suitable offerings entice the indwelling spirit to leave it. His
'theology' in this stage is the knowledge of the various spirits and
their dwellings, his ritual the due performance of sacrifice for
purposes of propitiation and expiation. It was in this state of
religious feeling that the ancestors of Rome must have lived before
they founded their agricultural settlement on the Palatine: we must try
now to see how far it had retained this character and what developments
it had undergone when it had crystallised into the 'Religion of Numa.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 81 ff.

[2] _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 181-185.




CHAPTER III

MAIN FEATURES OF THE RELIGION OF NUMA


=1. Theology.=--The characteristic appellation of a divine spirit in
the oldest stratum of the Roman religion is not _deus_, a god, but
rather _numen_, a power: he becomes _deus_ when he obtains a name, and
so is on the way to acquiring a definite personality, but in origin he
is simply the 'spirit' of the 'animistic' period, and retains something
of the spirit's characteristics. Thus among the divinities of the
household we shall see later that the Genius and even the Lar