the Greek oracles.

The Etruscan religion occupied a higher level than the Roman, in
so far as it developed at least the rudiments of what was wholly
wanting among the Romans--a speculation veiled under religious
forms. Over the world and its gods there ruled the veiled gods
(-Dii involuti-), consulted by the Etruscan Jupiter himself; that
world moreover was finite, and, as it had come into being, so was
it again to pass away after the expiry of a definite period of time,
whose sections were the -saecula-. Respecting the intellectual
value which may once have belonged to this Etruscan cosmogony and
philosophy, it is difficult to form a judgment; they appear however
to have been from the very first characterized by a dull fatalism
and an insipid play upon number.

Notes for Book I Chapter XII

1. I. II. Religion

2. This was, to all appearance, the original nature of the
"morning-mother" or -Mater matuta-; in connection with which we may
recall the circumstance that, as the names Lucius and especially
-Manius- show, the morning hour was reckoned as lucky for birth.
-Mater matuta-probably became a goddess of sea and harbour only
at a later epoch under the influence of the myth of Leucothea; the
fact that the goddess was chiefly worshipped by women tells against
the view that she was originally a harbour-goddess.

3. From -Maurs-, which is the oldest form handed down by tradition,
there have been developed by different treatment of the -u -Mars-,
-Mavors-, -Mors-; the transition to -o (similar to -Paula-, -Pola-,
and the like) appears also in the double form Mar-Mor (comp.
-Ma-murius-) alongside of -Mar-Mor- and -Ma-Mers-.

4. The facts, that gates and doors and the morning (-ianus
matutinus-) were sacred to Ianus, and that he was always invoked
before any other god and was even represented in the series of
coins before Jupiter and the other gods, indicate unmistakeably that
he was the abstraction of opening and beginning. The double-head
looking both ways was connected with the gate that opened both ways.
To make him god of the sun and of the year is the less justifiable,
because the month that bears his name was originally the eleventh,
not the first; that month seems rather to have derived its name
from the circumstance, that at this season after the rest of the
middle of winter the cycle of the labours of the field began afresh.
It was, however, a matter of course that the opening of the yea