From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (7 page)

What was it from a religious point of view that defined this period? How was it different from the time that Rome was unequiv- ocally Rome? And how, if at all, did this pre-Rome, or perhaps more accurately proto-Rome, help to define Rome? The enigmatic deity, Faunus, sometimes described as the father or brother of Bona Dea is a defining feature of this mythical period. Faunus was a mysterious and ambivalent figure in the Roman mythic ideology. He is difficult to interpret. The literary descriptions of him give an initial impres- sion of confusion. Was he man or god? For Dionysius of Halicarnas- sus he was king of the native inhabitants when Evander arrived in Italy. He was a prudent and energetic king who welcomed Evander with kindness and gave him as much land as he desired.
75
For Virgil, Faunus was the father of Latinus, but he was also a prophetic deity who appeared to supplicants in dreams during the rite of incuba- tion.
76
The theme of prophecy and incubation is found in Ovid too, where Numa, by the process of incubation, learns from Faunus that a current famine might be alleviated by the institution of the rite of the Fordicidia.
77
Was he singular or plural? In the examples cited he was certainly a single figure but Cicero talks of
faunorum voces
.
78
Was he beneficent or maleficent? In all the examples above Faunus was a beneficent deity whose help could be relied on in times of cri- sis, the good host of Evander, the wise father of Latinus, the kindly prophet. But Faunus was also the incestuous father of Bona Dea, who plied her with wine, beat her with rods of myrtle and changed himself into a serpent in order to satisfy his incestuous lust.
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In a tale very different from the aetiological myth of the Fordicidia, where Faunus comes voluntarily to Numa in a dream, Ovid tells how Faunus
—
and Picus, who was associated with Faunus in this story
80
had to be made drunk with wine and forced to divulge the

secret
—
of expiating Jupiter
’
s thunderbolts. They struggled to escape Numa
’
s shackles but failed and were forced to speak.
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Plutarch, in his version of this story, makes Picus and Faunus change shape in their vain effort to evade Numa
’
s grasp.

When captured they dropped their own forms and assumed many different shapes, presenting hideous and dreadful appearances. But when they perceived that they were fast caught and could not escape, they foretold to Numa many things that would come to pass.

(Plut.,
Num.,
15.4)

Finally, Ovid connects Faunus and Hercules in what at first glance appears to be a trivial little story. Faunus conceives a desire for Omphale when he spies her one day out walking with Hercules. Hercules and Omphale sleep apart that night for they plan to cele- brate the rites of Bacchus in the morning. But they exchange clothes, he dressing himself in her gauzy garments while she dons his lion- skin. When the lovers are asleep Faunus creeps up on them hoping to seduce Omphale, but is confused by the garments, attempts to seduce Hercules instead, and comes to grief. Faced with this jumble of evidence one cannot but sympathize with the character of Cotta in Cicero
’
s
De Natura Deorum:
‘
As for the utterances of a faun, I never heard one, but if you say you have I will take your word for it, although what on earth a faun may be I do not know.
’
82

This, however is precisely the point: we do not know what Faunus was. The significance of Faunus was that it was impossible to pin him down. He was every thing at once
—
beneficent and maleficent, singular and plural, man and god. To interpret the evidence as con- fused is to miss the point. If the various accounts are accepted as a single body of evidence, patterns of perception become discernible. For one thing every account unequivocally projects Faunus back into a vague, amorphous past. Although he did receive cult in Rome in historical times
83
he belonged in a mythical past.
84
Ovid described that age thus:

Their life was like that of beasts, unprofitably spent; artless as yet and raw was the common herd. Leaves did they use for houses, herbs for corn: water scooped up in two hollows of the hand to them was nectar. No bull panted under the weight of the bent ploughshare: no land was under the dominion of the

husbandman: there was as yet no use for horses, every man carried his own weight: the sheep went clothed in its own wool. Under the open sky they lived and went about naked, inured to heavy showers and rainy winds.

