G. Iulius Scaurus Anniae Octaviae Indagatrici salutem dicit.
Salve, A. Octavia.
I preface these remarks by noting that I hold neither religious office
nor any other magistracy (well, actually I'm a scriba, iurisconsultus,
and provincial legatus, but none of that is relevant here :-). I am a
professional historian who has made a serious study of the Religio
Romana; I read the relevant languages and I am familiar with the
relevant primary and secondary literature. I am also a practitioner
of the Religio. i apologise for not responding to this earlier on the
RR list, but this is the twenty-second posting or email related to NR
I've sent today and there are only so many hours in the day.
>PRELUDE - In some of the examples I have
>chosen I've had to simplify the concepts to
>make them usable within the context of a single
>post. I recognize they are complex but please
>don't harp on minutia when responding unless
>the entire premise is thought wrong. Not being
>rude but I don't want to start another one of
>those long drawn out fights over completely side
>issues like names or politically correct
>identifications of tribes and such.
There's a saying that the devil is in the details. In the Religio
Romana, it's the truth that's in the details. I shall try to avoid
technical discussions here, but there are some fundamental mistakes in
your argument which turn on philological and historical details.
>I think there is a general misunderstanding here in the context
>of sacrifice between all of us. Perhaps the real solution is to
>establish the meaning of such in context of the NR. Roma existed for
>753 years and in that time evolved so magnificantly that the village
>of poor working people can hardly be likened to the Empire right
>before the fall. Each of us has and will be exposed to such a
>variety of sources from RA and other past cultures that our personal
>ideas and influence will color what we suggest and how what we
>suggest is received.
There is a great deal of truth in this observation and it is the
source of what I believe is most of the confusion and misunderstanding
prevalent in this whole discussion. Unfortunately, the method you
advocate below obscures far more than it illumines, and it runs
contrary to what competent historical and philological research has
disclosed.
>There is a lot of talk of sacrifices in animal form and because
>of the lack of prelude in discussion, it seems sudden or not well
>thought out at times. That is a failing of the electronic community
>since we are often not a part of each other's private ruminations on
>a subject but rather see a partially or completely finished product
>based on a great deal of thought.
This is an issue to which I have devoted a great deal of research and
thought and in which I have some practical experience. I try not to
post in any NR venue without giving careful thought to what I have to
say, and I usually try to give that my interlocutors the benefit of
the doubt in the same direction, regardless of my personal opinion of
what they write. If there's been any wildly unthought-out tendency in
the debate on animal sacrifice, it has been from those who associate
blood sacrifice with some sort of macabre vivisection rather than
professionally-competent, humane, ritual slaughter of a food animal.
>Because of that limitation, it can sometimes give the impression
>that the person in question just *really* wants to sacrifice an
>animal and the whole focus of such a deed is really secondary, but
>couched under a guise of following a formula of ritual that has been
>out of use for more than a millenia. Precedents here in NR support
>that at times. I mean, a few years ago someone, (I forget who) was
>going to sacrifice a rat, for crying out loud. Just some poor
>schmuck of a rat. And it appeared he was doing it for no other
>reason than that is was handy. How noble and religious is that?
First, I believe the allusion to the rat has to do with a proposal for
a haruspicy by a magistrate some years ago, which did not take place.
I do not believe that such haruspicy was practiced in the Religio
Publica outside the context of sacrifice, and I believe the
magistrate's decision not to carry through was prudent. Second, even
in the Religio Publica not all sacrifices of food animals are to be
consumed by the participants in the rite after profanation. Victims
sacrificed to the Di Infernales are not consumed by the participants
in the sacrifice for theological reasons. However, if someone wishes
to sacrifice a small animal in his Religio Privata as an act of
devotion or to fulfill a vow, it is no one else's business to
interfere. Sacrifice in the Religio Privata did not always involve
profanation and feast. The poor might offer a small victim, a small
bird, for example, entire on the altar. I know of no historical
evidence for a rat sacrifice (rat bones have been found under termini
-- boundary markers -- which may have involved their offering to the
Di Infernales as a kind of pest control), but I do know that there is
plenty of archaeological evidence that rat was eaten in the ancient
world. Third, your remark -- "How noble and religious is that?" --
strikes me as suggestive of a sneering condescension which adds little
to the debate.
