Lemuria: When the Dead Come Back Hungry

The Romans are not afraid of death.

But they are afraid of the dead — specifically, of the dead who did not go well. The Roman underworld is organized. The properly buried dead with the proper rites go to their proper place. The Di Manes, the collective ancestor spirits, are honored and manageable. The Lares, the friendly household dead, protect the family that tends them.

But the Lemures are something else.

They are the dead who died badly. The prematurely dead — children especially, who died before their natural time. The violently dead — the murdered, the drowned, those killed in war without burial. The improperly buried — those whose funeral rites were skipped or abbreviated, who entered the underworld incomplete, without the full honors that would have settled them. These dead do not settle. They come back.

They come back hungry, which is the oldest thing that can be said about a ghost: that whatever it wants from the living, it wants it with the intensity of hunger, and that if you do not give it something, it will take something.

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The Lemuria ritual is specific.

On each of the three odd nights — May 9, 11, and 13 — the paterfamilias, the head of the household, performs the rite alone. He rises at midnight. He washes his hands three times. He walks barefoot through the house so that the sound of his feet on the floor is muffled.

He holds black beans in his hand. He throws them over his shoulder — never turning to look — one by one, nine times, with this formula spoken nine times: With these beans I redeem myself and mine.

The ghosts, it is believed, follow behind him collecting the beans. The beans are their price: food for the hungry dead, payment for leaving the living alone.

Then he washes his hands again, clashes bronze vessels together — pots and pans struck together to make noise, the universal ritual technology for driving away spirits — and tells the ghosts to leave, nine times: Ghosts of my fathers, go out.

He turns around. The house should be empty of the dead. He returns to bed.

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The odd days are chosen deliberately.

Roman religious practice is precise about time. Even-numbered days have a different divine valence than odd-numbered days; the Lemuria is on odd days because odd numbers were considered protective in Roman ritual. The three-day spread is also deliberate: one night is not enough to ensure the hungry dead have all departed. Three separate chances, three separate rites, three mornings when the household can reassure itself that the transaction is complete.

Ovid, telling the story in the Fasti, derives the festival’s origin from Romulus’s guilt over Remus. He says Romulus instituted Remuria — the original name — to propitiate his murdered brother’s ghost. The name shifted from Remuria to Lemuria as the specific ghost of Remus became the general category of restless dead. This derivation may be invented for the occasion. It is also resonant: Rome’s first ghost is the founder’s brother, the first victim of Rome’s law, and the festival that manages the restless dead begins as the founder’s act of appeasement.

The temples close during Lemuria. Marriages are not contracted during these days. Major business is avoided. The city knows that the boundary between living and dead is porous, and it arranges its calendar accordingly.

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What separates Lemuria from simple ghost-fear is its domesticity.

There are no public ceremonies. No priests, no temples, no state sacrifice. The paterfamilias does this alone, at midnight, in his own house, throwing beans over his shoulder. It is the most private of Roman religious acts, conducted inside the family’s walls without witnesses, without officials, without the elaborate machinery of state religion.

The Roman religion that everyone sees — the great temples, the public sacrifices, the processions with the statues of the gods — is built on a foundation of private domestic religion. The hearth fire, the Lares, the Penates, the genius of the household head: these are tended inside, in the family’s space, as the condition of everything else.

Lemuria is the darkest expression of this domestic piety. The paterfamilias, barefoot at midnight, throwing black beans to the hungry dead, is performing the most essential act of Roman household religion: maintaining the boundary between the living and the dead, and negotiating the terms of that boundary, one bean at a time.