Roman religious language distinguished carefully between a god as a personal, storied figure and the numen that god exercised in a given moment, so that a prayer or a legal document might invoke "the numen of Jupiter" specifically to name his active will bearing on the matter at hand rather than his broader mythic identity. This diffuseness let Roman religious sensibility extend divinity into settings a strictly anthropomorphic theology would struggle to cover: a particular grove, spring or crossroads could be treated as carrying its own numen, a presence to be respected through small ritual gestures, a libation, a moment of silence, an avoidance of certain acts, even where the place had no individual name, myth or iconography attached to it at all.
Historians of Roman religion, including Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, describe this as evidence of a religious sensibility oriented first toward recognizing and correctly responding to power wherever it was sensed to be active, with formal mythology and personified gods functioning as one elaboration of that underlying orientation rather than as its foundation. Household religion extended the same idea inward, since the numen of the paterfamilias's own genius could be invoked in a domestic oath with much the same seriousness as the numen of a great state god invoked in a public one.