Coulanges[81] implies that in addition to clan-religion there was domestic worship. Now this domestic worship was shared by a husband and wife who normally belonged to two different clans, and are we to assume that if a husband slew his wife or a wife her husband, the domestic religion would have compelled them to go into exile even when the clan could atone by wergeld? This point we cannot decide with any certainty. Clytaemnestra, in later legend, offers sacrifice at the tomb of her murdered husband: her children assert, not that it is sacrilegious, but only that it is unavailing as a placation. We think that the tribal penal code did not demand the exile penalty for homicide of this kind and would have permitted wergeld. But within the genuine kindred, and especially within the small kindred, bloodshed, particularly parricide, was from the earliest times a serious religious offence. There remain for discussion two problems which most writers regard as intimately related—namely, the origin and evolution of the Erinnyes, and the source and significance of the ritual of homicide-purgation. THE ERINNYES AND PURGATION The Greek word ἐριννύς is probably an adjective meaning ‘angry,’ and should therefore be applicable to any spirit, whether ghost or god. But Miss Harrison[82] believes that the word was originally an epithet of a ghost or _ker_. The following is a summary of her opinions: The _Keres_ (κῆρες), she thinks, were primarily ghosts: they were neutral potencies who might be either quite harmless[83] or baleful bacilli, or good spirits.[84] The _word_ Erinnys was originally probably an epithet of _ker_, and denoted a ghost-pest, a Poine. The Erinnys primarily is the _ker_ of a human being unrighteously slain. It is the _ker_ as Poine.[85] Thus, because it was a _ker_, the Erinnys was primarily a human ghost, but the word came, by a process of specialisation, to be applied only to such ghosts as are angry because they have been murdered.[86] In Homer, she thinks, the Erinnyes have passed beyond this stage and are ‘personified (? deified) almost beyond recognition.’ They are no longer souls, but the avengers of souls. They have even lost their exclusive connexion with souls, and are become the avengers of the moral law, vague equivalents of underworld Zeus and Persephone.[87] Now Miss Harrison implicitly connects the Erinnyes with purgation, since she asserts that ‘purification (_i.e._ purgation) is the placation of ghosts.’[88] But in Homeric times the ghosts of murdered men would not, she holds, accept any purgation sacrifice save the blood of the murderer.[89] Therefore, in a certain sense homicide could be purged, and in another sense it could not be purged in Homeric times!