; and I am entirely at one with Wissowa, whose knowledge of
the Roman religious law is unparalleled for exactness, in believing that
a _religio_ affecting a day had nothing whatever to do with its
character as _fastus_ or _nefastus_.[77]

If all these last-mentioned _dies religiosi_ are such because ancient
popular feeling attached the _religio_ to them, we may infer, I think,
that the same was really the case also with the _dies postriduani_. The
fact that the authorities of the State had made one or two days
_religiosi_ as anniversaries of disasters, supplied a handy explanation
for a number of other _dies religiosi_ of which the true explanation had
been entirely lost; but that there was such a true explanation, resting
on very primitive beliefs, I have very little doubt. Lucky and unlucky
days are found in the unwritten calendars of primitive peoples in many
parts of the world. An old pupil, now a civil servant in the province
of Madras, has sent me an elaborate account of the notions of this kind
existing in the minds of the Tamil-speaking people of his district of
southern India. The Celtic calendar recently discovered at Coligny in
France contains a number of mysterious marks, some of which may have had
a meaning of this kind.[78] Dr. Jevons has collected some other examples
from various parts of the world, _e.g._ Mexico.[79] The old Roman
superstition about the luckiness of odd days and the unluckiness of even
ones, which appears, as we shall see, in the arrangement of the
calendar, was probably at one time a popular Italian notion, not
derived, as used to be thought, from Pythagoras and his school.

I therefore conclude that we may add times and seasons to the list of
those objects, animate and inanimate, which were affected by the
practice of taboo in primitive Rome; and I hold that the word
_religiosus_, as applied both to times and places, exactly expresses the
feeling on which that practice is based. The word _religiosus_ came to
have another meaning (though it retained the old one as well) in
historical times, and the Romans could be called _religiosissimi
mortalium_ in the sense of paying close attention to worship and all its
details. But the original meaning of _religio_ and _religiosus_ may
after all have been that nervous anxiety which is a special
characteristic of an age of taboo.[80] To discover the best methods of
soothing that anxiety, or, in other words, the methods of disinfection,
was the wor