Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult

5. From the Inside Out

5 . 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N In this the final chapter of our study we will more closely examine elements of the Indo-European sacred spaces. Particular attention will be given to the boundary markers of the great sacred space, especially to their instantiation in Roman cult and the significance of their use for, inter alia, revealing the character of the gods Terminus and Mars. Discussions in this chapter will also focus somewhat more directly on the ancient IndoEuropean cult which is parent to the Vedic and Roman ritual practices examined throughout. The empirical method employed for these discussions is one that projects original (that is, historically antecedent) structures on the basis of identified homologous structures; Dumézil called it pensée extériorisée ‘exteriorized thinking’, which was discussed in §1.7.1.4.2. As we saw in that discussion, Dumézil’s method, similar to Benveniste’s, is in effect the scientific comparative method which linguists use in reconstructing earlier, unattested forms of language by comparing descendent languages, but here applied to cultural and social reflexes rather than linguistic forms. 24 C H A P T E R 5 From the Inside Out SSIE_ch5_FY.indd 241 6/8/06 10:47:20 AM 242 I N D O - E U R O P E A N S A C R E D S P A C E 5 . 2 P R O T O - I N D O - E U R O P E A N C U LT Vedic and Roman cult share a duality of sacred space—one small (Devayajana and urban Rome), one great (Mahāvedi and Ager Romanus). The common linguistic and cultural origin of the Indic and Italic peoples is beyond question. The religious preservationism of these two Indo-European societies ringing the eastern and western rims of the Indo-European expansion area in antiquity is well documented, revealed both by lexical evidence (see Benveniste 1969) and by cultic practice (see ARR). Ergo, the most economical and at the same time compelling interpretation of this shared structure of sacred space is one which appeals to inheritance: Vedic and Roman religious practice both continue a Proto-Indo-European doctrine and cultic use of dual sacred spaces. Extrapolating from the Vedic and Roman traditions, what conclusions can we draw about the ancestral Indo-European practices? 5.2.1 The small space Several considerations point to the freestanding cultic use of the IndoEuropean small space without the large. Most obvious of these is the Vedic observance of the various Iṣṭis—rites that require only the small space. In Rome the small sacred space—that bounded by the pomerium—likewise has a distinctive use, being the space within which the urban auspices must be conducted. In both India and Rome, the small space is that which houses the three canonical flames—flames which fulfill discrete ritual functions not dependent on operations being conducted within the large space. 5.2.2 East In Vedic practice, the great space is laid out to the east of the small. In Roman ritual, the great space has become an all encompassing expansion surrounding the small. The concentric geometry of the sacred spatial arrangement in Rome, we have proposed, is consequent to the immobile and permanent nature of Roman society—so many great-space extensions emanating from the boundary of the fixed small space, melding together by design or by inevitable necessity to form a continuous enclosure. Yet even in Rome there is clear evidence of the theological primacy of the eastward expansion. Like the Vedic Yātsattra with its iterative eastward expansion of the Mahāvedi along the course of the river Sarasvatī (see §4.3.1), so in Rome there is an iterated movement of the larger sacred space beyond SSIE_ch5_FY.indd 242 6/8/06 10:47:20 AM F R O M T H E I N S I D E O U T 243 the eastern boundary of the Ager Romanus—along the course, as it were, of the Via Praenestina. The Ager Gabinus with its own form of auspices, and so distinguished from the Ager Peregrinus, is a great sacred space that projects from the eastern boundary of the Ager Romanus, one step further removed from the small space of urban Rome (see §4.12). East is also...