May 12

Lemuria: Rome’s Festival of the Dead

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

Tonight, according to the old Roman calendar, the physical world finds itself in the throes of “the Lemuria”—when, sometime after midnight, the head of the household rises barefoot from their bed, washes their hands in spring water, tucks their thumb between their fingers to ward off whatever might be lurking in the dark, fills their mouth with black beans, and spits them behind —nine times—while chanting in Latin that they’re is redeeming himself with the offering.

Never look back never look back, for there are hungry, restless, potentially furious ghosts of the untimely dead—following behind…

Welcome to Ancient Rome’s version Halloween!

Origins of the First Spooky Festival

The Lemuria was, according to the Roman poet Ovid, founded in guilt. His Fasti, a poetic calendar of Roman religious observance written around 8 CE, traces the festival back to the very beginning of Rome itself, to the story that every Roman child knew and that every Roman adult carried somewhere uneasily in the civic imagination: the killing of Remus.

The version Ovid tells is kinder to Romulus than most. He implicates a foreman named Celer—appointed by Romulus to oversee the construction of Rome’s first walls—as the one who actually struck the blow. Remus had jumped over the wall in an act of mockery, dismissing his brother’s fortifications as too slight to defend anything, and Celer cut him down for it. Romulus, in Ovid’s telling, received the news with stoic public composure, suppressing his grief to model strength for his new people. But grief suppressed doesn’t disappear. It finds another form. The philosopher Porphyry, writing centuries later, was blunter about what Ovid implied: Remus had died violently, prematurely, and his death was a matter of genuine and lasting regret for his brother. A death like that—sudden, unjust, intimate—was precisely the kind that produced a lemur.

The lemures were not, in Roman theology, simply ghosts; rather, they were a specific category of the dead, defined by the circumstances of their dying and the quality of their subsequent neglect. Scholar Fanny Dolansky, writing in the Mouseion Journal of the Classical Association of Canada in 2019, defines the lemures as those who had died before their proper time—in childhood, through war or assault or disease or misadventure, or in circumstances that prevented proper burial and the performance of correct funerary rites. The Roman historian Toynbee characterizes them as ordinary di Manes—the collective spirits of the dead—rendered harmful and spiteful by a specific condition: they were kinless and neglected, without rites or memorial, unable to enter the underworld or afterlife and yet no longer belonging to the world of the living. They haunted the boundary because there was nowhere else for them to go.

These were not the honored ancestors—the lares and benevolent manes who received regular offerings and were understood as protective presences in the Roman home. The lemures were the other kind: the ones who had reasons to be angry, who had not been properly sent, who drifted back toward the houses of the living not from affection but from a kind of desperate, unsatisfied hunger. Alongside them moved an even darker category—the larvae, more malevolent still, described in ancient literature as entirely unforgiving, even demonic, sometimes thought to persecute the living and to torture bad souls in Hades. The name larva appeared rarely in Roman writing, and seems to have doubled as the word for a particularly terrifying type of theatrical mask—a detail that suggests the Romans understood, at some level, that what we call a monster and what we call a face can be the same thing, depending on the light.

The Ritual Revealed

What makes the Lemuria genuinely extraordinary, as a piece of occult history, is how specific and personal it was. This was not a public festival in the mode of the Saturnalia or the Lupercalia—no processions, no civic spectacle, no priests officiating in temples. During the Lemuralia, all temples were closed. No marriages were permitted. The whole of May was considered inauspicious for weddings specifically because of the festival’s shadow falling across the month, a superstition Ovid captures in his phrase Mense Maio malae nubunt—roughly, “they marry badly who marry in May.” Erasmus quoted the line in his Adagia sixteen centuries later; the Italian saying Maggio non ti sposare, né partire (Don’t marry or leave in May) is still current.

The Lemuria took place entirely within the private household, performed by the paterfamilias in his role not as citizen or soldier or magistrate but as priest of his own domestic sanctuary. The house in Roman religion was a sacred space, inhabited not only by the living but by invisible presences of various kinds—gods, ancestors, protective spirits—and on these three nights in May, the presences were not protective. The head of the house had to address them directly, alone, in the dark, with a protocol specific enough to suggest generations of accumulated knowledge about what the dead would and wouldn’t accept.

The details matter, and they’re worth dwelling on. Barefoot—the bare foot signifying contact with the earth, with the domain of the chthonic, and also a kind of ritual vulnerability, the removal of ordinary protective layers. The thumb tucked between the fingers of a closed fist—a gesture called the mano fico, used to ward off evil, an apotropaic gesture that Roman writers treat as both ancient and instinctive. Spring water for the hand-washings—living water, not standing water, the kind that comes from a source rather than a container. Black beans, specifically—in Roman symbolic thinking, black was the color of the underworld, and beans were associated with both life and death, the earth’s productivity and the soil’s capacity to receive the dead. Scholar Robert Schilling notes that beans constituted a “food par excellence” in archaic Roman culture, making them an irresistible offering to the lemures, who were hungry in all senses of the word.

