such expressions as _peccata luere_, _supplicium
luere_, on the same principle--in the sense of payment, just as we speak
of paying the penalty. We might thus be tempted to fancy that the
root-idea of _lustrare_ is to perform a duty and so get rid of it, as we
do in paying for anything we buy; but this would be to misapprehend the
original meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he
explained _luere_ by reference to the payments of contractors. Varro
and Servius do, however, suggest the right clue; they see that the idea
lurking in the word is that of getting rid of something, but they
understand that something in the light, not of primitive man's
intelligence, but of the duty of man in a civilised State. What exactly
it was that was to be got rid of is a more difficult question; but all
that we have so far learnt about the early religious ideas of the Romans
strongly suggests that they were in what we may call an advanced
_animistic_ stage of religious ideas, and that whatever may have been
the notion of their primitive ancestors, they themselves, in these rites
as we know them, saw the means of getting rid of and so keeping away
hostile spirits. A French sociologist, M. van Gennep, whose book _Les
Rites de passage_ I have read with great interest, has kindly written me
a long letter in which he insists that this animistic interpretation of
_lustratio_ is really superfluous, and that the idea of separation
alone, _i.e._ of separation between sacred and profane, without any
reference to spirits or _dei_, is a fully sufficient explanation. So no
doubt it may be among many savage peoples; but he would probably allow
that as a people advances from one stage of superstition to another,
while it retains in outline the scheme of its rites, it will apply new
meanings to them in keeping with the changes in its mental attitude.
This is one of the most interesting processes with which modern research
has been occupied; we are now familiar with the adoption of
pre-Christian ceremonies, with a complete change of meaning, in the
ritual of the Christian Church. These very processions of _lustratio_,
which had already been once metamorphosed in an animistic period, were
seized upon by the Roman Church with characteristic adroitness, adapted
to its ritual, and given a new meaning; and the Catholic priest still
leads his flock round the fields with the prayers of the _Litania maior_
in Rogation week, begging a blessing on the f