ly to be welcomed back to their place, but as
hostile spirits to be exorcised.[7] The head of the house rises from
bed at midnight, washes, and walks barefoot through the house, making
signs for the aversion of evil spirits. In his mouth he carries black
beans--always a chthonic symbol--which he spits out nine times without
looking round, saying, as he does so, 'With these I redeem me and
mine': he washes again, and clanks brass vessels together; nine times
he repeats the formula, 'depart, Manes of our fathers' (no doubt using
the dignified title Manes euphemistically), and then finally turns
round. Here we have in a quite unmistakeable manner the feeling of the
hostility of the spirits of the dead: they must be given their
appropriate food and got out of the place as quickly as possible. Some
scholars have attempted to explain the difference between these two
festivals on the assumption that the Parentalia represents the
commemoration of the duly buried dead, the Lemuria the apotropaic right
for the aversion of the unburied, and therefore hostile spirits; but
Ovid has given a far more significant hint, when he tells us that the
Lemuria was the more ancient festival of the two.

So far we have had no indication of anything approaching divinity in
connection with the dead or the underworld as distinct from the
earth-goddesses, but the evidence for it, though vague and shadowy, is
not wanting. Certain mysterious female deities, Tarpeia, Acca Larentia,
Carna, and Laverna, of whom late aetiological myth had its own
explanation, have, in all probability, been rightly interpreted by
Mommsen as divinities of the lower world: the commemorative 'sacrifice
at the tomb,' which we hear of in connection with the first two, was in
reality, we may suppose, an offering to a chthonic deity at a _mundus_.
A rather more tangible personality is Vediovis, who three times a year
has his celebration (_Agonia_ not _feriae_) in the Calendar: he, as his
name denotes, must be the 'opposite of Iove,' that is, probably, his
chthonic counterpart, a notion sufficiently borne out by his subsequent
identification with the Greek Pluto. Finally, of course, there is that
vague body, the Di Manes, 'the good gods,' the principal deities of the
world of the dead; to them invocations are addressed, and they have
their place in the formulae of the _parentalia_ and the opening of the
_mundi_.[8] In connection with them, acting as a link with the female
deities,