Chapter 16. Dianus and Diana.
IN THIS CHAPTER I propose to recapitulate the conclusions to which the
enquiry has thus far led us, and drawing together the scattered rays of
light, to turn them on the dark figure of the priest of Nemi. 1
We have found that at an early stage of society men, ignorant of the
secret processes of nature and of the narrow limits within which it is in our
power to control and direct them, have commonly arrogated to themselves
functions which in the present state of knowledge we should deem
superhuman or divine. The illusion has been fostered and maintained by
the same causes which begot it, namely, the marvellous order and
uniformity with which nature conducts her operations, the wheels of her
great machine revolving with a smoothness and precision which enable the
patient observer to anticipate in general the season, if not the very hour,
when they will bring round the fulfilment of his hopes or the accomplishment
of his fears. The regularly recurring events of this great cycle, or rather
series of cycles, soon stamp themselves even on the dull mind of the
savage. He foresees them, and foreseeing them mistakes the desired
recurrence for an effect of his own will, and the dreaded recurrence for an
effect of the will of his enemies. Thus the springs which set the vast
machine in motion, though they lie far beyond our ken, shrouded in a
mystery which we can never hope to penetrate, appear to ignorant man to
lie within his reach: he fancies he can touch them and so work by magic art
all manner of good to himself and evil to his foes. In time the fallacy of this
belief becomes apparent to him: he discovers that there are things he
cannot do, pleasures which he is unable of himself to procure, pains which
even the most potent magician is powerless to avoid. The unattainable
good, the inevitable ill, are now ascribed by him to the action of invisible
powers, whose favour is joy and life, whose anger is misery and death.
Thus magic tends to be displaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the
priest. At this stage of thought the ultimate causes of things are conceived
to be personal beings, many in number and often discordant in character,
who partake of the nature and even of the frailty of man, though their might
is greater than his, and their life far exceeds the span of his ephemeral
existence. Their sharply-marked individualities, their clear-cut outlines
have not yet begun, under the powerful solvent of philosophy, to melt and
coalesce into that single unknown substratum of phenomena which,
according to the qualities with which our imagination invests it, goes by
one or other of the high-sounding names which the wit of man has devised
to hide his ignorance. Accordingly, so long as men look on their gods as
beings akin to themselves and not raised to an unapproachable height
above them, they believe it to be possible for those of their own number
who surpass their fellows to attain to the divine rank after death or even in
life. Incarnate human deities of this latter sort may be said to halt midway
between the age of magic and the age of religion. If they bear the names
and display the pomp of deities, the powers which they are supposed to
wield are commonly those of their predecessor the magician. Like him, they
are expected to guard their people against hostile enchantments, to heal
them in sickness, to bless them with offspring, and to provide them with an
abundant supply of food by regulating the weather and performing the other
ceremonies which are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility of the earth
and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited with powers so lofty
and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in the land, and while the
rift between the spiritual and the temporal spheres has not yet widened too
far, they are supreme in civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they
are kings as well as gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its
roots deep down in human history, and long ages pass before these are
sapped by a profounder view of nature and man. 2
In the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity the reign of kings was
for the most part a thing of the past; yet the stories of their lineage, titles,
and pretensions suffice to prove that they too claimed to rule by divine right
and to exercise superhuman powers. Hence we may without undue temerity
assume that the King of the Wood at Nemi, though shorn in later times of his
glory and fallen on evil days, represented a long line of sacred kings who
had once received not only the homage but the adoration of their subjects
in return for the manifold blessings which they were supposed to dispense.
