Pax and the Roman Understanding of Peace

3rd century denarius depicting Pax 
(moneymuseum.com)

The worship of the Goddess Pax (Peace) in ancient Rome first comes to prominence during the reign of Augustus, when in 13 BCE the Senate commissioned the Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of the Augustan Peace) to mark the safe return of Augustus from Gaul and Spain. Significantly, it was dedicated on the Campus Martius (field of Mars), which until the 1st century BCE had been used primarily as a military exercise ground. This is a powerful hint as to how ancient Romans understood Pax, ie, that Pax and Mars have a relationship with each other. In the Roman mind, Mars (war) establishes the necessary conditions for Pax (peace) to flourish.

Our Degenerate Age – A Buddhist Prophecy

A man feeling spent after a night of debauchery
Detail from "Marriage a la Mode" by Hogarth (1743)

In many Indo-European religions there is a tradition which predicts the decline of humanity. The Romans spoke of an initial golden age of man, followed by a silver age, bronze age and finally iron age, with each age being less virtuous and less verdant than the last – it was predicted that our kind would finally be wiped out by floods and starvation (see Ovid’s Metamorphoses). In Germanic spirituality there is a tradition that speaks of mankind’s devolution: kinship bonds break down, lasciviousness and violence abound, the weather is harsh and sunbeams turn black (implying volcanic ash clouds?) – this is the age just before the destruction of our world by violence and fire, Ragnarök. It will be followed by the rebirth of a verdurous world when Gods and virtuous folk begin anew (see the Völuspá). In Hinduism it is taught that there are four epochs that characterise the cycle of existence. The first is the most blessed age, with each of the succeeding ages becoming more degenerate than the last, until the cycle begins anew (see the Mahabharata). 

Likewise, in Mahayana Buddhism, which originated in northern India but is now most common in NE Asia, there is a very old and widely accepted prophecy which speaks of the inevitable decline of Buddhism. It describes three ages. The first begins with the life of the Buddha of the Shakya clan, at some point between the 1th-5th century BCE (the exact century of the birth of Shakyamuni Buddha is unknown), and lasted between 500 to 1000 years. This was a golden age of Buddhism, when it was comparatively easy to follow the Buddha’s teachings and achieve enlightenment. The second period represents a time of the weakening of Buddhist spirituality, it also lasts between 500-1000 years. The third age is said to last for 10,000 years. According to Japanese tradition it began in the 11th century CE (which coincides with the Islamic conquest of south Asia; Muslims massacred Buddhist monks and destroyed their monasteries, universities and libraries, thus causing Buddhism to almost disappear from these regions where it had previously flourished: Reat at 76). During this latter age it is said that it will become increasingly difficult for people to follow the Buddha’s teachings, though there will be a period of flourishing before finally becoming obscured and lost. Following this there will be an extremely long period of spiritual darkness, after which a new golden age of Buddhism will eventually emerge, ushered in by the Maitreya Buddha.

The Greco-Roman Cosmos

Illustration from La Sphere du Monde by Oronce Fine (1549)
(the sublunary elements are fire, air, water and earth; above the moon is aether)

In most ancient Greek and Roman minds the distant stars were not thought to be suns capable of supporting a family of orbiting planets, and our own sun was not thought to be the central hearth-fire of our familial solar system. Their view of the cosmos was fundamentally different to our own.

“The Greeks, by about 500 BC, were trying to explain the movements of the planets by first assuming the earth to be the centre of the universe. ( … practically everyone before modern times assumed that it was.) A philosopher named Anaximenes about 550 BC suggested that the stars were fixed in a huge hollow sphere that enclosed the earth, the sun, the moon and the planets … This sphere might be motionless while the earth turned, or vice versa. Later Greeks argued both ways. 

The sun, moon and planets could not be fixed to this sphere of the stars, because they did not move along with the stars at the same speed. They must therefore exist in space between the sphere of the stars and the central earth … each must be fixed in a special sphere of its own [Asimov at 25-27].”

Beggar Spirituality

"A Beggar Girl" by Sargent (c. 1877)

When my husband died nearly two years ago it was as if in a thunderstruck moment I realised that the cosmos was not as I thought it to be – it was so much darker and more painful than I had imagined. I saw that the Gods had not kept me free from misfortune, and that my approach to worship had been absurd. I dismantled my beautiful shrine and even destroyed one of the statues in a state of bitterness and blank despair. But I did not stop believing in the Gods, nor did I hate them. Rather, I saw that on a very fundamental level *I* had got it wrong and that I needed a wiser and more realistic approach to the divine. Answers to difficult questions can never be finite – because the universe and the questions keep changing – but what I see now is that I was more of a spiritual beggar than a spiritual seeker. 

Valkyries

"Dream Idyll (A Valkyrie)" by Hughes c. 1902

In the Prose Edda Snorri Sturluson describes Valkyries as women who “serve in Valhalla. They bring drink and see to the table and the ale cups … They are sent by Odin to every battle, where they choose which men are to die and they determine who has the victory” (at 44-45). In the Völuspá Valkyries are described as coming “from widely beyond, ready to ride to the people of the Gods. Shall-be wore one shield, Brandisher another, Battle, War, Wand-maid and Spear-brandisher: now are the War-lord’s ladies, ready to ride over earth, Valkyries” (Elder Edda at 9). In the Grímnismál Odin is said to speak of the Valkyries thus:

“I want Wielder and Mist to bring me a horn; Axe-age and Brandisher, War and Strength, Clash and War-bonds, Smash and Spear-waver, Shield-truce and Counsel-truce and Power-trace: they bring the Einherjar ale [Elder Edda at 56]”.

