The Word History of Immolate
Hello,
I’ve made it as far as the letter i in “Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable” (a great read, but it takes time) and I was very surprised to find the origins of the word immolate had nothing to do with burning, so I thought I’d share that with you.
Let’s start with the current definition. Merriam-Webster says “The meaning of immolate is to kill or destroy especially by fire.” Cambridge says “To kill yourself or someone else, or to destroy something, usually by burning, in a formal ceremony”. Collins says “to kill or offer as a sacrifice , esp. by fire”.
Notice anything all these definitions have in common? Fire.
This, plus the modern usage of the word, had always led me to believe that to immolate meant to burn. In fact, immolation didn’t start out that way at all, although it does have a strong historic link to sacrifice.
Etymology Online gave me somewhat more information on immolation because they had the original definition from the 1540s – to sacrifice, without any mention of burning. It comes from the Latin verb immolare (to sacrifice, originally to sprinkle with sacrificial meal). It formed from im (in, on, upon) and molere (to grind).
Brewer added more context. He says it came from an Ancient Roman custom of sprinkling wine and fragments of sacred cake (mola salsa) on the head of a victim to be offered in sacrifice.
As a well known cake lover it would have been rude not to find out more about the sacred cake and I found a long explanation here. First to the name – mola salsa. Mola means mill, and by extension flour. Salsa, doesn’t mean sauce when it comes from Latin, it means salted. The cake was made by the Vestals for various festivals and ceremonies.
The cakes were used as a grain offering to the gods, sometimes replacing blood sacrifices. Ovid says the cakes were called Februa and offered at that time of year to give us the month name February. I examined the history of month names in my first book (“How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary”) and concluded February‘s origins are unclear. Some claim it for the Etruscan god of the underworld, Februus, while others support the claim of Februa, the Roman festival of purification celebrated in this month (with the sacred cakes).
Salt was used for purification and the Vestal Virgins made the cakes from spelt flour, water and salt. The water came from a sacred spring and the cakes were thin circular wafers. Anybody Catholic reading this may notice the similarity of these cakes with the wafers used for Holy Communion, another form of sacrifice. The connection to Jesus as sacrifice would have been totally clear to early Christians living under Roman rule.
The only connection to burning I could find about the mola salsa was that sometimes they would be burned as an offering. Many animal sacrifices made at the time would have been burned on altars, hence the burning of the cakes instead. This association clearly stuck (or, flippantly, the Vestal Virgins were terrible cooks and burned the wafers by accident?).
Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
