In Christian liturgy there is an often-used salutation, ‘The Lord be with you’, and the congregation responds, ‘And also with you.’ Of course, English Christian liturgy is by and large derived from the Catholic Latin liturgy. The salutation in Latin is ‘pax vobis’, meaning ‘peace to you’. The greeting is often called, simply, ‘The Pax’. The word ‘Pax’, recurs in the Latin interpretation of the Gospels, which became the standard version, and Latin the standard language of the Church during the fourth century. ‘Pax’, however, is not simply a word which invokes the concept of peace, it goes deeper than that. Pax was a Roman goddess, the Roman goddess of Peace. And so ‘Pax’ is a word which invokes the personification of peace and all that entails: in peacetime there is social harmony, there’s prosperity (because trade can be conducted freely), and ‘Pax’ is also closely associated with the feminine or maternal spirit, for in peacetime things can be nurtured into life - new life can come forth - and as such ‘Pax’ is also closely associated with the season of Spring.

Within the pantheon of Roman gods, there is an interrelationship between the gods, an interrelationship which invokes an unconscious association between one personified concept and another, much like archetypes have an association. One God (or goddess in this case) associated with Pax, is Concordia. Concordia is the goddess who embodies, well, ‘Concord’ - the virtue of agreement between parties, between statesmen perhaps, or between spouses. And so it was, that in times of social unrest, social disharmony, Roman senators would gather together in Temples of Concordia to reaffirm their essential like-mindedness, their essential commitment to the majority of things which they (and society at large) held together in agreement, as opposed to the few, hot-button issues of the day which caused amongst them (and society) discord. Perhaps London should consider building itself a Temple to Concordia. I think we could do with one. And then a third Roman goddess, worth bringing in and considering, is Libertas, or Liberty, who is often associated in the Roman Empire with the freeing of slaves. This was represented by her holding out a Pileus, a felt cap, which was then given to a slave as a sign that they were now free.

So, here we have three ideas: peace, agreement, and liberty, being personified as Roman goddesses. And in being personified, as I’ve shown, they take on a much richer set of suggestive associations than the mere concepts do in and of themselves. And this points more generally to the richer, more suggestive nature of older languages. It was not possible to use a word like peace, agreement, or liberty, without drawing in this rich set of associations. It was common to represent ideas as gods or goddesses, and it was also common to personify abstract entities or geographical spaces as gods or goddesses as well. And it’s these geographic or national personifications into gods or goddesses, which is the topic of my address this morning.

In the first Century BC, two legions led by Emperor Julius Caesar invaded Britain. In the following centuries they conquered the South of England, the West, and then on up into Northern England where Emperor Hadrian built his wall. They actually did go further up into Scotland as well. They attempted to build a second wall across the central belt of Scotland, roughly between Glasgow and Edinburgh, but it proved too difficult to defend and they pulled back. The Latin name for Roman Britain was Britannia, which did not refer to the whole of Great Britain, but only Roman Britain. As early as the second century, Roman Britannia came to be personified as a goddess, armed with a trident and shield, and wearing an ancient Greek helmet. Since then, the use of this personification has waxed and waned. Its use increased from the reign of Elisabeth I onwards - the goddess made an appearance on the farthing in 1672, and became increasingly important as a symbol of accord with the constitutional unification of England and Scotland in 1707.

The goddess Britannia has such a rich set of suggestive associations that are ever evolving, that it’s difficult to encapsulate her in a few words. There’s a 19th Century painting, by the Scottish artist William Dyce, that frames her persona well. The painting shows Neptune, the Roman God of the Sea, passing his crown to Britannia, the obvious inference being, now Britannia rules the waves. She stands there looking out into the sea, one hand holding up her trident, the other resting upon a lion. She is steadfast, a protector, representing naval superiority in the defence of her people, a people whom she looks over in a maternal fashion, invoking some of those other Roman virtues I previously mentioned - Pax, Concordia, Libertas - a symbol of British liberty and democracy. She became a particularly prominent figure during World Wars I & II, a propaganda tool, calling people throughout the Empire to rally forth.

The French counterpart to Britannia is the goddess Marianne. Marianne is historically much younger; she emerged as a symbol of the Republic during the French Revolution in the late 18th Century. Although unlike Britannia, she is much more singular in what she represents. She is a symbol of Liberty. So much so, that she can be directly paralleled with the Roman Libertas. If you think about the emergence of Marianne in Jungian terms, you could frame her as the spirit of Libertas being so repressed, so held down for centuries under European monarchies generally, and by King Louis XVI in particular, that all that pent-up psychical energy bubbling away under the surface within the collective unconscious of the French landscape and people, all that energy, pent up, had to be ejected. And of course, forcefully, in a bloody way, it certainly was. Paralleling this is what happened in the American colonies. Again, there Libertas exploded onto the scene with fury, in that instance manifesting as the goddess Columbia, which I’ll come onto.

These goddesses, encapsulating the essence of geographical place, seem to me, as I’ve been suggesting, a live phenomena. A tangible reality, that if taken seriously may allow us as individuals and society more broadly to not be swept up into the 24-hour news cycle, and whatever shallow drama is unfolding on the Western stage, but recognise the gradual evolving nature of things. Her betterment is not advanced with political point scoring in any given week, her betterment unfolds over eons. It unfolds with the evolution of ideas, with the gradual reorientation of priorities. It takes continuity of action and belief, it takes collective action, and sweeping shifts in sentiment. That way, as we look to her betterment, this land’s betterment, the ecological question, and the intellectual and spiritual health of a nation, we see, not in terms of our time, but in terms of hers.

Amen.