ature of the whole
extraordinary ritual of the Lupercalia is unmistakably within the region
of magic rather than of religion. Some potency was believed to work in
the act of striking, though apparently without a spoken spell or
_carmen_, such as usually accompanies acts of this kind; and this part
of the rite, grotesque though it was, was allowed to survive by the
grave religious authorities who drew up the calendar of religious
festivals. It was probably a superstition too deeply rooted in the minds
of the people to admit of being excluded; and, strange to say, it
survived, in outward form at least, until Rome had become cosmopolitan
and even Christian. The Lupercalia has always been a puzzle to students
of early religion, and as each new theory is advanced, this strange
festival is seized on for fresh interpretation;[103] but for our present
purposes it must suffice to point out that we clearly find embedded in
it a piece of genuine magic, dating beyond doubt from a very primitive
stage of thought.

There is one other very curious performance, occurring each year on the
ides of May, which in my view is rather magical than religious, though
the ancients themselves looked upon it as a kind of purification: I mean
the casting into the Tiber from the _pons sublicius_ of twenty-four or
twenty-seven straw puppets by the Vestal virgins, in the presence of the
magistrates and pontifices. Recently an attempt has been made by Wissowa
to prove that this strange ceremony was not primitive, but simply a case
of the substitution of puppets for real human victims as late as the age
of the Punic wars.[104] These puppets were called Argei, which word
naturally suggests Greeks; and Wissowa has contrived to persuade himself
not only that a number of Greeks were actually put to death by drowning
in an age when everything Greek was beginning to be reverenced at Rome,
but (still more extraordinary to an anthropologist) that the primitive
device of substitution was had in requisition at that late date in order
to carry on the memory of the ghastly deed. And the world of German
learning has silently followed their leader, without taking the trouble
to test his conclusions by a careful and independent examination of the
evidence. It happens that this fascinating puzzle of the Argei was the
first curiosity that enticed me into the study of the Roman religion,
and for some thirty years I have been familiar with every scrap of
evidence bearing o