But, in the last place, the question must be asked whether these Sondergötter of the real kind, such, for example, as those twelve agricultural ones invoked by the flamen at the Cereale sacrum, had their origin in any sense in popular usage or belief. At the end of his paper Wissowa emphatically says that he does not believe it. For myself, I would only modify this conclusion so far as this: they must, I think, have been the theological, or perhaps rather the ritualistic outcome, of a psychological tendency rooted in the popular mind. I have already noticed that curious bit of folklore in which three spirits of cultivation were invoked with a kind of acted parable at the birth of a child;[339] and I cannot regard this custom as a piece of pontifical ritualism, though the names may have been invented by the priests to suit the practice. The old Roman seems to have had a tendency to ascribe what for want of a better word we may call divinity, not only to animate and inanimate objects, but to actions and abstractions; this, I take it, is an advanced stage of animism, peculiar, it would seem, to a highly practical agricultural people, and it is this stage which is reflected in the ritualistic work of the priests. They turned dim and nameless powers into definite and prehensible deities with names, and arranged them in groups so as to fall in with the life of the city as well as the farm. What was the result of all this ingenuity, or whether it had any popular result at all, is a question hardly admitting of solution. What is really interesting in the matter, if my view is the right one, is the curious way in which the early Roman seems to have looked upon all life and force and action, human or other, as in some sense associated with, and the result of, divine or spiritual agency.
[291] For _loca sacra_ and _consecratio_ see Marquardt, p. 148 foll.; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 400.
[292] Serv. _ad Aen._ xii. 119, "Romani moris fuerat cespitem arae super imponere, et ita sacrificare." Cp. some valuable remarks of Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ p. 23. The altar of the Fratres was in front of their grove; they used also a movable one (_foculus_) of silver, but _cespiti ornatus_ (_ib._ p. 21): this was for the preliminary offering of wine and incense (Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 351).