Prayer to the Manes

The Lemuria, on 9, 11 and 13 May. The head of the household rises at midnight, barefoot, and walks through the house driving out the dead. Ovid describes the rite step by step.

The verbal part is one sentence, spoken nine times: "with these beans I ransom myself and mine". It is a substitution: the beans are given instead of the living, and the dead take them in payment. Beans were connected with the dead among the Romans generally — the flamen of Jupiter was forbidden to touch them or even to say the word.

The rest of the rite is built on prohibitions and numbers. Throw over the shoulder without looking; say it nine times and nine times do not look back; at the end strike bronze of Temesa. A backward glance would undo the act, as in the story of Orpheus: what is seen ceases to be expelled.

Manes exite paterni — "go out, ancestral shades". What is driven off is not foreign ghosts but one's own forebears: the same dead who were brought gifts at their graves in February turn out in May to be unwanted guests, and are shown the door.

The card cited lines 435-437; the text has been carried to 443, where the formula of expulsion itself stands.