ent features in ritual, and see to
what conclusion they point as to the underlying belief.

One of the most remarkable facts in domestic worship is that, whereas
the moment of birth and the other great occasions of life are
surrounded with religious ceremony and belief, the moment of death
passes without any trace of religious accompaniment: it is as though
the dying man went out into another world where the ceremonials of this
life can no more avail him, nor its gods protect him. As to his state
after death, opinion varied at different times under different
influences, but the simple early notion, connected especially with the
practice of burial as opposed to cremation,[6] was that his spirit just
sank into the earth, where it rested and returned from time to time to
the upper world through certain openings in the ground (_mundi_), whose
solemn uncovering was one of the regular observances of the festal
calendar: later, no doubt, a more spiritual notion prevailed, though it
never reached definiteness or universality. One idea, however, seems
always to be prominent, that the happiness of the dead could be much
affected by the due performance of the funeral rites; hence it was the
most solemn duty of the heir to perform the _iusta_ for the dead, and
if he failed in any respect to carry them out, he could only atone for
his omission by the annual sacrifice of a sow (_porca praecidanea_) to
Ceres and Tellus--to the divinities of the earth, be it noticed, and
not to the dead themselves. The actual funeral was not a religious
ceremony; a procession was formed (originally at night) of the family
and friends, in which the body of the dead was carried--accompanied by
the busts (_imagines_) of his ancestors--to a tomb outside the town,
and was there laid in the grave. The family on their return proceeded
at once to rites of purification from the contamination which had
overtaken them owing to the presence of a dead body. Two ceremonies
were performed, one for the purification of the house by the sacrifice
of a sow (_porca praesentanea_) to Ceres accompanied by a solemn
sweeping out of refuse (_exverrae_), the other the lustration of their
own persons by fire and water. This done, they sat down with their
friends to a funeral feast (_silicernium_), which, Cicero tells us, was
regarded as an honour rather to the surviving members of the family
than to the dead, so that mourning was not worn. Two other ceremonies
within the followi