Roman religion divided the dead into categories, and the categories mattered. The properly buried dead who had received correct funeral rites and were remembered with offerings by their descendants became the Manes — the divine dead, benevolent ancestral spirits integrated into the ongoing life of the family. The household guardian spirits, the Lares, watched over the home and ensured its continuity. These were the good dead, the manageable dead, the dead who stayed where they belonged.
The Lemures were something else. They were the dead who did not stay where they belonged — the unburied, the forgotten, the those who had died violently or prematurely or without anyone to perform the necessary rites. They wandered. They returned to the houses they had inhabited in life. They disturbed the living. And the Romans, who did not leave religious problems unaddressed, had a festival specifically designed to deal with them.
What Made a Lemur
The Roman understanding of what the dead required to rest peacefully was specific and practical. A corpse needed proper burial — not elaborate burial, necessarily, but deliberate burial, with the correct ritual formulae spoken over it. The deceased needed someone to perform the parentalia, the annual commemoration of the ancestral dead in February. They needed to be remembered, named, kept present in the family’s religious practice.
When any of these requirements failed, the soul’s transition into the underworld was incomplete. It remained in the liminal space between the living world and the realm of the dead, unable to proceed, unable to rest, and capable of returning to trouble the living.
The categories of the dead most likely to become Lemures were those who had died young before fulfilling their life’s expected span, those who had died violently, those who had died without family to bury them or without the money for proper burial, and those whose graves had been disturbed or forgotten. The untimely dead — the aōroi in Greek tradition — were considered particularly likely to remain restless, because death had interrupted something that was supposed to continue.
Ovid, in the Fasti, connects the Lemures to the myth of Romulus and Remus. According to one version of the founding myth, Remus’s ghost haunted the city after his murder — an early Roman had a dream in which Remus appeared to him, and from this originated the observance that would become the Lemuria. Whether or not this etiological myth is ancient, it expresses the Roman understanding of what produced a Lemur: a violent, untimely death, a murder unavenged, a burial without proper mourning.
The Lemuria
The Lemuria was observed on three nights in May: the ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth. The odd dates were not accidental — the Romans avoided even numbers in funerary contexts, considering them unlucky, and the three-day spread ensured that the ritual was performed across the full dangerous period when the dead were understood to be active.
This was a private festival, not a public one. There were no state ceremonies, no processions through the Forum, no sacrifices conducted by public priests. Each household performed its own rites for its own dead. The temples of the gods were closed during the Lemuria, because the festival was not about the gods — it was about managing a particular kind of unwanted supernatural presence, and the appropriate setting was the home, not the temple.
The ritual, as Ovid describes it in Book 5 of the Fasti, was conducted by the paterfamilias, the male head of the household, at midnight. He rose from his bed, walked barefoot — barefoot having apotropaic significance, marking a transition out of ordinary life into ritual contact with dangerous forces — and made the sign against evil by folding his thumb between his fingers. He washed his hands three times. He then walked through the house in darkness, casting black beans behind him without looking back.
As he cast the beans, he spoke nine times: Haec ego mitto; his redimo meque meosque fabis — “These I cast; with these beans I redeem myself and mine.” He did not look back because looking back would mean making eye contact with the spirits, which was dangerous. He spoke nine times because nine had ritual significance in Roman apotropaic practice. The beans were offered in place of the living — the spirits, offered food, would take the food rather than the people.
After casting the beans, he washed his hands again, took bronze — a pot, a basin, anything — and clashed it, making as much noise as possible, while speaking nine times: Manes exite paterni — “Go forth, ancestral shades.” He then looked back, and the ritual was complete. The spirits, summoned and fed and ordered to leave, were gone for another year.
The Beans
The use of black beans in this ritual is worth examining because it connects to a broader set of associations. Beans in Roman ritual thought were associated with the dead — they were the food of mourning, forbidden in certain priestly contexts precisely because of their connection to death and the underworld. The Flamen Dialis, the priest of Jupiter, was prohibited from even naming beans, let alone eating them or touching a bean plant.
The Pythagorean tradition, which had considerable influence on Roman religious thought, held that beans contained the souls of the dead — that they were somehow inhabited by or connected to the shades of the departed. Whether or not this was a mainstream Roman belief, the association between beans and the dead was deep enough to make them the appropriate offering in the Lemuria. The paterfamilias was not eating the beans or sacrificing them in the usual sense. He was giving them to the spirits as a substitute — here, take this, not us.
Larva, Lemur, and the Terminology of the Dangerous Dead
The Latin terminology for the dead was not uniform, and the relationship between the different terms reflects the Roman classificatory instinct.
Manes was the general term for the spirits of the dead, with a positive valence — the proper, honored, settled dead.
Larvae (singular larva) referred specifically to malevolent spirits, ghosts with hostile intent. The word also meant mask — the connection being between the larvae and the theatrical masks worn in funeral processions that represented the deceased’s ancestors. Apuleius in the Metamorphoses uses larva for a malevolent ghost haunting a widow.
Lemures was the broader term for the restless, unappeased dead, of which the malevolent larvae were the most dangerous subset. Apuleius distinguishes between lares, the good spirits of those who lived and died well, and larvae, the bad spirits of those who lived badly or died badly, while lemures served as the general category encompassing both.
The distinction between types of dead had practical consequences for how you dealt with them. The Manes required commemoration. The Lares required regular daily offerings at the household shrine. The Lemures required the Lemuria — annual ritual expulsion.
The Month of May
One of the ritual consequences of the Lemuria was the unsuitability of May for weddings. The Roman calendar was full of unlucky periods when certain activities were forbidden or inauspicious, and the association of May with the Lemuria made it a month to avoid for marriage. Ovid records this folk belief and traces it to the Lemuria: why marry in a month when the dead are abroad and the household is engaged in exorcism?
The Latin proverb mense Maio malae nubunt — “in the month of May, bad women marry” — preserves this association. The proverb is almost certainly ancient and reflects the genuine religious anxiety attached to May through the Lemuria. The surviving modern superstition that May is an unlucky month for weddings is a direct descendant of this Roman belief, preserved through centuries of cultural transmission without most people knowing why May was considered unlucky in the first place.
Lemures in the Roman World
The Lemures tell you something important about how Roman religion worked at the level below the great state ceremonies. The Lupercalia and the Ludi Romani and the triumph were public, political, spectacular. The Lemuria was private, nocturnal, conducted in darkness and silence by a single man walking barefoot through his own house casting beans.
Both were equally real expressions of Roman religious life. The public ceremonies maintained the relationship between Rome and its gods. The private midnight ritual maintained the relationship between the household and its dead. Both relationships required constant maintenance, correct observance, and the acknowledgment that failing to observe them had consequences.
The Lemures were what happened when the maintenance failed — when someone died without burial, without commemoration, without anyone to cast beans in May and tell them to leave. They came back not out of malice but out of the logic of an incomplete process. The ritual that expelled them was not punishment. It was completion. You fed them, you ordered them out, and the process that had been interrupted was finally, for another year, finished.