>What really has to be done by the worthy people we have elected,
>or those placed in the senate by other means, and the priests and
>college is to determine the nature of sacrifice today. I have made a
>pretty thorough study of it in seeking some illumination and what I
>find is that, historically and sociologically, sacrifices often came
>from what is most valuable in the standard parlance of the time or,
>in absolute contrariness, to what was most valuable to another
>person or cultural identity. For example, sacrificing of human males
>was done by several cultures either because they were most valuable
>to their own culture (Aztecs) or because they were too dangerous to
>keep and to valuable to the opposing culture, (captives or criminals
>in several cultures including early british isles). An example from
>another text, though I hesitate to use it, is the old testament.
>(No, I'm not a christian trying to sneak in preaching). Abraham was
>asked to make a great sacrifice, his son, and though he didn't have
>to actually do it, he had to be at the moment of plunging the knife
>in before he was reprieved. The context of that son being the only
>child he had sired and had waited most of his life to have him makes
>the sacrifice all the more significant. (I don't know if that story
>is true, however, so it has to be included as a story rather than a
>truly researched cultural item.)
What does any of this have to do in the slightest way with sacrifice
in the Religio Romana? A global anthropological theory about why
humans over history have sacrificed to their gods smacks of the kind
of overreaching theorising which led Dumezil so astray so much in his
study of the Religio Romana. Show a connection between your theory
and the Roman historical evidence, and I shall give it serious
consideration.
>The key here is that in each case found, major or important
>sacrifices during the heyday of the cultures looked at involved
>commodities that were very valuable to someone and difficult to
>obtain.
There are hundreds of thousands of small altars, some votive, others
not, recovered by archaeologists from Roman and Roman-related sites.
They are generally very pedestrian affairs with a few words etched
into them in painfully uncalligraphic scripts. Do you really think
that hecatombes were sacrificed at them? You theory fails in the
Roman case from the plethora of sociological evidence that a wide
latitude, possibly economically determined, was observed in sacrifice
in local observance of the Religio Publica (particularly in the poorer
settlements of the poorer provinces) and Privata.
>To use an example from RA, let me put forward the perfect white
>bull. What did that mean to them? The real question is what did it
>mean when the rites were established?
The notion of animal "perfection" in this context has to do with two
related ideas -- ritual purity and respect for the deity --
intersecting with pride and prestige. Physical defect was regarded as
a sign of inauspicious omen and ritual purity required that that which
was associated with ill-omen be excluded from the rites, just as
mistakes of ritual language were signs of ill-omen. This is some
thing different from the idea which you are putting forward. Since
the Religio Publica was a public function of the state, the pride and
prestige of the state was at stake in negotiating the pax Deorum, and,
since the negotiation was with the most powerful entities imaginable,
an exemplary attention to proper respect for those entities was
mandatory. The best evidence suggests that these were at the core of
the earliest concerns about the character of sacrificial victims.
>During that time, before the massive influx of conquest based
>slavery (to the best of anyone's knowledge) *any* bull represented
>great wealth. When the religio was established, to give up such
>wealth would be extraordinarily significant to anyone. To actually
>have to find and purchase a *perfect* white bull would be
>prohibitive to all but a select few and, in short, would represent a
>truly great sacrifice on the part of the giver. Dowry's all over the
>ancient world, even for the very rich (a relative idea), consisted
>of livestock and household goods. Keeping in mind the religio came
>about at a point in RA's development before they were the world
>conquering, globe trotting set they became, we must view them
>differently.