Renowned Old Norse scholar H R Ellis Davidson describes Valkyries as:

Fate in the Germanic Tradition

Brynhild and Gudrun are bound by fate; by Rackham (1911) 

In the Hamdismál (a poem within the Codex Regius) a man who is about to die says to his brother: 

“30. ‘Great glory we have gained though we die now or tomorrow; no man survives a single dusk beyond the Norns’ decree’.”

The brothers have won “great glory” because they have, at the urging of their mother Gudrun, avenged the death of their sister by slaughtering her murderer and in the doing of it showing themselves to be fearless warriors. They do not lament their imminent death; to do so would be futile, for the date is preordained. They cannot choose the hour of their death, but they can choose the manner in which they meet it, either boldly or otherwise. It is as if they fearlessly look into the eyes of death even as they succumb to his grip. Equally pointless as resisting the hour of one’s death is attempting to embrace death before the hour decreed by fate – just as Gudrun failed in her attempt at suicide by wading into a rough sea:

Germanic Values – Advice From the Havamal

Depiction of Wotan by Breitkpod and Hartel (19th century)

In the second half of the 13th century CE an unknown Icelander copied a number of Pagan era poems into the Codex Regis (literally meaning “Royal Manuscript”), which makes up a large part of what is known as the Elder Edda or the Poetic Edda. Among them is the Havamal, which means something like “Sayings of the High One”, the High One being Odin. Theoretically Odin is the speaker throughout most of the Havamal, if not the author. From a scholarly point of view the Havamal is thought to be a composite of poems, written by up to six different authors hundreds of years earlier, before Iceland adopted Christianity as the State religion in circa 1000 CE. Whoever the author, or authors, the Havamal is an invaluable record of traditional Norse values; it is full of good advice and insight, much of which is perfectly relevant to our own times. For this reason I attempt to summarise and extract those parts of the Havamal that I find particularly inspiring. In so doing I draw from two translations: Larrington (translator), The Poetic Edda, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008, and Orchard (translator), The Elder Edda: Myths, Gods and Heroes from the Viking World, Penguin Books, 2013.

Death is coming for you no matter what you do, so live fearlessly:

“16. A senseless man thinks to live for ever if he bewares a war; but old age won’t grant him a truce, whatever spears may grant [Orchard].” 

“16. The foolish man thinks he will live forever, if he keeps away from fighting; but old age won’t grant him a truce even if the spears do [Larrington].”

Hecate in the Roman Tradition – Trivia of the Crossroads

"Hekate" by Blake (1795)

Hecate (or Trivia, to use her Latin name – as this is now also an English word with a very different association I will retain her Hellenic title) is an enigmatic Goddess of the triple crossroads, the stygian night and magic; though she walks through the dark she is not a Goddess of darkness itself, for it is her torches which lit up the way for Ceres when she searched for her abducted daughter. Hecate is associated with both Diana,* who lights up the night, and Proserpina, who gives us hope that life can emerge from death. Hecate's rites were not recorded on the official Roman calendar (Beard at 384), but her veneration was well known in Rome. Cicero tells us that altars and shrines to her were commonplace in Greece, though not apparently in Rome at this time, however, she is referred to by a number of contemporaneous Roman poets, such as Horace and Catullus, which suggests that Hecate had already been successfully synchronised into Roman polytheism by the 1st century BCE. By the 4th century CE her worship was apparently prominent enough for Roman senators to be counted among her priests. This was during the last gasp of overt Paganism in Italy, when Christianity had become the religion of emperors; Paganism was increasingly mocked as a set of superstitions befitting peasants and barbarian Germans. Perhaps in an effort to assert greater spiritual legitimacy, some affluent and well educated Pagans were embracing an increasingly more sophisticated species of polytheism, by fusing it with mystery religions and philosophies from the east (a process which had been ongoing for centuries in any case). Roman veneration of Hecate appears to have gone hand-in-hand with this, for she almost certainly featured prominently within the well known Eleusinian Mysteries – a Pagan sect that was apparently so spiritually fulfilling that initiation into its secret rites brought about the apostasy of Constantine I’s nephew Julian, who would later be known as the last Pagan emperor of Rome.

Dis Pater and Proserpina

"The Rape of Proserpina" by Ulpiano Checa (1888)

In Roman polytheism Dis Pater, Pluto and Orcus are all names for the same God of the underworld and of death. His consort Proserpina is equally a Goddess of death, but also of spring, and thus the possibility of renewed life. Any discussion of one of these deities is incomplete without the other. Both deities should be understood as being essentially the same as the Hellenic Hades and Persephone. Although they are infernal Gods they are in no way like their Christian usurper, Satan. They are not inherently evil and their raison d'etre is not to torture the damned or tempt the weak. Nor is their domain a burning hell, but rather a “gloomy palace” (Ovid) surrounded by water. Dis Pater is euphemistically called the rich one – this title meaning, literally, rich father. As the foremost God of the underworld Dis Pater is naturally associated with all the wealth that comes from it, including gold, precious gems and, most importantly, the latent fertility of the earth. This latter aspect of the God links him with the Goddess of the harvest (Ceres), and of course her daughter who emerges from beneath the earth every spring, Proserpina.