What little we know of the functions of Diana in the Arician grove seems to
prove that she was here conceived as a goddess of fertility, and
particularly as a divinity of childbirth. It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose
that in the discharge of these important duties she was assisted by her
priest, the two figuring as King and Queen of the Wood in a solemn
marriage, which was intended to make the earth gay with the blossoms of
spring and the fruits of autumn, and to gladden the hearts of men and
women with healthful offspring. 3
If the priest of Nemi posed not merely as a king, but as a god of the grove,
we have still to ask, What deity in particular did he personate? The answer
of antiquity is that he represented Virbius, the consort or lover of Diana. But
this does not help us much, for of Virbius we know little more than the
name. A clue to the mystery is perhaps supplied by the Vestal fire which
burned in the grove. For the perpetual holy fires of the Aryans in Europe
appear to have been commonly kindled and fed with oak-wood, and in
Rome itself, not many miles from Nemi, the fuel of the Vestal fire consisted
of oaken sticks or logs, as has been proved by a microscopic analysis of
the charred embers of the Vestal fire, which were discovered by
Commendatore G. Boni in the course of the memorable excavations which
he conducted in the Roman forum at the end of the nineteenth century. But
the ritual of the various Latin towns seems to have been marked by great
uniformity; hence it is reasonable to conclude that wherever in Latium a
Vestal fire was maintained, it was fed, as at Rome, with wood of the sacred
oak. If this was so at Nemi, it becomes probable that the hallowed grove
there consisted of a natural oak-wood, and that therefore the tree which
the King of the Wood had to guard at the peril of his life was itself an oak;
indeed, it was from an evergreen oak, according to Virgil, that Aeneas
plucked the Golden Bough. Now the oak was the sacred tree of Jupiter, the
supreme god of the Latins. Hence it follows that the King of the Wood,
whose life was bound up in a fashion with an oak, personated no less a
deity than Jupiter himself. At least the evidence, slight as it is, seems to
point to this conclusion. The old Alban dynasty of the Silvii or Woods, with
their crown of oak leaves, apparently aped the style and emulated the
powers of Latian Jupiter, who dwelt on the top of the Alban Mount. It is not
impossible that the King of the Wood, who guarded the sacred oak a little
lower down the mountain, was the lawful successor and representative of
this ancient line of the Silvii or Woods. At all events, if I am right in
supposing that he passed for a human Jupiter, it would appear that Virbius,
with whom legend identified him, was nothing but a local form of Jupiter,
considered perhaps in his original aspect as a god of the greenwood. 4
The hypothesis that in later times at all events the King of the Wood
played the part of the oak god Jupiter, is confirmed by an examination of
his divine partner Diana. For two distinct lines of argument converge to
show that if Diana was a queen of the woods in general, she was at Nemi a
goddess of the oak in particular. In the first place, she bore the title of
Vesta, and as such presided over a perpetual fire, which we have seen
reason to believe was fed with oak wood. But a goddess of fire is not far
removed from a goddess of the fuel which burns in the fire; primitive thought
perhaps drew no sharp line of distinction between the blaze and the wood
that blazes. In the second place, the nymph Egeria at Nemi appears to
have been merely a form of Diana, and Egeria is definitely said to have
been a Dryad, a nymph of the oak. Elsewhere in Italy the goddess had her
home on oak-clad mountains. Thus Mount Algidus, a spur of the Alban
hills, was covered in antiquity with dark forests of oak, both of the
evergreen and the deciduous sort. In winter the snow lay long on these
cold hills, and their gloomy oak-woods were believed to be a favourite
haunt of Diana, as they have been of brigands in modern times. Again,
Mount Tifata, the long abrupt ridge of the Apennines which looks down on
the Campanian plain behind Capua, was wooded of old with evergreen
oaks, among which Diana had a temple. Here Sulla thanked the goddess
for his victory over the Marians in the plain below, attesting his gratitude by
inscriptions which were long afterwards to be seen in the temple. On the
whole, then, we conclude that at Nemi the King of the Wood personated the
oak-god Jupiter and mated with the oak-goddess Diana in the sacred
grove. An echo of their mystic union has come down to us in the legend of
the loves of Numa and Egeria, who according to some had their
trysting-place in these holy woods. 5
To this theory it may naturally be objected that the divine consort of
Jupiter was not Diana but Juno, and that if Diana had a mate at all he might
be expected to bear the name not of Jupiter, but of Dianus or Janus, the
