we have the strange goddess Genita Mana, the 'spirit of birth
and death.'

Controversy is acute as to the interpretation of these facts,
especially in regard to the question whether or no the spirits of the
dead were actually worshipped. I would hazard the following
reconstruction of history as consistent with what we otherwise know of
Roman religion, and with the evidence before us. From the earliest
times the Roman looked upon his dead relations as in some sense living,
lying beneath the earth, but capable alike of returning to the world
above and of influencing in some vague way the fortunes of the living,
especially in relation to the crops which sprung from the ground in
which they lay. At first, when his religion was one of fear, he
regarded the dead as normally hostile, and their presence as something
to be averted; this is the stage which gave birth to the Lemuria. As
civilisation increased, and the sense of the unity of household and
community developed, fear, proving ungrounded, gave place to a kindlier
feeling of the continued existence of the dead as members of household
and state, and even in some sense as an additional bond between the
living: this is the period which produced the _sacra privata_ and the
Parentalia. When the _numen_-feeling began to pass into that of _deus_,
in the first place a connection was felt between the spirits of the
dead and the deities of the earth associated with the growth of the
crops, in the second the notion that the underworld must have its gods
as well as the world above, produced the shadowy female deities and
Vediovis. Lastly, the same kind of feeling which added Parentalia to
Lemuria developed the vague general notion of the Di Manes, not the
deified spirits of the dead, but peaceful and on the whole kindly
divinities holding sway in the world of dead spirits, yet accessible to
the prayers of the living. The dead, then, were not themselves
worshipped, but they needed commemoration and kindly gifts, and they
had in their lower world deities to whom prayer might be made and
worship given.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] It is right to state that there is a totally different theory,
according to which the Lares were the spirits of the dead ancestors and
the Lar Familiaris an embodiment, as it were, of all the family dead.

[6] It is significant that even when the dead were cremated, one bone
was carefully preserved in order to be symbolically buried.

[7] We may note that, though