The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s5.13

v2.c41.s5.13

The nature of such deities as Hestia and Vesta is often misunderstood by students of Greek and Roman religion, who are accustomed to reckon personality in terms of clear anthropomorphism, and who fail to appreciate that the conception of fire as living and active is in essence a personal conception. This error, fostered by the fact that what we know of old Roman religion is only on its formal side, has led to the view² that early Roman religion could not be nature worship of the type usually attributed to Indo-Europeans. The conclusion obviously rests on the wholly erroneous view that Indo-European worship was that of personifications of nature forces; it was the worship of nature as animate, and what is animate is not impersonal. The theory that Roman or any other religion developed from the indeterminate conception of an impersonal force ascribes to early man the power of framing a complex conception which is wholly implausible. It is absurd to suppose that the daily reverence paid in the household to the flame of Vesta into which a morsel of salted cake was thrown was not paid to a personal deity, although she was not represented by an image. The reason for this paucity of representation in Rome as in Greece was precisely the same as in Greece; the living flame is the present deity, and to a people to whom this was a living belief the idea of making an image would have appeared idle. The formalism of the Indigitamenta is the result of priestly ingenuity,³ not primitive belief, and all our knowledge of Roman religion is obscured by the lateness of our records and the effect of Greek ideas. It is characteristic of the tendency to treat Roman religion as more abstract than it really was that efforts are made to explain away the facts recorded of the connexion of the wolf and the woodpecker with Mars as representing a late development, and to deny the paternity of Jupiter⁴ and the maternity of Earth, and to make even sun worship a borrowing.⁵