This curious statement is fortunately explained to us in instructive detail by Plutarch in the answer to his 5th _Roman Question_. He there says ‘Those who have had a funeral and sepulture as though they were dead are accounted by the Greeks as not pure, and they will not associate with them, nor will they permit them to approach sanctuaries. And they say that a certain Aristinus, who believed in this superstition, sent to Delphi to enquire of the god and to ask release from the disabilities this custom imposed on him, and the Pythian made answer: “Whatsoe’er is accomplished by woman that travails in childbed, That in thy turn having done, sacrifice thou to the gods.” And Aristinus being a good and wise man gave himself up, like a new-born child, to the women to wash and swaddle and suckle, and all the others who were called “later-doomed” did the like.’ ‘But,’ adds Plutarch, and doubtless most justly, ‘some say that these things were done with respect to the “later-doomed” before Aristinus did them, and the custom was an ancient one.’ Plutarch says the exclusion was from all sacred rites. In this he is probably mistaken. Anyhow in the case of the Semnae, and of all underworld divinities, the significance is clear. If a man comes back to life after burial rites, the reason to the primitive mind is that there is something wrong with him; he is rejected by the powers below and unfit to mingle with his fellows in the world above; he is highly taboo. Despised of the gods, he is naturally rejected of his fellow men. The only chance for him is to be born again. When we come to the ritual of the Semnae every detail confirms the view that they are underworld beings. From Aeschylus himself[630] we know that σφάγια, animal sacrifices consumed but not eaten, were offered to them. Athene bids the Erinyes, after they have turned Semnae, ‘pass below the earth With these your sacred sphagia.’ The underworld nature of _sphagia_—the word has no English equivalent—has been fully discussed (p. 63). In careful writers, as has been seen, it is never interchangeable with ἱερεῖα, victims sacrificed and eaten.