(Ov.,
Fast.,
2.292
–
300)
85

The ritual complement to Ovid
’
s description was that Faunus belonged to and represented an age which lacked the twin concepts of boundary and categorization. This is the second pattern con- tained in the evidence. In general terms this is how the multi-faceted nature of Faunus is most usefully interpreted. More specifically, the stories of Faunus and Bona Dea, Hercules and Omphale, and Plutarch
’
s version of the story of Faunus and Numa all form part of this same pattern. In the rapid change of shape, Picus and Faunus represent the ability to slide unceremoniously across boundaries, as if the concept itself did not exist. In the story of Hercules and Omphale, Faunus is made to betray sexual confusion: he could not tell male from female; again as though the concept of a boundary between the sexes did not exist. With Bona Dea, he attempts to cross a sexual boundary that can never be crossed, in any circumstances whatsoever: the sexual distance that must be maintained between father and daughter.
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This, the inability to discern boundaries, rep- resented the significance of Faunus within the Roman religious system. The function of that inability was to define by contrast the religion that was acknowledged as Roman, the religion that had as its basis
—
as I hope this book will demonstrate
—
the concepts of boundary and categorization.

The significance of Hercules, and especially of his cult at the
Ara Maxima,
was that he was perceived as having laid the foundation of the religion that was considered Roman. The related concepts of boundary and categorization were first articulated by the establish- ment of the exclusively male rite at the
Ara Maxima
in conscious opposition to the exclusively female rite of Bona Dea. This also marked, in Roman perception as expressed in myth making at any rate, the beginning of the notion of a religious system. The impor- tance of the two cults of Hercules and Bona Dea was that they were defined in terms of each other; they complemented each other; they were linked by a relationship of meaning. It was this that marked out the religion defined as Roman from the one represented by Faunus. However chaotic a polytheistic system such as the Roman might appear to us, to the Romans it was an ordered, meaningfully

structured system. The Roman conception of religious chaos was symbolized by Faunus.

The
Ara Maxima
existed in historical times,
87
providing a tangi-

ble link between the religious past and present. In this sense it might well be regarded as the earliest Roman shrine. Significantly it was also, in terms of its aetiology, the first expression of the concept of exclusively male ritual space. Note that according to the logic of Rome
’
s myths, female ritual space was not a Roman creation. Bona Dea with her female rites was already part of the enchanted land- scape into which Hercules intruded, and which he ended up by dominating. None the less that female space needed to be incorpo- rated into the new system, for it was that which defined and com- plemented the newly created male space. Together they constituted the germ of the new Roman system. Cicero, in his harangues against Clodius, was certainly not exaggerating the importance of the cult of Bona Dea to the civic religion. It is arguable that he did not go far enough when he described the cult as one which
‘
we received from our kings and is coeval with our city
’
.
88
The perceived antiquity of Bona Dea
’
s cult, with the particular meanings that antiquity was invested with, clearly constituted a large part of its significance.

We come now to the problem of status. Were the male and female cultic spaces perceived to have an equal status, or in the patriarchal society of the time was the female cultic space marginal to a central masculine space? This is the current orthodoxy on Roman reli- gion.
89
In this section I shall argue that in Rome, male and female cultic space were equally important to the civic system. It is time to rethink the notion that Roman religion placed a negative value on the female and a positive value on the male.

The mysteries of Mithras, like the cult of Hercules, were, to the best of our knowledge, forbidden to women.
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But in contrast to the cult at the
Ara Maxima
the cult of Mithras occupied a space marginal to the public cults of Rome. This was an ancient mystery religion of uncertain oriental origin
91
which did not reach its classic western form until the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD.
92
It was especially popular among the Roman legions, which were also undoubtedly responsible for the wide dissemination of the cult throughout the Roman empire. According to Plutarch, Mithras was

introduced to Rome by the Cilician pirates conquered by Pompey.
93
But it is unlikely that the initiates were at this stage anything more than a tiny sect operating on the fringes of society, and with no effect on the dominant ideology of the day. Cumont in 1913 writes of the mysteries in the time of the Republic,
‘
L
’
action de ses sectateurs sur la masse de la population
é
tait
à
peu pr
è
s aussi nulle que celle de soci
é
t
é
s bouddhiques dans l
’
Europe moderne.
’
94
The mysteries were therefore not part of the religious system which included the cult of Bona Dea and Hercules Invictus. But they provide a useful analyti- cal tool with which to evaluate the relative importance of male and female cultic space.

