The two great February festivals[119] to which Ovid alludes are of course the Feralia and the Lupercalia, celebrated respectively on the 21st and 15th of February. The Feralia was but the climax of a series of days beginning on Feb. 13th and devoted to ceremonies of the worship of ancestors, Parentalia. It is curious that, though the Lemuria (May 9-13) were marked as Nefasti, none of the days of the Parentalia were so marked: still from the 13th to the 21st marriages were forbidden, temples closed, and magistrates appeared without their insignia; clearly there was some lingering dread of ghosts that might be about. Parentalia and Feralia alike were ceremonies wholly devoted to the placation of ghosts. In the Lupercalia, on the other hand, it is purification rather than placation that is the prominent feature in the rites. Much in the Lupercalia is obscure, and especially the origin of its name, but one ritual element is quite certain. Goats and a dog were sacrificed, two youths girt themselves in the skins of the slain goats, they held in their hands strips of the hides of the victims. They ran round a certain prescribed portion of the city, and as they ran smote the women they met with the strips of skin. These strips of skin were among the things known as _februa_, _purifiers_, and by their purifying power they became fertility charms. ‘Forget not in your speed, Antonius, To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say The barren touchèd in this holy chase Shake off their sterile curse[120].’ There has been much needless discussion as to whether in ceremonies where striking and beating occur the object is to drive out evil spirits or to stimulate the powers of fertility. Primitive man does not so narrowly scrutinize and analyse his motives. To strike with a sacred thing, whether with a strip of skin from a victim or a twig from a holy tree, was to apply what the savage of to-day would call ‘good medicine.’ Precisely how it worked, whether by expulsion or impulsion, is no business of his. When the Catholic makes the sacred sign of the Cross over his food, is he, need he be quite clear as to whether he does it to induce good or to exorcise evil? The peasant mother of to-day may beat her boy partly with a view to stirring his dormant moral impulses, but it is also, as she is careful to explain, with intent to ‘beat the mischief out of him.’ In the third Mime of Herondas[121] the mother is explicit as to the expulsive virtue of beating. Her boy is a gambler and a dunce, so she begs the schoolmaster to ‘Thrash him upon his shoulders till his spirit, Bad thing, is left just hovering on his lips.’ She is in the usual primitive dilemma: his spirit is bad but it is his life; it is kill and cure.