latter of these forms being merely a corruption of the former. All this is true,
but the objection may be parried by observing that the two pairs of deities,
Jupiter and Juno on the one side, and Dianus and Diana, or Janus and
Jana, on the other side, are merely duplicates of each other, their names
and their functions being in substance and origin identical. With regard to
their names, all four of them come from the same Aryan root DI, meaning
"bright," which occurs in the names of the corresponding Greek deities,
Zeus and his old female consort Dione. In regard to their functions, Juno
and Diana were both goddesses of fecundity and childbirth, and both were
sooner or later identified with the moon. As to the true nature and functions
of Janus the ancients themselves were puzzled; and where they hesitated,
it is not for us confidently to decide. But the view mentioned by Varro that
Janus was the god of the sky is supported not only by the etymological
identity of his name with that of the sky-god Jupiter, but also by the relation
in which he appears to have stood to Jupiter's two mates, Juno and
Juturna. For the epithet Junonian bestowed on Janus points to a marriage
union between the two deities; and according to one account Janus was
the husband of the water-nymph Juturna, who according to others was
beloved by Jupiter. Moreover, Janus, like Jove, was regularly invoked,
and commonly spoken of under the title of Father. Indeed, he was identified
with Jupiter not merely by the logic of the learned St. Augustine, but by the
piety of a pagan worshipper who dedicated an offering to Jupiter Dianus. A
trace of his relation to the oak may be found in the oakwoods of the
Janiculum, the hill on the right bank of the Tiber, where Janus is said to
have reigned as a king in the remotest ages of Italian history. 6
Thus, if I am right, the same ancient pair of deities was variously known
among the Greek and Italian peoples as Zeus and Dione, Jupiter and
Juno, or Dianus (Janus) and Diana (Jana), the names of the divinities
being identical in substance, though varying in form with the dialect of the
particular tribe which worshipped them. At first, when the peoples dwelt
near each other, the difference between the deities would be hardly more
than one of name; in other words, it would be almost purely dialectical. But
the gradual dispersion of the tribes, and their consequent isolation from
each other, would favour the growth of divergent modes of conceiving and
worshipping the gods whom they had carried with them from their old home,
so that in time discrepancies of myth and ritual would tend to spring up and
thereby to convert a nominal into a real distinction between the divinities.
Accordingly when, with the slow progress of culture, the long period of
barbarism and separation was passing away, and the rising political power
of a single strong community had begun to draw or hammer its weaker
neighbours into a nation, the confluent peoples would throw their gods, like
their dialects, into a common stock; and thus it might come about that the
same ancient deities, which their forefathers had worshipped together
before the dispersion, would now be so disguised by the accumulated
effect of dialectical and religious divergencies that their original identity
might fail to be recognised, and they would take their places side by side
as independent divinities in the national pantheon. 7
This duplication of deities, the result of the final fusion of kindred tribes
who had long lived apart, would account for the appearance of Janus
beside Jupiter, and of Diana or Jana beside Juno in the Roman religion. At
least this appears to be a more probable theory than the opinion, which has
found favour with some modern scholars, that Janus was originally nothing
but the god of doors. That a deity of his dignity and importance, whom the
Romans revered as a god of gods and the father of his people, should have
started in life as a humble, though doubtless respectable, doorkeeper
appears very unlikely. So lofty an end hardly consorts with so lowly a
beginning. It is more probable that the door (janua) got its name from Janus
than that he got his name from it. This view is strengthened by a
consideration of the word janua itself. The regular word for door is the same
in all the languages of the Aryan family from India to Ireland. It is dur in
Sanscrit, thura in Greek, tür in German, door in English, dorus in old Irish,
and foris in Latin. Yet besides this ordinary name for door, which the Latins
shared with all their Aryan brethren, they had also the name janua, to
which there is no corresponding term in any Indo-European speech. The
word has the appearance of being an adjectival form derived from the noun
Janus. I conjecture that it may have been customary to set up an image or
symbol of Janus at the principal door of the house in order to place the
entrance under the protection of the great god. A door thus guarded might
be known as a janua foris, that is, a Januan door, and the phrase might in
