The following is Ovid’s description of the way in which the ghosts were laid at the Lemuria by the father of a family. At midnight he rises, and with bare feet[419] and washed hands, making a peculiar sign with his fingers and thumbs to keep off the ghosts, he walks through the house. He has black beans in his mouth, and these he spits out as he walks, looking the other way, and saying, ‘With these I redeem me and mine.’ Nine times he says this without looking round; then come the ghosts behind him, and gather up the beans unseen. He proceeds to wash again and to make a noise with brass vessels; and after nine times repeating the formula ‘manes[420] exite paterni,’ he at last looks round, and the ceremony is over. The only point in this quaint bit of ritual which need detain us is the use of beans. We have had bean-straw used at the Parilia, and we shall find that beans were also used at the festival of the dead in February. Assuredly it is not easy to see what could have made them into such valuable ‘medicine.’ Beans were not a newly discovered vegetable. Their exclusion from the rites of Demeter must have been of great antiquity, and the notions of the Pythagoreans about them were probably based on very ancient popular superstitions[421]. No one, as far as I know, has as yet successfully solved the problem why beans had so strange a religious character about them[422]; they probably were an ancient symbol of fertility, but it is impossible now to discover how or why the ideas grouped themselves around them, which we so constantly find both in Greece and Italy. If we ask why the ghosts picked them up, or were supposed to do so, there is some reason for believing that by eating them they might possibly hope to get a new lease of life[423]. Whatever was the real basis of the superstition, it was a widely spread one, and ramified in more than one direction; the Roman priest of Jupiter, for example, might not touch beans nor even mention them[424]. In his case the taboo was no doubt very old, but might have grown out of some such practice as that just described, all things ill-omened and mysterious being carefully kept out of his reach. The days from May 7 to 14 were occupied by the Vestal Virgins in preparing the _mola salsa_, or sacred salt-cake, for use at the Vestalia in June, on the Ides of September, and at the Lupercalia[425]. This was made from the first ears of standing corn in a primitive fashion by the three senior Vestals, and is no doubt, like most of their ritual, a relic of the domestic functions of the daughters of the family. But we must postpone further consideration of the Vestals and their duties till we come to the Vestalia in June. ID. MAI. (MAY 15). NP. FER[IAE] IOVI. MERCUR[IO] MAIAE. (VENUS[426].) MAIAE AD CIRC[UM] M[AXIMUM]. (CAER.) MERC[URIO]. (TUSC.)