Prayer at a child's naming

A modern LABRYS text (see greek-agathodaimon-001) for the giving of a name.

The occasion is ancient and well attested. The Amphidromia was the rite in which a newborn was carried at a run around the household hearth on the fifth or seventh day; the name was given on the tenth. Until then the child did not count as a member of the household, and the circuit of the hearth was its admission to the house.

It is curious that the prayer names no deity at all. It addresses "the immortal gods" in general and then the ancestors. This corpus contains ancient texts with no addressee too — the sower's formula (pliny-sowing-001), the inscription over a door (silvanus-002) — but there the reason is different: the words work by themselves, correctly spoken. Here the collective address is the compiler's convenience, not a property of the rite.

And the request betrays its origin: "a life in virtue, guided by reason, nature and habit". Logos, physis, ethos is a schoolroom triad, out of the philosophical pedagogy of the Stoics and Peripatetics. At the cradle, a sound education is requested.

An ancient naming prayer would have asked that the child survive.