he knew something, as he found it in the books of
the pontifices; and the part of those books in which he found these
names, known as Indigitamenta, probably contained formulae of
invocation, _precationum carmina_,[337] of the same kind as the
_comprecationes deorum immortalium_ from which Gellius quoted the pairs
of male and female deities which we discussed above. Varro arranged all
these names in groups of principal and subordinate or assistant deities,
the latter amplifying in detail the meaning and scope of the former, as
we have just seen; and of this grouping some traces are still visible in
the accounts of Augustine and Tertullian. But the good Fathers tumbled
the whole collection about sadly in their search for material for their
mockery, having no historical or scientific object in view; with the
result that it now resembles the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, and
can no longer be re-arranged on the original Varronian plan. The
difficulty is increased by the etymologies and explanations which they
offer of the divine names, which, as a rule, are even more absurd than
the divinities themselves.[338]

But, in the last place, the question must be asked whether these
Sondergoetter 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 i