The chant—Haec ego mitto; his redimo meque meosque fabis—repeated nine times, never looking back. The number nine carries its own weight in Roman ritual numerology, associated with the dead and the underworld in a pattern that appears across multiple Roman rites. Looking back was forbidden because to turn and see the lemures gathering your offering would be to make direct contact, to acknowledge their presence in a way that might invite something worse than the haunting you were trying to end. The beans were cast behind and upward—thrown over the shoulder or spat from the mouth in a gesture that combined offering and expulsion, giving the dead what they wanted while simultaneously refusing to face them. And then the bronze—the household waking and beating its pots in the full-throated Roman version of a noise exorcism, the clashing metal thought to disrupt and displace spectral presences, the living asserting their collective claim on the space with sound. Manes exite paterni!—Ghosts of my fathers and ancestors, be gone.

So, the Dead Want Our Beans?!

The distinction the Romans drew between types of dead is worth pausing on, because it illuminates something that the Lemuria shares with ghost lore across cultures and centuries. The honored dead—those who had received proper burial, proper rites, proper remembrance—were generally understood as benevolent or at least neutral, settled into their afterlife and available as protective presences rather than threatening ones. What made a lemur was the specific combination of violent or premature death and subsequent neglect: no rites, no memorial, no one to perform the necessary offices of grief. These were the ones who had been cut off—by circumstances, by misfortune, by the failure of the living to do what the living owe the dead.

Romulus’ brother Remus was a perfect candidate: a violent death, followed by a complicated grief ... and a brother who suppressed his tears in order to keep up appearances. Ovid’s festival origin myth isn’t just etiological decoration—it’s an argument about what kinds of failures produce what kinds of haunting. The city of Rome was founded on a fratricide, on a story of justified and unjustified violence so entangled they couldn’t be separated, on a death that required an annual ritual of appeasement across the entire life of the Republic and Empire. Every May, for centuries, Roman households spat black beans into the dark because Romulus’ brother hadn’t been properly buried, properly mourned, properly let go.

The beans themselves remain somewhat mysterious. Some believed that beans were thought to contain the souls of the dead, that their growth from underground made them natural symbols of the chthonic, that their nutritional primacy in archaic Roman diet made them the most meaningful gift a household could offer. (Pliny the Elder reported that priests of Jupiter were forbidden to eat or even touch beans, suggesting they carried a ritual charge powerful enough to require professional handling in some contexts.) But what’s clear from Ovid’s account is that the lemures were understood to desire them—to follow the sound of the spitting and gather the beans from the floor in the darkness behind the paterfamilias, invisible, present, appeased for another year by the offering and the formula together.

The magic itself was in the combination: the gift and the words and the number and the posture and the silence of looking away.

The Transition into All Saints’ Day

The Lemuria’s afterlife is one of the more quietly extraordinary transformations in the history of Western religion. As Christianity spread through the Roman world and the old festivals were variously prohibited, reinterpreted, or allowed to quietly fade, the Lemuria’s dates proved too resonant to simply abandon. Christians in fourth-century Roman Edessa were already observing a feast honoring all Christian martyrs on May 13—the final day of the Lemuralia. The timing was almost certainly not coincidental.

Then, on May 13 in either 609 or 610 CE, Pope Boniface IV re-consecrated the Pantheon—one of the great pagan temples of Rome, already ancient and mythologically charged—to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs. The feast of that re-dedication, the dedicatio Sanctae Mariae ad Martyres, was fixed at Rome from that point forward. In doing so, Boniface effectively replaced the last night of Rome’s ghost festival with a Christian commemoration of the saintly dead—transforming the night when the lemures had to be propitiated into a night when the honored dead were celebrated. The anxious private ritual became public and ecclesiastical. The black beans became candles and prayer. The bronze pots went silent.

The feast eventually migrated: Pope Gregory III, who died in 741, dedicated a chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica to all the saints on November 1, and in the ninth century Pope Gregory IV formally extended the feast of All Saints’ to that date throughout the Western Church. The November date aligned neatly with the Celtic festival of Samhain, and from that alignment—Roman feast of the dead absorbed into Celtic feast of the dead, filtered through Christian liturgy—came Halloween. The long chain runs from a barefoot Roman spitting beans in the dark of May to the carved pumpkins of October. The anxiety underneath it is the same in every version: there are the dead who are settled and the dead who are not, and the ones who are not will come back, and you had better have something ready for them when they do.

How the World Still (Unknowingly) Celebrates…

What strikes a modern reader about the Lemuria—and about the Roman system of ghost management more broadly—is how practical it was. This was not a festival of mourning or remembrance in the warm, commemorative sense that modern death-adjacent holidays tend toward. It was closer to pest control. The lemures were a problem—a specific kind of supernatural problem created by a specific kind of failure, human and circumstantial—and the Lemuria was the annual solution. Black beans were the mechanism. The formula was the activation. The noise was the expulsion. You performed these actions correctly and the house was safe for another year. You’re welcome.

There’s something almost refreshingly honest about this approach: the Romans didn’t sentimentalize their restless dead—nor did they pretend that every spirit was a beloved ancestor popping back for a visit. Some of the dead were angry, and often for good reasons. It was the job of the living was to acknowledge those reasons and offer something in exchange for peace. The black beans were a transaction, not an expression of grief. I send these; with these beans I redeem me and mine…

The date makes tonight—May 12—one of the three nights of the Lemuralia. If you’re feeling the particular weight of unquiet things, if the house seems slightly less empty than usual after dark, the Romans had a suggestion: grabs some black beans and kick off your shoes.

Just don’t look behind you.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist