dy of belief and ritual,
which was always, at least officially, the kernel of Roman religion,
and constituted what the Romans themselves--staunch believers in their
own traditional history--loved to describe as the 'Religion of Numa.'
We must discover, as far as we can, how far its inherited notions ran
parallel with those of other primitive religions, but more especially
we must try to note what is characteristically Roman alike in custom
and ritual and in the motives and spirit which prompted them.

CHAPTER II

THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGION

In every early religion there will of course be found, apart from
external influence, traces of its own internal development, of stages
by which it must have advanced from a mass of vague and primitive
belief and custom to the organised worship of a civilised community.
The religion of Rome is no exception to this rule; we can detect in its
later practice evidences of primitive notions and habits which it had
in common with other semi-barbarous peoples, and we shall see that the
leading idea in its theology is but a characteristically Roman
development of a marked feature in most early religions.

=1. Magic.=--Anthropology has taught us that in many primitive
societies religion--a sense of man's dependence on a power higher than
himself--is preceded by a stage of magic--a belief in man's own power
to influence by occult means the action of the world around him. That
the ancestors of the Roman community passed through this stage seems
clear, and in surviving religious practice we may discover evidence of
such magic in various forms. There is, for instance, what anthropology
describes as 'sympathetic magic'--the attempt to influence the powers
of nature by an imitation of the process which it is desired that they
should perform. Of this we have a characteristic example in the
ceremony of the _aquaelicium_, designed to produce rain after a long
drought. In classical times the ceremony consisted in a procession
headed by the pontifices, which bore the sacred rain-stone from its
resting-place by the Porta Capena to the Capitol, where offerings were
made to the sky-deity, Iuppiter, but[1] from the analogy of other
primitive cults and the sacred title of the stone (_lapis manalis_), it
is practically certain that the original ritual was the purely
imitative process of pouring water over the stone. A similar rain-charm
may possibly be seen in the curious ritual of the _a