Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!
Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!
Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!
Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!
Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!
Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!
Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!
Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!
Haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis!

*

Manes exite paterni!
Manes exite paterni!
Manes exite paterni!
Manes exite paterni!
Manes exite paterni!
Manes exite paterni!
Manes exite paterni!
Manes exite paterni!
Manes exite paterni!

 

* * * * *

 

The Lemuria appear to be an older festival to the dead than the di parentalia of February. In the surviving Roman calendars, only the 9th, 11th and 13th of May are designated Lemuria, but other features suggest that the full period of the Nones and the Ides and between constitutes a novemdiale sacrum to those who have passed before us. But only one calendar (the Fasti Venusini) marks the Nones with the F-designation for fastus. The others, including the one surviving calendar from the Republican era, suggest the Nones as nefastus (N) – the same marking for the 9th, 11th and 13th as well. In other words, this interval is not dies festi but solemn commemorations.

The only ritual we know for this time is the description of a private domestic nocturnal ceremony furnished by Ovid. The observer rises at midnight, washes his or her hands in spring water, assumes the mano fica (or thumb enclosed in fingers), rings a bronze bell and, barefoot, goes through the house casting black beans behind his or her person saying, “These I cast; with these beans I redeem me and mine.” This is done nine times in all. At the conclusion of the bean-casting, the observer once again dips hands into spring water and sounds the bell. Then one proclaims nine times, “Ghosts of my fathers, go forth!” In my own domestic observation of this ritual, we wash our hands a third time in water and clash the bronze yet again to conclude.

What is unclear for the Lemuria is exactly who the lemures are – the di parentes or manes as Ovid’s invocation suggests, that is, the ghosts of the general dead and especially one’s ancestral dead, or the larvae or umbras vagantes, unquiet and potentially malevolent ghosts as the domestic rite itself might suggest. Ovid also connects the Lemuria with Remus, the slain twin and prototype of Quirinus, the chthonian/underworld partner of the divine twins. Using the first ears of wheat of the season, the Vestal Virgins baked the sacred salt cakes (mola salsa) which were subsequently used as offerings on the Vestalia of June, the Ides of September, and the Lupercalia in February.

The novemdiale sacrum of the Lemuria culminates with the Ides of May, a Jupiterean festival reminiscent of the February dies parentalia ending with the Feralia which we also take to be sacred to Jupiter. With the month of May, however, the time was considered to be inauspicious for marriage. Ovid also mentions that the temples closed during the Lemuria.