+143+. Examples of human apotropaic vehicles occur in the ancient civilized world. In the Athenian Thargelia the Pharmakos was supposed to bear in his person crimes and evils, and was driven forth from the city.[288] The same conception is found, perhaps, in the Roman Mamuralia and Lupercalia. In the first of these Mamertius is driven forth from the city and consigned to the keeping of hostile persons;[289] in the second, young men ran about the streets beating the women with strips of goatskin, the skin being that of a sacred animal--a proceeding that was regarded as purificatory, and seems to be naturally explicable as an expulsion of evil spirits or injurious mana.[290] +144+. In another direction expulsion of evil, or protection against it, is effected by the blood of a sacrificed (and therefore sacred) animal. A well-known example of this sort of ceremony is the Hebrew _pesah_ (the old lamb ceremony, later combined with the agricultural festival of unleavened bread, at the time of the first harvest, the two together then constituting the passover); here the doorposts and lintel of every house were sprinkled with the blood of a slain lamb by the master of the house,[291] and the hostile spirits hovering in the air were thus prevented from entering. The sacred blood seems to have been conceived of as carrying with it the power of the family god (who was also the clan god), which overbore that of the demons (in the earliest period, however, the efficacy was doubtless held to reside simply in the blood itself). The ceremony belonged to each family, but it belonged also to the clan since it was performed by every family, and ultimately it became a national usage. +145+. Apotropaic ceremonies appear to have been performed originally at various times during the year as occasions arose; the increasing pressure of occupations,[292] the necessity of consulting people's convenience, and the demand for order and precision led here (as in other cases) to the massing of the observances. When so massed they begin to lose their original significance, to yield to the knowledge of natural law, to be reinterpreted from time to time, and finally to become mere social events or to be dropped altogether. Apotropaism has hardly survived at all in the higher religions.[293] In popular customs it appears in the reliance placed on horseshoes and other objects as means of keeping witches and similar demonic things out of houses.[294] CEREMONIES OF PUBERTY AND INITIATION