MANES, the inhabitants of the underworld, especially the ghosts of the dead. (Lat. "good people," an obvious euphemism.) In pure Roman cult we hear nothing of the worship of individual dead persons, and fear of ghosts does not seem to have been prev alent. But the collectivity of the inhabitants of the underworld was regarded as divine (di manes). Properly, the ancestral ghosts of a family are called di parentes or parentum, the di manes being the same as the di inferi; but this distinction tends to dis appear about the beginning of our era, hence the common formula on tombstones, dis manibus followed by a name in the genitive or dative, i.e., "to the glorified spirit of so-and-so" or "to so-and so, a glorified spirit." The formula is clumsy at best.
Of public cult of the manes we hear little. They are men tioned in a few prayers (see ANCESTOR-WORSHIP) ; such things as burial-grounds are sacred to them; certain persons guilty of very serious offences were devoted (sacri) to them (see CONSE CRATION). It was supposed, at least in later times, that they came forth when the mundus, or ritual pit dug at the foundation of a city and opened three times a year (Aug. 24, Oct. 5, Nov.
8) was uncovered. Their dwelling-place was the bowels of the earth, to which any deep chasm might lead (see Livy, vii., 6, 4).
In private cult, they, or properly the di parentes, were pro pitiated with offerings of food, wine, garlands, etc., left on potsherds in the middle of the road, during the dies parentales, Feb. 13-21. On Feb. 22 followed a family reunion, the Caristia. At the Lemuria (May g, I I, 13) each householder rose in the night, dropped beans from his mouth, saying "with these beans I ransom me and mine," and then bade the manes paterni, i.e., the di parentum, be gone (Ovid, Fasti, 531, et seq.; v. 419 et seq.). Hence, perhaps, is derived the name lemures for ghosts. The larvae were malignant phantoms, supposed to possess and madden people (Plautus, Capt., 598, Menaech., 89o) ; they had no part in cult.
See G. Wissowa, Religion u. Kultus (2nd ed.) p. 232, et seq., and in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyklopiidie, s.v. Lemuria; W. Warde Fowler, Roman Essays, p. 24 et seq.