The mysteries of Mithras, like the cult of Hercules, did not admit women to its rites. But the dynamics of this exclusion were quite dif- ferent from those operating in the cult of Hercules Invictus. The nature of this difference is instructive. I am not suggesting an opposi- tion here in the structuralist sense; merely the contrast between two very different views of the world. What I hope will emerge from this analysis is not so much a positive as a negative hypothesis; not so much what Bona Dea was as what she was not. This in turn will, I hope, be helpful in understanding the status of her cult in the civic religion.

The cult of Mithras was based on a deliberate rejection of the real- ities of the world as they were perceived to exist.
95
Instead, the initi- ate entered into a deliberately constructed cosmic entity, governed by a carefully constructed cosmology. Central to that cosmology was the rejection of the female. It is important to note that unlike the male cultic space created by Hercules, which had to exist within a wider cultic universe, the Mithraic cosmos was complete: it
was
the universe. Beyond its boundaries existed nothing. The rejection of women was therefore total. In the mysteries of Mithras women had no status because they simply did not exist. Even their exclusive function of child-bearing was denied in both the myth and the ritual by an appeal to the fantasy of sexless generation. Mithras was born from a rock.

In his discussion of the significance of grade names in the myster- ies, Gordon argues that the only way to make them meaningful to the initiates was to make an appeal to the commonly held associa- tions of ideas which each of the names evoked. Thus although reject- ing the outside world, the mysteries needed to use it as a point of reference to make the nature of the rejection intelligible to its initi- ates. In other words, the terms of the denial of elements in the out-

side world admitted the existence of those elements, albeit outside the cult. Thus the systematic rejection of women at each level in the progress of the initiate may be interpreted as a recognition of women
’
s status in the
‘
non-existent
’
world beyond the cult. The rejection of women occurred on every level, mundane, mythic and cultic. It occurred on an empirical level: women had no part in the ritual. The myth of Mithras
’
birth also excluded women on a mythic level. But most significant was their exclusion at a cultic level. It was not simply women that were excluded but the female principle itself. The central myth of the cult, that Mithras was born not of woman but of a rock, can very instructively be compared to the myth of Her- cules and the Bona Dea. In the cult of Hercules too, women were excluded, so that female members of the population had no place therein, just as in the cult of Mithras. But the aetiological myth rec- ognized the necessity for the female principle and the necessary cul- tic space was provided, albeit at a safe distance. Exclusion of women from a cult was in itself nothing very much out of the ordinary. But exclusion of the female principle from a cultic system
—
which is what the Mithraic mysteries did
—
was a different proposition alto- gether and needed to be legitimated repeatedly. This, I suggest, is why the theme of female rejection occurs at every level in the initia- tory process in the cult of Mithras as well as in the myth.

I suggest that if the mysteries of Mithras were inordinately preoc- cupied with legitimating the denial of any status to the female prin- ciple it could only be because of the important status conferred on the female in the cultic system that the mysteries had rejected, which was the traditional civic ideology. The cult of the Bona Dea, as I argued, occupied its own well defined space within the civic system where the cult of Hercules also existed. Whatever may have been the actual process of the formation or invention of these cults in an antiquity so remote that it has not been recoverable by historical investigation, analysis, or indeed imagination, the common percep- tion of that formation, in the myth of Hercules and Bona Dea at any rate, was that sexual exclusiveness was a feature imposed initially by women. Far from being pushed by the male into a marginal posi- tion, the female occupied centre stage to begin with, and it is the male that was refused entry. Indeed if we were to carry the logic of this aetiological position to its extreme, we would arrive at a sce- nario where the male cultic space is the marginal one.