625
That fire should be regarded in its own right as a divine power, worthy of worship, appears so natural that it is only reasonable to recognize such worship as Indo-European. The sanctity of Agni in the Rigveda is, of course, especially that of the fire regarded as the recipient of sacrifice and the bearer of oblations, but it seems wholly unjustifiable to suggest that his sanctity arose from his nature as the sacrificial fire; rather he was the recipient of offerings as sacred in his own right.
4
5
In Greece, in addition to Hephaistos, Hestia must, it seems, be accorded an origin as fire, especially the fire on the hearth, not the hearth with its fire as Farnell 2 suggests. He bases this view on the identity of the words for hearth and for the goddess, but there seems no reason whatever for accepting this suggestion, which derives Hestia from vas, dwell, when it is at least as natural to assume that the name of the fire on the hearth was used to denote the hearth, and connexion with vas or possibly some other root with the signification of shining or burning is easy. Moreover the earliest literary references point singularly clearly to a conception like that of Agni; the Homeric Hymns tell of Hestia as the goddess who haunts the house of Apollo in Pytho and from whose locks sweet unguents trickle down, and of her sitting in the middle of the house, taking the fat of sacrifice. Euripides definitely calls her the lady of fire and associates her with Hephaistos. At Delphi we find her associated with the deathless fire in the Amphictyonic oath. Moreover the maintenance of a sacred fire in the Prytaneion at Athens, and the fact that it was regarded as in a sense the source of the Ionic colonies, because they carried thence the sacred fire, show clearly enough that the essential element in the idea is the fire, not the hearth. Nor is there any evidence for the suggestion that the hearth in Mediterranean lands was built of sacred stones or that its sanctity is a reflex of the pillar cult of pre-Hellenic times. The parallelism of the expressions Hephaistos is laughing’ and ‘Hestia is laughing’, used of the crackling of the fire, suggests essential identity of both deities with fire.
6
•
The rules in India which urge the householder to maintain a sacred fire, a duty especially incumbent on the king, is paralleled by the Greek evidence as to the fires of the Prytaneia and the Roman cult of Vesta, which bears adequate evidence of independence to render derivation from Greece unnatural. The fire of the Sabha clearly approaches the conception of these public fires in Greece and Rome. For the practice in Greece and Rome various explanations have been offered. That of Frazer 7 stresses the importance of preserving one fire at least in a village which would never be extinguished, while Farnell contends that the rite was religious in origin, depending on the belief that the fire on the hearth was the external thing in which the soul of the chief resided, so that the whole tribe had an interest in keeping it up; when kingship passed away the idea was transferred to the fire of the state in the Prytaneion, with which the fortune of the state might be held to be inextricably connected. It may be granted that the purpose of maintaining the fire was religious from the start, but the motive had, it seems probable, nothing to do with any idea of the connexion of the chief’s soul with the fire; rather the fire as a most
Cults of the Greek States, v. 358.
- Ibid., 859.
Brugmann, Griech. Gramm., p. 52;
Ehrlich, KZ. xli. 289 f.
xxiv. and xxix.
20
[x.0.8. 32]
Phaeth. frag. 781, 1. 55.
• Farnell, ibid., 360.
JP. xiv. 167 ff.
• Ibid., 353 f.
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Appendix E
important 1 and ever valuable deity was to be preserved alight if possible by every sacrificer, an idea which naturally enough with civic organization results in the fires of the Prytancia and the cult of Vesta at Rome.
The nature of such deities as Hestia and Vesta is often misunderstood by students of Greek and Roman religion, who are accustomed to reckon personality in terms of clear anthropomorphism, and who fail to appreciate that the conception of fire as living and active is in essence a personal conception. This error, fostered by the fact that what we know of old Roman religion is only on its formal side, has led to the view 2 that early Roman religion could not be nature worship of the type usually attributed to Indo- Europeans. The conclusion obviously rests on the wholly erroneous view that Indo-European worship was that of personifications of nature forces; it was the worship of nature as animate, and what is animate is not impersonal. The theory that Roman or any other religion developed from the indeterminate conception of an impersonal force ascribes to early man the power of framing a complex conception which is wholly implausible. It is absurd to suppose that the daily reverence paid in the household to the flame of Vesta into which a morsel of salted cake was thrown was not paid to a personal deity, although she was not represented by an image. The reason for this paucity of representation in Rome as in Greece was precisely the same as in Greece; the living flame is the present deity, and to a people to whom this was a living belief the idea of making an image would have appeared idle. The formalism of the Indigitamenta is the result of priestly ingenuity, not primitive belief, and all our knowledge of Roman religion is obscured by the lateness of our records and the effect of Greck ideas. It is characteristic of the tendency to treat Roman religion as more abstract than it really was that efforts are made to explain away the facts recorded of the connexion of the wolf and the woodpecker with Mars as representing a late development, and to deny the paternity of Jupiter and the maternity of Earth, and to make even sun worship a borrowing.5
3