It would seem safer to take this as one of the many well-known _piacula_ in which the worshipper wears the skin of a very holy victim, thereby entering sacramentally into the very nature of the god to whom the victim is sacrificed[1426]. Whether or no we are to look for the origin of these practices in a totemistic age, is a question that cannot be discussed here; and there is no sign of totemism in the Lupercalia save this one[1427]. But if this be the right explanation, what, we may ask, was meant by the name Luperci? If it meant wolves, are we not rather thrown back on Mannhardt’s theory? To this it may be answered; (1) that no classical author suggests that the runners were looked upon as representing wolves; by the common people we are told that they were called _creppi_[1428], the meaning of which is quite uncertain, though it has been explained as = _capri_, and as simply arising from the fact that the runners were clad in goat-skins[1429]. There is in fact no necessary connexion at all between the skins and the name Luperci. If that name originally meant wolf-priests, its explanation is to be found rather in connexion with the wolf of Mars, and the cave of the she-wolf, than in the skins of the sacrificed goats, which were worn by only two members of the two collegia bearing the name. We must now turn our attention to the last features of the festival; the course taken by the runners round the Palatine Hill, and the whipping of women with the strips of sacred skin. The two youths, having girded on the skins (though otherwise naked) and also cut strips from them, proceeded to run a course which seems almost certainly to have followed that of the pomoerium at the foot of the Palatine. The starting-point was the Lupercal, or a point near it, and Tacitus[1430] has described the course of the pomoerium as far as the ‘sacellum Larum forumque Romanum’: in his day it was marked out by stones (‘cippi’). We are concerned with it here only so far as it affects the question whether the running was a _lustratio_ of the Palatine city. The last points mentioned by Tacitus, the ‘sacellum Larum, forumque Romanum[1431],’ show plainly that the course was round the Palatine from south-west to north-east, but they do not bring the runners back to the point from which they started, and complete the circle[1432]. Varro is, however, quite clear that the running was a _lustratio_: ‘Lupercis nudis lustratur antiquum oppidum Palatinum gregibus humanis cinctum.’ The passage is obscure, and attempts have been made to amend it; but there can be no doubt that it points to a religious ceremony[1433].