Prayer to Silvanus

Six words over a door: "Good Fortune dwells here: let nothing evil enter."

There is no deity in the text — unless Felicitas herself is one. The ambiguity is genuine and untranslatable: felicitas means "luck, wellbeing", but Felicitas was also a real Roman goddess, with a temple and priests. The inscription can be read as "there is good fortune in this house" and as "the goddess Good Fortune lives in this house", and there is no need to choose — a Roman heard both at once.

It is constructed as a charm, not as a prayer. First a statement, then a prohibition; no one is asked for anything. The words work by themselves, by being written and standing in their place — like the sower's formula, which likewise has no addressee (pliny-sowing-001).

Nihil intret mali — let nothing of evil enter. The threshold is the object of concern: evil is conceived as coming in rather than arising within, and so the defence is posted at the door.

The word Felicitas is not on the stone. The inscription was a mosaic pavement at Iuvavum, the modern Salzburg, already destroyed by the nineteenth century. Buecheler prints it as no. 26 and states outright that the opening word was supplied by Abeken, and the colon placed by Zangemeister. That is, the whole ambiguity on which this card turns rests on an editorial conjecture — a plausible one, since at Pompeii hic habitat Felicitas is read both in a bakery and in a tavern, but a conjecture nonetheless. The square brackets in the card's text follow the edition.

Silvanus' name does not occur in the inscription at all: the deities field names him from the card's place in the collection, not from the stone.