stead of the door; for
the door must be kept barred against ghosts, and this man may be after
all a ghost, or at least he may have evil spirits or miasma about
him.[153] It was at the doorway that a curious ceremony took place (to
which I shall ask your attention again) immediately after the birth of a
child, in order to prevent Silvanus, who may stand for the dangerous
spirits of the forest, from entering in and vexing the baby.[154] Again,
a dead man, as among so many other peoples, was carried out of the
doorway with his feet foremost, so that he should not find his way back;
and the old Roman practice of burial by night probably had the same
object.[155] Exactly the same anxiety (_religio_) is seen in regard to
the gates of a city; the wall was in some sense holy (_sanctus_), but
the gates, through which was destined to pass much that might be
dangerous, could not be thus sanctified. Was there, then, no protecting
spirit of these doors and gates?

St. Augustine, writing with Varro before him, finds no less than three
spirits of the entrance to a house: Forculus, of the door itself;
Limentinus, of the threshold; and Cardea, of the hinges of the door; and
these Varro seems to have found in the books of the pontifices.[156] I
must postpone the question as to what these pontifical books really
represented; but the passage will at least serve to show us the popular
anxiety about the point of entrance to a house, and its association with
the spirit world. Of late sober research has reached the conclusion that
the original door-spirit was Janus, whom we know in Roman history as
residing in the symbolic gate of the Forum, and as the god of
beginnings, the first deity to be invoked in prayer, as Vesta was the
last.[157] But Janus is also wanted for far higher purposes by some
eminent Cambridge scholars; they have their own reasons for wanting him
as a god of the sky, as a double of Jupiter, as the mate of Diana, and a
deity of the oak.[158] So, too, he was wanted by the philosophical
speculators of the last century B.C., who tried to interpret their own
humble deities in terms of Greek philosophy and Greek polytheism. The
poets too, who, as Augustine says, found Forculus and his companions
beneath their notice, played strange tricks with this hoary old god, as
any one may read in the first book of Ovid's _Fasti_. I myself believe
that the main features of the theology (if we may use the word) of the
earliest Rome were derive