I am strongly inclined to suggest that the traditional explanation of the tabooing of these thirty-six, or possibly seventy-two days was neither more nor less than an aetiological myth, like hundreds of others which were invented to account for Roman practices, religious and other; and this supposition seems to be confirmed as we go on with the list of _dies religiosi_ as given by Wissowa. The three days--Sextilis 24, October 5, November 8--on which the Manes were believed to come up from the underworld through the _mundus_ (to which I shall return later on) were _religiosi_;[72] so were those when the temple of Vesta remained open (June 7 to 15),[73] those on which the Salii performed their dances in March and October,[74] two days following the _feriae Latinae_ (a movable festival),[75] and the days of the Parentalia in February and the Lemuria in May, which were concerned with the cult and the memory of the dead.[76] Now the _religio_ or taboo on these days obviously springs either from a feeling of anxiety suggested by very primitive notions of the dead and of departed spirits; or in the case of the temple of Vesta, by some mystical purification or disinfection preparatory to the ingathering of the crops, which I noticed in my _Roman Festivals_ (p. 152 foll.); or again in the case of the Salii, by some danger to the crops from evil spirits, etc., which might be averted by their peculiar performances. In fact, all these _dies religiosi_ date as such, we may be pretty sure, from a very primitive period before the genesis of the City-state, and were not recognised--for what reason we will not at present attempt to guess--as _religiosi_ by the authorities who drew up the Calendar. Some of them appear in that calendar as _dies nefasti_, but not all; and I am entirely at one with Wissowa, whose knowledge of the Roman religious law is unparalleled for exactness, in believing that a _religio_ affecting a day had nothing whatever to do with its character as _fastus_ or _nefastus_.[77]