The Romans, with their singularly archaic religious consciousness, preserved this primitive faculty of personification (which is not strictly anthropomorphic) in the practice of the so-called ‘indigitamenta’ an official rite whereby new divinities were installed in times of violent public excitement, with a view to tranquilizing those outbursts of collective emotion by giving them fixed form as sacred entities. It was a brilliant psychological trick for resolving dangerous social tensions and exorcising them by projection and propitiation.