A solemn promise made on a religious occasion. Examples include the marriage vows, the vows made by monks and nuns (now usually of poverty, chastity, and obedience), and vows made to saints in times of crisis.
votum, vow, promise; The vow is a kind of oath, with the deity being both the witness and recipient of the promise. Also, see the Bodhisattva vows.The god is usually reckoned to be going to grant some special favor to his votary in return for the promise made or service declared.
A vow has to be distinguished, firstly, from other and lower ways of persuading or constraining supernatural powers to give what man desires and to help him in time of need;
It would be an abuse of language to apply the term vow to the uses of imitative magic, e.g. The deities, however, to whom vows are made or discharged are already personal beings, capable of entering into contracts or covenants with man, of understanding the claims which his vow establishes on their benevolence, and of valuing his gratitude; conversely, in the taking of a vow the petitioner's piety and spiritual attitude have begun to outweigh those merely ritual details of the ceremony which in magical rites are all-important.
Sometimes the old magical usage survives side by side with the more developed idea of a personal power to be approached in prayer.
Here we have a sympathetic rain charm, combined with a prayer to the rain viewed as a personal goddess and with a promise or vow to give her the animal. The point of the promise lies of course in the fact that water is in that country stored and carried in sheep-skins.1
Secondly, the vow is quite apart from established cults, and is not provided for in the religious calendar. The Roman vow (votum), as W. it was a promise made by an individual at some critical moment, not the ordered and recurring ritual of the family or the State.' The vow, however, contained so large an element of ordinary prayer that in the Greek language one and the same word (ebxi~) expressed both. The characteristic mark of the vow, as Suidas in his lexicon and the Greek Church fathers remark, was that it was a promise either of things to be offered to God in the future and at once consecrated to Him in view of their being so offered, or of austerities to be undergone.
The Bible affords many examples of vows. Jephthah 'vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou wilt indeed deliver the children of Ammon into my hand, then it shall be that whosoever cometh forth out of the doors of my house' to meet me, when I return in peace from the children. of Ammon, it shall be the Lord's, and I will offer it up for a burnt-offering.' In the sequel it is his own daughter who so meets him, and he sacrifices her after a respite of two months granted her in order to 'bewail her virginity upon the mountains.' A thing or person thus vowed to the deity became holy and sanctified to God. But to substitute an unclean for a clean beast which had been vowed, or an imperfect victim for a flawless one, was to court with certainty the divine displeasure.
It is often difficult to distinguish a vow from an oath. A vow is an oath, but an oath is only a vow if the divine being is the recipient of the promise and is not merely a witness. In the Christian Fathers we hear of vows to abstain from flesh diet and wine. They began by polling their locks at the shrine and left them as a soul-token in charge of the god, and never polled them afresh until the vow was fulfilled. So Achilles consecrated his hair to the river Spercheus and vowed not to cut it till he should return safe from Troy; and the Hebrew Nazarite, whose strength resided in his flowing locks, only cut them off and burned them on the altar when the days of his vow were ended, and he could return to ordinary life, having achieved his mission. So in Acts 18:18 Paul had shorn his head in Cenchreae, for he had a vow. In Acts 21:23 we hear of four Jews who, having a vow on them, had their heads shaved at Paul's expense. Among the ancient Chatti, as Tacitus relates (Germania, 31), young men allowed their hair and beards to grow, and vowed to court danger in that guise."
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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