time be abridged into janua, the noun foris being understood but not
expressed. From this to the use of janua to designate a door in general,
whether guarded by an image of Janus or not, would be an easy and
natural transition. 8
If there is any truth in this conjecture, it may explain very simply the origin
of the double head of Janus, which has so long exercised the ingenuity of
mythologists. When it had become customary to guard the entrance of
houses and towns by an image of Janus, it might well be deemed
necessary to make the sentinel god look both ways, before and behind, at
the same time, in order that nothing should escape his vigilant eye. For if
the divine watchman always faced in one direction, it is easy to imagine
what mischief might have been wrought with impunity behind his back. This
explanation of the double-headed Janus at Rome is confirmed by the
double-headed idol which the Bush negroes in the interior of Surinam
regularly set up as a guardian at the entrance of a village. The idol consists
of a block of wood with a human face rudely carved on each side; it stands
under a gateway composed of two uprights and a cross-bar. Beside the
idol generally lies a white rag intended to keep off the devil; and sometimes
there is also a stick which seems to represent a bludgeon or weapon of
some sort. Further, from the cross-bar hangs a small log which serves the
useful purpose of knocking on the head any evil spirit who might attempt to
pass through the gateway. Clearly this double-headed fetish at the
gateway of the negro villages in Surinam bears a close resemblance to the
double-headed images of Janus which, grasping a stick in one hand and a
key in the other, stood sentinel at Roman gates and doorways; and we can
hardly doubt that in both cases the heads facing two ways are to be
similarly explained as expressive of the vigilance of the guardian god, who
kept his eye on spiritual foes behind and before, and stood ready to
bludgeon them on the spot. We may, therefore, dispense with the tedious
and unsatisfactory explanations which, if we may trust Ovid, the wily Janus
himself fobbed off an anxious Roman enquirer. 9
To apply these conclusions to the priest of Nemi, we may suppose that as
the mate of Diana he represented originally Dianus or Janus rather than
Jupiter, but that the difference between these deities was of old merely
superficial, going little deeper than the names, and leaving practically
unaffected the essential functions of the god as a power of the sky, the
thunder, and the oak. It was fitting, therefore, that his human representative
at Nemi should dwell, as we have seen reason to believe he did, in an oak
grove. His title of King of the Wood clearly indicates the sylvan character
of the deity whom he served; and since he could only be assailed by him
who had plucked the bough of a certain tree in the grove, his own life might
be said to be bound up with that of the sacred tree. Thus he not only
served but embodied the great Aryan god of the oak; and as an oak-god
he would mate with the oak-goddess, whether she went by the name of
Egeria or Diana. Their union, however consummated, would be deemed
essential to the fertility of the earth and the fecundity of man and beast.
Further, as the oak-god was also a god of the sky, the thunder, and the
rain, so his human representative would be required, like many other divine
kings, to cause the clouds to gather, the thunder to peal, and the rain to
descend in due season, that the fields and orchards might bear fruit and the
pastures be covered with luxuriant herbage. The reputed possessor of
powers so exalted must have been a very important personage; and the
remains of buildings and of votive offerings which have been found on the
site of the sanctuary combine with the testimony of classical writers to
prove that in later times it was one of the greatest and most popular shrines
in Italy. Even in the old days, when the champaign country around was still
parcelled out among the petty tribes who composed the Latin League, the
sacred grove is known to have been an object of their common reverence
and care. And just as the kings of Cambodia used to send offerings to the
mystic kings of Fire and Water far in the dim depths of the tropical forest,
so, we may well believe, from all sides of the broad Latian plain the eyes
and footsteps of Italian pilgrims turned to the quarter where, standing
sharply out against the faint blue line of the Apennines or the deeper blue
of the distant sea, the Alban Mountain rose before them, the home of the
mysterious priest of Nemi, the King of the Wood. There, among the green
woods and beside the still waters of the lonely hills, the ancient Aryan
worship of the god of the oak, the thunder, and the dripping sky lingered in
its early, almost Druidical form, long after a great political and intellectual
revolution had shifted the capital of Latin religion from the forest to the city,
from Nemi to Rome. 10