inaugurāre
inaugurāre
Latin
“Every presidential inauguration unknowingly reenacts an ancient Roman rite — priests watching birds to learn whether the gods approve.”
Inaugurate comes from Latin inaugurāre, meaning 'to take omens from the flight of birds,' from in- ('into, upon') and augurāre ('to act as an augur, to predict from bird signs'), from augur ('a priest who interprets bird omens'). In the Roman Republic, no significant public act — the founding of a temple, the assumption of a magistracy, the beginning of a military campaign — could proceed without first consulting the augurs. These priests observed the flight patterns, feeding behavior, and cries of birds to determine whether the gods favored the proposed action. To inaugurate was to submit human plans to divine review.
The augural college was one of the most prestigious religious institutions in Rome. Augurs did not predict the future; they determined whether the gods approved of a specific proposed action at a specific moment. The answer was binary: the auspices were either favorable (birds appeared on the right, ate eagerly, flew in auspicious patterns) or unfavorable. If the omens were bad, the action was postponed. Cicero, himself an augur, described the practice in De Divinatione with a mixture of reverence and skepticism — he acknowledged that the system was politically manipulated but defended its role in maintaining social order.
The most sacred inaugural rite was the installation of a new priest or magistrate. The augur would mark out a sacred space in the sky — the templum — using his curved staff (lituus) and observe the birds that flew through it. If the signs were favorable, the official was inaugurated — literally 'installed by augury.' When Augustus became the first Roman emperor, his very name (from augēre, 'to increase,' related to augur) carried the augural association. The first citizen of Rome was, etymologically, the most auspicious man alive.
English borrowed inaugurate in the late sixteenth century, and by the time George Washington took the first presidential oath in 1789, the word had shed its birds entirely. No augur observed the skies above Federal Hall in New York. No priest read the flight of pigeons over the East Portico of the Capitol. Yet the word persists, and with it a ghostly structure: the inauguration is still a ceremony of beginning that requires a form of public blessing — not from birds but from the crowd, the oath, the transfer of legitimacy. The gods have changed. The ritual has not.
Related Words
Today
Inauguration has become the word for any formal beginning that carries symbolic weight. The inauguration of a building, a festival, a new era — each borrows the solemnity of the Roman augural rite without any awareness of its ornithological origins. The word still implies that a beginning requires a ceremony, that starting something important cannot be done casually, that legitimacy must be publicly conferred. These are augural ideas, preserved in amber.
The deepest irony is that the augurs' role was not to predict success but to ensure that the beginning was properly sanctioned. An inauguration that went forward despite bad omens was not merely unlucky — it was impious, a violation of the contract between humans and gods. The modern inauguration preserves this anxiety in secular form: the oath of office, the peaceful transfer of power, the ritual presence of former leaders. No birds are consulted. But the ceremony still exists to answer the same question the augurs asked: is this beginning blessed?
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