served the state in its highest offices were preserved in the atria or halls of their descendants, inscribed, like the Chinese tablets, with titles recording their dignity and exploits. Whether the departed spirits tenanted them according to the Chinese belief is not recorded; though it probably was so, for at funerals they might be carried, like the images of the gods in Lectisternia (see Image Worship), on couches before the corpse. Oftener, however, they were mere masques worn at funerals by men who personated the ancestors and wore their robes of office. Perhaps the vulgar regarded these men as temporary reincarnations of those whom they thus represented.
The word Manes signified the friendly ancestral ghosts of a Roman household. To them, under the name of Lares, it was the solemn preoccupation of male descendants to offer food and sacrifice and to keep alight the hearth fire which cooked the offerings. Small waxen images of the Manes called Lares, clothed in dogskin, and on feast days crowned with garlands, stood round the family hearth of which they were the unseen guardians (but see Lares). To lack such care and tendance was—along with want of regular burial—the most dreadful fate that could overtake an ancient; and a Roman, like a Hindu, in case he was childless, adopted a male child whose duty it would be, as if his own son, to continue after his death the family rites or sacra. On this side the ancestor-worship of the Aryans has been productive of the most important institutions of adoption and will or testament. Sir Henry Maine (Ancient Law, ch. v.) has justly observed that “the history of political ideas begins with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions,” and that in early commonwealths “citizens considered all the groups in which they claimed membership to be founded on common lineage.” A man only shared in house, tribe and state, so far as he was descended from particular ancestors and eponymous heroes, and due cult of these illustrious dead was the condition of his enjoying any rights or inheriting any property. Yet if society was to grow, men of alien descent had to be admitted into the original brotherhood and amalgamated therewith. “Adverting to Rome singly,” adds the same author, “we perceive that the primary group, the family, was being constantly adulterated by the practice of adoption.” Thus transition was made possible from an agnatic society based on blood ties to one based on contiguity.
In the worship of the Lares the head of a Roman household commemorated and reinforced the blood tie which made one flesh of all its members living and dead. The gens in turn was regarded as an expansion of the family, as was the state of the gens; and members of these larger units by worship of common ancestors—usually mythical—kept alive the feeling that they were a single organic whole animated by a common soul and joined in consanguinity. Outcasts alone, the offspring of irregular unions, could be ignorant of the blood which ran in their veins, of the unseen ancestors to be fed and tended in family and gentile rites.[1] Such considerations help us to understand the enormous importance attached in ancient societies to the right of intermarriage, as also to grasp the origin of wills and testaments. For a will was to begin with but a mode of indicating (not necessarily in writing) on whom devolved the duty of conducting a parent’s funeral, and together with that duty the right of inheriting his property. The due performance of funeral rites re-created the blood tie and renewed the kinship of living and dead at the moment when death seemed specially to endanger it by removal of that representative of the household whose special duty it had been to keep up the family sacra. In Hindostan, as Maine remarks (op. cit. ch. vi.), we have a parallel to the Roman system; for there “the right to inherit a dead man’s property is exactly co-extensive with the duty of performing his obsequies. If the rites are not properly performed or not performed by the proper person, no relation is considered as established between the deceased and anybody surviving him; the law of succession does not apply, and nobody can inherit the property. Every great event in the life of a Hindu seems to be regarded as leading up to and bearing on these solemnities. If he marries, it is to have children who may celebrate them after his death; if he has no children, he lies under the strongest obligation to adopt them from another family, ‘with a view,’ writes the Hindu doctor, ‘to the funeral cake, the water and the solemn sacrifice’ ” “May there be born in our lineage,” so the Indian Manes are supposed to say, “a man to offer to us, on the thirteenth day of the moon, rice boiled in milk, honey and ghee.”[2]
It is then in connexion with the history of inheritance and adoption, and of the gradual evolution from societies held together only by blood-kinship to societies consolidated on other bases, especially on that of local contiguity, that ancestor-worship chiefly calls for investigation.
We must now pass on to other aspects of it less important for the student of ancient law, but interesting to the folklorist.
In ancient Rome the Di manes, or as we should say the blessed dead, who reposed in their necropolis outside the walls, were specially commemorated on the dies parentales or days of placating them (placandis Manibus). These began on the 13th of February and ended on the 22nd with the Caristia or feast of Cara Cognatio. The family have on the preceding days solemnly visited the grave, and offered to the shades gifts of water, wine, milk, honey, oil, and the blood of black victims; they have decked the tomb with flowers, have renewed the feast and farewell of the funeral, and have prayed to the ancestors to watch over their welfare. Now the survivors return home and hold a love-feast, in which all quarrels are healed, all trespasses forgiven. The Lares are brought out to preside over this solemn feast, and for the occasion are incincti or clothed in tunics girt at the loins.
It is doubtful whether we should dignify by the name of ancestor-worship the older Roman festival of the Lemuria, which was held on the 9th, 11th and 13th of May. For the lemures were, like our unlaid ghosts, unburied, mischievous or inimical spirits, and these three days were nefasti or unlucky, because their malign influence was abroad. The ghosts had to be driven out of the house, and Ovid (Fasti, v. 432) relates how the head of the family arose at midnight, and with feet unfettered by shoon or sandals, and with washen hands traversed his house beckoning against the ghosts with fingers joined to thumb. Nine times with averted glance he spat a black bean out of his mouth and cried: “With these I redeem me and mine.” The ghosts followed and picked up, or perhaps entered into the beans. Then he washed afresh, and rattled his brass vessels, and nine times over bade them begone with the polite formula, Manes exite paterni, “Go forth, O paternal manes.”
The gesture described was probably the same as that with which a Christian priest averts demonic influences from the heads of his congregation in the act of blessing them. The many hands of Zeus Sabazios turned up in ancient excavations observe a similar gesture. All over the earth we meet with such periodically recurrent ceremonies of expelling demons and ghosts, who usually are given a meal before being hunted back into their graves. But an account of such ceremonies belongs rather to demonology than to the history of the worship of Manes, which are peaceful, well-conducted and beneficent beings, endowed and, so to speak on the foundation, like the Christian souls for whose masses money has been left. Ancestor-worship has its parallels in Christian cults of the dead and of the saints; it must be remembered, however, that a saint is not as a rule an ancestor, and that his cult is not based upon family feeling and love of kinsmen, nor tends to stimulate and encourage the same. Such cults have never prevented those who participated in them from fighting one another. Ancestor-worship on this side is also in strong contrast with the teaching of the Gospel, for it is an apotheosis of family affections and supplies a real cement wherewith to bind society together; whereas the Christian Messiah taught that, “If any cometh to me, and hateth not his father
