Some comparative considerations on the Indo-European religion with a focus on the Roman religion

The Roman religion is important for our understanding of the early Indo-European religion which forms the basis of our own religion, tradition, and identity. Unfortunately, the religions of the western branches of Indo-European were destroyed by Abrahamism; hence, we are left with what are at best reconstructions rather than a living tradition. One of the early modern works on this topic that unearthed a large amount of useful material was that of the German scholar Georg Wissowa ‘Religion und Kultus der Römer’. Thereafter one might name the French scholar Dumézil and Puhvel who extended his work to bring the Roman religion into the realm of the comparative Indo-European framework. While Dumézil overdid his structuralist tripartation hypothesis his contributions to Indo-European comparative analysis remain an important foundation. More recently there has been a work by another German scholar Lipka that also furnishes some useful and updated information in a concise form but suffers from certain defects comparable to what one encounters in works of white Indologists on Indo-Aryan material. While one may appreciate the insights or thoroughness of some of these scholars, we should remember that none of them have a visceral stake in the subject matter as, unlike us, they are not heathens. Moreover, while the modern west might appropriate the Roman past as their own they are particularly keen to rescind its heathen foundations and use only the facade of its “secularized” institutions. This prevents most western analysis from realizing the fundamental meaning of the religion to Roman people and presents some errors of understanding. Hence, it is important for us as the last Indo-European heathens to present an analysis of this material from a purely heathen standpoint.

The Roman situation is important to understand the different processes by the different branches of Indo-European spread into their final homelands. In India and Greece there were multiple waves of related peoples moving into territories which were already housing urban and literate civilizations. In both cases the invasive Indo-Europeans established complete dominance over the substratum in a relatively short period of time, especially in India. While both of them underwent extensive genetic admixture with the substratum, they retained much of their ancestral Indo-European traditions intact, which then became the foundation of their respective civilizations in their new homes. This was rather unlike the case of the Hittites where the substratum component played a huge role alongside their early Indo-European inheritance. However, the Greeks differed from the Indo-Aryans in primarily establishing themselves in the form of several dispersed and disconnected foci, often contending with each other, and with different governmental systems, with only a much later, only partly successful attempt at creating a unified center. The maritime mode of spread with naval/amphibious warfare capability was important in establishing many of these regional foci. The Indo-Aryans in contrast fluctuated between periods of early widespread unification followed by regionalization. However, even in the latter periods there were fairly large and dominant kingdoms. The first major unification appears to have been that under bharata and his immediate successors which gave the name to their new homeland. A subsequent unification of the powerful kuru and the pa~nchAla successors of the bhArata-s under parIkShit and janamejaya established the basic of Indo-Aryan pattern in the Indian subcontinent. The control of river-valleys by means of wide-ranging mobile armies was the primary mode of power projection used by the Indo-Aryans. In the case of the Romans the progress was gradual with establishment of several disconnected foci to the north of their final home. In their final home were the Etruscans, who were already urban. While they were not Indo-European, their contacts with the Greeks had already Indo-Europeanized them to a degree (e.g. adopting the worship of the god Apollo and explicitly equating their deities with the Greek deities) and also made them literate by way of adopting a Greek script which later became the Latin script. The Romans at first established only a single major focus – namely the city of Rome (itself an Etruscan place name) and were already influenced in many ways Etruscan and Greeks tendencies. From this focus they gradually expanded outwards engulfing and overtaking the Etruscans. The success of the Indo-European invaders in establishing their language and culture over that of the urban and literate substratum in India, Greece and Rome despite different dynamics and modes of dispersal is something one might ponder about in private.

Against this backdrop, one might then ask the question regarding how the originally Roman religious ideas were affected by their adoption of iconographic trends from another phylogenetically distant but geographically proximal Indo-European people, the Greeks. This dynamic was of some importance to us because it provides some parallels to our own history. The early parts of the shruti and the avesta, as we have described before, were largely aniconic. The zarathuShtrian strain of the avestan religion acquired a positively iconoclastic strain resembling the iconoclasm of the Egyptian ruler Akhenaten. In contrast, the Indo-Aryan religions became increasingly iconic, just as the Greek and Roman religions, starting from the late stages of the Vedic period. Despite the lack of clearly attested iconography in the early period, it is apparent Indo-Aryan tradition, shares with non-zarathuStrian Iranian religion, Slavic and Greek tradition (much muted in the iconic period) a conception of polycephalous or polymelous deities – a feature only rarely seen elsewhere among natural religions. A corollary to this is that one of the earliest examples of religious iconography in the Indian subcontinent might have had an Indo-Aryan influence. This is the image of the tricephalic, horned, ithyphallic deity from the sindhu-sarasvati civilization who shows continuity with the later iconography of the Indo-Aryan god rudra (of course we cannot rule out that the SSVC deity was rudra himself). Thus, as an example of how lateral transfer of iconography might work it is instructive to study the Roman religion.

In the Roman religion the “indra-like deity” was represented by Iuppiter: an etymological cognate of Indo-Aryan dyauH-pitR^i and Greek Zeus Pater (vocative: dyauH pitaH and Zeu Pater;). Like in other branches of Indo-European he was the head of the pantheon and the chief god (Footnote 1). However, Romans were distinct in having Mars as a prominent deity perhaps nearly of the same level as Iuppiter. Mars had functional and iconographic similarity to kumAra the deity of para-Vedic provenance, who became a major deity among the Indo-Aryans starting from the latest-Vedic period. Thus, in a sense the Roman function of Mars could be compared to that of kumAra in certain Indo-Aryan settings, such as in the yaudheya republic of northern India. An interesting feature of the iconography of Mars was his non-human representation in the form of a spear. This was particularly important in the Regia, the office of the senior-most ritualist (Pontifex Maximus; Footnote 2), which lay between the temple of Vesta (where the Roman equivalent of the gArhapatya fire was housed) and the memorial of Julius commissioned by Augustus. Here along with the spear, there were two more lances (hastae Martis) and the two shields (ancilia) which might have represented his two wives, Nerio and Moles. The Roman authors are clear that the spear was an important religious object that was worshiped as a representation of Mars himself. This object does not seem to have a Greek cognate at all even though they possessed a cognate deity Ares. Hence, (contra Lipka) we suspect that this was an early, purely Roman, non-anthropomorphic representation of the god Mars. This was distinct from the temple of Mars with anthropomorphic icons, e.g. the temple of Mars Ultor of Augustus. There, offerings relating to military or political victories were made, like the Roman standards whose return Augustus negotiated from the Iranians, which the latter had captured after the rout of Crassus.

Like the Indo-Aryan skanda, the Roman Mars had a wider functional repertoire than being the god of war alone (in contrast the classical Greek Ares). This becomes clear from an incantation to Mars preserved by Cato:
prohibessis, defendas averrunces que;
morbos visos invosos que;
viduertatem vastitudinem;
calamitates intemperias que.

Ban, repel and sweep away ;
illness, seen and unseen;
depopulation, devastation;
calamities and bad weather [Footnote 3].

He not only protects against ill-effects of war but also against disease and bad weather, which points to the ancient link between the Mars-like deities and the “rudra class” of deities.

The importance of the Mars and his abstract representations become even more apparent in one of his major rituals the March ritual which began on March 1 and continued for several days. The specialist ritualists officiating this rite were the Salii and it was supposed to have been initiated by the legendary second king of Rome, Numa. Numa is supposed to have been an agent of the gods who organized the rituals of the Romans and established their four types of ritualists the Flamens, the Pontifices, the Salii, and the Fetiales (a potential parallel to the four-fold division of ritual specialists among the Indic and Iranic Aryans). In the March ritual the 12 Salii carried forth the 12 shields kept in the Palatine temple of Mars in Rome and they themselves carried a spear in his right hand and wore a sword. The performed a ritualized dance during the procession by clanging their spear against the shield. The ritual also included the chanting of the Saliaria Carmina which were ancient incantations which were part of the Roman “shruti”. They were composed in an ancient form of Italic that predated Latin and their text was faithfully handed by the ritualists along with their correct oral form. By the classical Roman period few understood their meaning they were learned by rote and deployed in the ancient language even as the ancient language of the veda is deployed by the Hindu ritualists. The core verses of the incantation appear to have had Mars as the “devatA”; this was followed by several verses to many other deities of the pantheon which were called Januli (Janus), Junonii (Juno), Minervii (Minerva) and the like for the deities. Then the name of the ruler of Rome were taken in the final incantation in certain instances. For instance, we have record that this honor was conferred on Augustus. That this importance of Mars was not just limited to Rome but more widespread in the old Italic sphere is suggested by the Iguvine bronze tablets from around 200 BCE which contain instructions of certain complex rituals with multiple animal sacrifices performed by the 12 ritualists of the Umbrians. The primary deities of these rituals were Iove Patre, Marte and Vofionos of whom the first two correspond to the Roman Iuppiter and Mars. Identity of Vofionos is unclear, though he is often equated with Roman Quirinus who himself might have been a Martian ectype derived from another Italic people in the region the Sabines. Interestingly, these tablets also frequently use the theonym Sherfe Martie (Çerfe Marti), which as Grassmann and Max Muller correctly deduced (but ignored by italicists) has a relationship to the Vedic term, shardho mArutaH. Thus, there was possibly a concept of the hosts of Mars, similar to the Vedic marut-s, in the old Italic religion and this preserved in the ancient Roman ritual incantation the Carmen Arvale, which we have discussed before.

In this context we shall examine the two small fragments of the Saliaria Carmina that survive today as it points to an important parallel between the Indo-Aryan and Italic religions with considerable significance for early Indo-European religion:
Coz-eulodoiz eso, omina enim vero
Ad patula’ ose misse Jani cariones.
Duonus Cerus esit dunque Janus vevet.

I will be a flute-player in the chorus,
for the ritualists of Janus have sent omens to open ears.
Cerus will be propitious so long as Janus shall live.

Divom empta cante, divom divo supplicante.
Chant by the impelling of the gods, chant as the suppliants of the god of gods [Iuppiter].

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Footnote 1: A closer study reveals that this function was probably distributed among three distinct deities, albeit with overlapping functionality, in the early Proto-Indo-European religion (i.e. even before Hittite split from the rest). All three deities are preserved only in the old Indo-Aryan vaidika religion – dyauH pitR^i, parjanya and indra vR^itrahan. Thus, dyauH pitR^i represented the ancestral sky deity with a thunder weapon, parjanya the fertilizing rain deity, and indra vR^itrahan represented the deity who was the supreme divine warrior. However, due to their overlapping functionality they were rolled into one in most branches of Indo-European with one of the three being made the sole possessor of the combined functionality. In the Hittite religion the cognate of dyauH pitR^i was retained as Tarhuwant while the cognate of indra was retained in female form as the goddess Inara the daughter of Tarhuwant. In Germanic and Celtic the same cognate deity as Tarhuwant was retained with the appellation invoking the term for the thunder, respectively, Thor and Taranis. In Greek and Roman religions again it was the cognate of dyauH pitR^i. In Baltic and Slavic it was the cognate of parjanya, respectively Perkūnas and Perun. In the Baltic religion indra survived as the planet Jupiter (Lithuanian Indraja). In the vaidika and the Kalasha, non-zarathuShtrian Iranian and perhaps Armenian religions, indra vR^itrahan became the dominant possessor of this function. However, in the vaidika religion alone the essence of the remaining two deities were retained along with their specific ancestral functional aspects. Thus, parjanya was specifically the fertilizing rain deity. In the vaidika religion he receives a specific cooked rice offering (charu) on the day before the full-moon as part of the vaishvadeva ritual as ordained by Apastamba. In the bali ritual of the Indo-Aryan householder, he offers a bali for parjanya near the drum in which he stores water. The connection of thunder and dyaus is explicitly mentioned in the famous recitation with which the fire is taken forth to the new altar:
akrandad agni stanayann iva dyauH kShAmA rerihad vIrudhaH sama~njan | RV 10.045.04ab
agni roared like dyaus when he thunders; he licked the plants off the earth, anointed [with ghee]. The deity dyauH is invoked in one of the mantra-s with which the churning of fire takes place. He also receives oblations along with pR^ithivi in the mR^igareShTi ritual of the atharvan-s.

Footnote 2: The Roman term for this senior priest, an office occupied by Julius Caesar who was a pious man, has an interesting parallel in the Indo-Aryan world: The Sanskrit equivalent of Pontifex is pathikR^it, both meaning the maker of the path (ponti= path; fex=maker). In the veda it is applied among others to: 1) To the god bR^ihaspati who has the function of the chief ritualist among the deva-s. This is observed in the mantra of gR^itsamada shaunahotra:
tvaM no gopAH pathikR^id vichakShaNas tava vratAya matibhir jarAmahe | RV 2.23.06ab
You are our protector, the path-maker, the wise one; for your ritual we recite mantra-s.
2) It is also applied to human ancestors who were literally makers of religious path of Arya-s – the path of the gods. Thus, such ancestors, who were mantra-seers, are worshiped along with yama:
idaM nama R^iShibhyaH pUrvajebhyaH pUrvebhyaH pathikR^idbhyaH | RV 10.014.15cd
This salutation is for the seers, the ancestors and the former path-makers. Interestingly, the founder of the jaina religion chose the term tirthaMkara which is the semantic equivalent of these terms for their highest figures.

Footnote 3: Latin que is cognate of the enclitic particle cha in Sanskrit and is used similarly in this hymn as it is used in Indo-Iranian incantations such the chamaka prashna of the yajurveda. Second, the use of the imperatives in the first foot of the Roman incantation is a parallel to such imperative constructions in the vaidika mantra-s:
bAdhasva=prohibessis (e.g. in Are bAdhasva duchChunAm |)
pAhi= defendas (e.g. in dahAshaso rakShasaH pAhy asmAn druho nido mitramaho avadyAt |)
prati vidhya adhi = averrunces (e.g. in Urdhvo bhava prati vidhyAdhy asmad AviSh kR^iNuShva daivyAny agne |)

continued…