imagine waking up in the middle of the night, barefoot, filling your mouth with black beans and spitting them along the corridors of your house in the dark, trembling, not daring to look back. that is exactly what the roman head of household did at the lemuria, and he was no superstitious village figure: he might be a senator, a consul, a man who by day governed provinces.
the lemuria was celebrated on three alternate nights of may, the 9th, 11th and 13th, and was one of the gloomiest festivals on the calendar. its object was the lemures, the restless spirits of the dead: not the venerated and benevolent ancestors, but the restless dead, those who had died badly, without burial or without descendants to honour them, and who returned in may to haunt the houses of the living in search of some form of revenge. the whole month was marked by their presence: it was ill-omened to marry in may, “mense maio malae nubunt”, said the proverb.
the ritual to drive them out is described by ovid step by step, and it is unsettlingly precise. at midnight, the pater familias rose without sandals, because walking barefoot was a condition of the rite. with his fingers he made a protective sign against the spirits and rinsed his hands in spring water. then he filled his mouth with black beans and began to walk through the house throwing them over his shoulder, one by one, without turning, repeating nine times a formula: “haec ego mitto; his redimo meque meosque fabis”, “these i throw; with these beans i redeem myself and mine”.
you can rule the mediterranean with your engineering, but at night even consuls feared the dark.
the bean was not chosen at random. for the romans it was a legume loaded with funerary connotations, bound to the world of the dead to the point that the priest of jupiter was forbidden even to name it. by offering the beans, the patriarch was paying a ransom: he handed food to the spirits in exchange for them leaving the living in peace. the absolute rule, the one ovid underscores as unbreakable, was not to look back while throwing them, just as in the myth of orpheus: to turn would have ruined the spell and left the door open to the dead.
the close of the rite was pure din. after throwing the beans, the head of the household rinsed his hands again in the water and struck bronze vessels or cauldrons loudly, ordering the spirits to leave the property. the noise of metal, which appears in so many cultures as a repellent of the supernatural, drove the lemures from the house until the following year. the civilisation of law and concrete closed its day of domestic exorcism by banging on a pot.
modern historiography reads the lemuria as one of rome’s most archaic rites, a fossil of the family religion older than the city and its official gods, preserved almost intact for centuries alongside the feralia, its february counterpart dedicated to the benevolent dead. this is what is revealing: the same culture that wrote treatises of jurisprudence and laid out roads from one end of europe to the other believed that, on three nights in may, its own dead came home with bad intentions, and that the only defence was a handful of beans and a bronze pot.
