object:1.16 - Dianus and Diana
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XVI. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, _tr_ 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.
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.
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.
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