I am not going to let myself be drawn here into the vexed question of the relation of religion to magic--two words which, simply by virtue of their being words with constantly shifting connotation--are very apt to mislead us. But putting aside this controversy, it is helpful, I think, to suggest that _februum_ and _februare_ belong to an age when material contamination, e. g. of a corpse or of blood--in other words, of things ‘taboo’--could be got rid of by magical means, _lustrare_ and _lustratio_ to an age when the thing to be driven and kept away is spiritual mischief--the influence of spirits that may be hostile--and when the means used are sacrifices and prayer, with processional movement. To draw the line clearly, however, between a magical period and a religious period is in Roman history quite impossible, as indeed it is and must be everywhere. Magical and quasi-magical processes are taken up into the processes of a period which may be called religious, and survive in an amphibious condition for which it is difficult to find a name. The Flamen Dialis, for example, was priest of Jupiter, and as such in all his duties was an official of a highly organized religious system, yet he was afflicted with an extraordinary number of taboos--now familiar to all readers of _The Golden Bough_--which survived from a period long anterior to that of religion in the true sense of the word. The purification of new-born children on the _dies lustricus_ is an essential part of the religion of the family, and the word _lustricus_ is itself, in my view, a mark of a period of religion; but the original meaning of the ceremony is probably to be found in pre-animistic ideas. So too with the purification of the family after a funeral, where the original horror of a corpse common to all primitive peoples is still just discernible in the religious ritual of historical times.[116] And, as we shall presently see, the belief that he who has shed blood, even of an enemy, needs purification, is still to be found lurking in the form of one of those acts of _lustratio_ with which we are about to occupy ourselves.