You are making a fundamental philological mistake. _Sacrificare_ in
Latin comes from _sacer_ + _facere_, "to make _sacer_." _Sacer_ means
"consecrated, holy, sacred," much like the Greek _hieros_. It is also
related to the Greek root _saos_ and is cognate to the Latin _sanus_
("safe"). There is a collateral meaning to _sacer_, irrelevant here,
which involves religious crime and accursedness, arising from failure
to treat the sacred with due respect. It has absolutely no necessary
connection the Judeo-Christian notion of giving up the first-fruits,
the most treasured, to a God. Such ideas exist in some specific cults
in the Religio Romana for historical reasons, but not in the Religio
as a whole. The idea of _sacrificare_ is to make something sacred and
appropriate to share with a deity. The modern connotations of
"sacrifice" in English are completely misleading. One of the problems
on which I have been harping recently on the Religio list is the need
to strip away modern attitudes to get at the mentalités of the ancient
Romans; a basic, philological familiarity with the Latin language is
essential to that process for those who are doing reconstruction. If
you don't know what the Romans meant by the word, you don't have a
chance of recovering what the social-religious event to which it
referred meant in their lives.
As a object lesson, may I suggest a reference back to that rat and the
snide "How noble and religious is that?" regarding another citizen.
How would you feel if I were to observe: How thoroughly Latinate and
philologically competent not to know what the basic word we are
discussing means in the language of the Romans? There's too damned
much personal invective and too little scholarship in a great deal of
what has passed in this discussion. Enough said on that.
>Now, move forward in time to a time during the republic before
>Marius, Sulla and Caesar and even before the Gracchi brothers.
>Conquest based slavery was very well established and Carthage had
>(controversial possibly) created a corporate farm structure with
>small holders falling away and wealth never before seen accumulating
>at the top of the society's ranks. The amount of land held for
>grazing, the population of people requiring animals to serve their
>needs (in terms of transport, farm work and food) and, therefore,
>the number of animals in "inventory" under Roman control rose at a
>dramatic rate. What did a perfect white bull mean then? Certainly
>less than before, but perfection appears to have taken a great
>upward surge in importance. In a time without antibiotics and such,
>increased herd sizes and density would have made perfection more
>difficult, however the overall effect is still that it was worth
>much less.
This calculus of market value has nothing to do with the concerns for
ritual purity and respect for the deity. The way in which economic
forces operated as the Republic became enriched appears to have been
pressure to add sacrificial occasions and increase the number of
sacrificial victims, not change the criteria of victim acceptability.
>What was the result? Gold, drama, festivals and food that were
>held in tandem with, but not officially a part of rituals, started
>becoming far greater in importance and the net effect was that it
>was ruinously expensive to be the one to have to sacrifice to the
>gods. Again, oversimplification, but you understand I'm speaking of
>major events. Far more time was spent in the arranging of the other
>aspects of any given event than the sacrifice of the animal, which
>is the oldest of the religious forms recorded for them. There
>weren't games with gladiators when RA was a little village or even a
>respectable town, those things came to be later.
You are mixing metaphors and phenomena here. The notion of sacrifice
to the Di Infernales and Di Manes in gladiatorial games, and later the
religious/sacrificial associations they gained in connection with
public ludi has an extremely complicated and obscure history. It is
not oversimplification which is the problem; it is confusion of the
much more straightforward history of animal sacrifice in the Religio
Romana with an entirely different matter (not to mention the fact that
the vast majority of gladiatores did not die in funerary games or the
public ludi in the Republic -- nor even in the Empire; it was, by
then, an industry and no one wants to lose more skilled workers than
absolutely necessary).
>So, we have a situation where things were added to the
>celebrations, though not officially to the rituals. It is sort of a
>cheat but in terms of the overall obligation of the giver from a
>financial standpoint, it remains valid.
In what sense a "cheat"? Because people wanted to give more,
celebrate more often, sharing food with the Gods on more occasions?
That is an odd notion of "cheating."
>During the time in which RA developed, we also see another
>evolution in the relgio that points to the change in values. That is
>the change in the temples and the facets of the gods themselves. The
>amount of money piled into the gods homes was enormous. And with new
>temples built, such underground warrens became more substantial.
>People gave money. Why? Because as they lived in cities, removed
>from agricultural pursuits and worked for wages rather than their
>food, that is what was valuable to them. It was also handier and
>more easily used by the gods. (I understand that the treasury
>resided in a temple and am not referring to the official treasury.)
>If this were not the case then there is no reason for the vast
>treasure houses beneath temples. Instead there would be cafe's
>serving the meat. The temples gave substantial amounts of money,
>willingly or not, on several occasions and yet each time they were
>filled again. The very rich also began to build new temples for the
>gods. This is also a form of sacrifice and one far more likely to be
>painful to make than a bull the worthy would send a slave to
>purchase for him.
Public liturgies -- and I do not mean that in a religious sense at
all, but the contribution of private funds for public purposes -- were
an expectation of Roman civic life. Payment for sacrifices in
connection with holding priesthoods or other magistracies were part of
the religious-political system and seems to have become so quite
early. The idea of noblesse oblige, of civic responsibility on the
part of the elite, is at the core of Roman public life. You are
confusing the modern sense of "sacrifice" with the Roman sense of
public duty.
>Now we have today. Today, the cattle population is
>extraordinarily large. Perfect cattle are a dime a dozen (well, not
>quite a dime!). Growth horomones, antibiotics and super-fortifed
>concentrated food for weight gain make sure of that. I could easily,
>without even lifting my bum from the chair, acquire one and have it
>delivered directly to the slaughterer. Then by simply popping over
>and using the correct format of words, complete a sacrifice. But was
>it? No, not really. All I did was make a cow or bull give up their
>most valuable asset so I could make a formulaic sacrifice.
If you want the food you consecrate to share with your Gods
slaughtered anonymously by people who share none of your beliefs and
know none of the words and gestures by which meat is consecrated to
the Gods, then that is your right. I, personally, wouldn't care to
stand in a thunderstorm next to someone who advocated that as official
policy for the Religio Romana, but that's one of my prejudices.
>Were I to have to raise the cow free from anything other than
>normal, non-fortified, feed and have it come to full growth and
>maturity and fulfill it's obligation to produce young, without
>having to use any medication or vaccination or anything like that,
>then it would be perfect if it matched in all other respects as
>well. Then it would be very hard to sacrifice. Then it might mean
>something more than just having a bovine whacked. Once it got sick
>or had to have medication for an injury it would be disqualified
>from perfection forevermore. If we were to use the strictest
>possible adherence to the mos maiorum, that should be what we follow
>since at the time of the establishment of the religio, that would be
>more accurate.
Perfection as ritual purity in the Religio Romana is something
entirely different from what you are discussing. Given the nature of
Roman animal husbandry, it was perfectly possible that a bull could
have been sick and healed on its own without ever being noticed as
such. It is the state of the animal at the time of sacrifice which is
crucial.
>If, however, we are going to toss those restrictions aside as
>inconvenient or not feasible for everyone, what have we done to the
>mos maiorum? Those in RA, when the religio wasn't a parade or food
>orgy, had to live with such restrictions by necessity, and if we
>don't we might as well toss the whole bucket and think again on what
>the nature of sacrifice is to us. Using the term provided by another
>(please, no harassing, I have to use some term!), strict
>reconstructionisms are not always a valid choice because the context
>of the construction is alien to the objective. Cato learned this
>when he went about without a tunic. All he got was cold. The mos
>maiorum is a wonderful thing, however taken to great extremes
>without regard for the changes evident all around us, simply lessens
>our credibility and, more importantly, our viability in an ever
>changing world.
You are revealing an interesting prejudice. Why is sharing a sacred
meal with the Gods a "food orgy"? That sacred meal is very much at
the centre of sacrifice for most of the Religio Publica and Privata.
To be sure, some sacrifices were consumed only by the Di Infernales,
but those are a small minority. The overwhelming fact of cultic life
in the Roman religion from its earliest origins is the making sacred
of food and sharing it with the Gods. If you do not understand that,
you have missed most of the whole point.
Do you actually know what "mos maiorum" means? I hesitate to insult
you by accusing you of knowing that and still speeaking so
disrespectfully of it. Cato Minor is a reductio ad absurdam you throw
out to justify casting aside what it fundamentally means to believe in
the Via Romana. What has changed? Do we no longer want to consecrate
meat and share it in a meal with the Gods? Do we no longer want to
observe the ancient ways of communicating with the ancient Gods? With
whom should I more fear losing credibility: prejudiced Christians and
secular humanists or the Di Immortales?
No one proposes erecting altars on every public square and lining up
the cattle to be slaughtered for a spectacle to outrage or titillate
those who do not practice our religion. Have you never heard of a
barbecue? Christians in Texas and Oklahoma slaughter beef and pray
over them while they do it, then cook them up for hundreds in their
church parking lots on Sunday afternoons. I've watched them do it.
Why is that acceptable, but donning a toga, cinctu Gabino, reciting
the ancient words in Latin as the priest and attendants humanely
sacrifice a cow, take the haruspices, then offer the entrails to the
Gods and roast the remainder for a feast with fellow believers
unacceptable?
>What does it mean for me? Well, I'm a capitolist American female
>with half-responsibility for 3 children (nieces and nephew) and a
>good career. What means most to me is obviously not even under
>consideration for sacrifice so the next possible thing would be
>money or labor related. That hits where it hurts when done right.
>That would be something involving very difficult labor that I valued
>highly. In my case that would be trying to grow something with my
>black thumb and then give it up to the gods. Or possibly taking the
>best of my weaving, something very painful to produce in my case
>(I'm not good at it), and sacrificing it. That doesn't mean buying a
>length of wool that is better than what I produce and tossing it
>into a fire, it means giving up something I had to work very hard at
>producing. It might mean giving the maximum amount of money that I
>can give and still survive (with credit rating intact) for something
>of extraordinary importance. It might mean giving up sex and being
>chaste, not just celibate, for a year to serve Vesta (I'm on 4 years
>now and only 1 more to go!). In short, it has to really mean
>something to qualify under the definition of sacrifice. If there is
>any doubt that sacrifice, the word, meant the same long ago, we only
>have to look at those who were asked to sacrifice impossible to
>consider things, like their beloved children, to understand that it
>did.
Making something _sacer_ has nothing to do with your suffering. If
you think that suffering and the sacred are intrinsically related, I'm
surprised you are not more inclined to Christianity, since that is a
dominant Christian theological motif. Hairshirtting oneself for the
Gods is not a part of the Religio Romana. The virginity of the
Vestals is not the "sacrifice" of Christian nuns. Your model of what
Roman sacrifice is about is simply historically wrong.
>So now we come to the important part of all this. What do the
>gods think? We can't really know except by signs. In my home we
>worship Vesta, Iuno and Iuppiter. So far, in many years of serving
>obligations in the manner in which I've described above, the signs
>have been good and I have always overcome stumbling blocks
>specifically addressed. In short, it goes very well indeed using the
>contract above. I even explained the contract and how I proposed to
>fulfill it in a rite and had a string of the most extraordinary luck
>afterwards. Do I claim that it makes my views absolutely correct?
>No. It only means that whatever I'm doing as an honest practictioner
>of the RR is working well.
You are not a priest nor a magistrate. You have no obligation to make
animal sacrifice in the Religio Publica nor to participate in it in
any way. It would be absurd to think that the Gods would punish you
for not fulfilling a duty which is not incumbent upon you. Romans who
followed Pythagorean philosophy no doubt made themselves scarce at
sacrifices. What you do in your Religio Privata is your business, but
you have no business denigrating those who choose to include animal
sacrifice in their private rites.
>I'm sincerly interested in the college and all others in the know
>getting together and establishing these important parts of the RR
>once and for all. It will, in the future, avoid so much confusion
>and perhaps guide those who are eager to begin to make wise choices
>in their practice. I heartily urge such a debate, whether behind
>closed doors or not, that considers all sides of the issue and the
>needs of the gods and the ability of the people.
These issues cannot be resolved instantly. The debate has been going
on for quite a long time. I notice from the Album Civium that you
have been a citizen since 2003/06/29; I beat you only by a few months
(2003/03/22), but I have the advantage of having read much of the
archives on these discussions from years past. The debate continues
and a resolution will eventually be had, but, I fear, if it is the one
you propose, no one will recognise it as having much to do with the
historical Religio Romana Publica.
Vale.
G. Iulius Scaurus