Lemures
The lemures were shades or spirits of the restless or malignant dead in Roman religion, sometimes used interchangeably with the term larvae.
The term lemures was first used by the Augustan poet Horace, and was the more common literary term during the Augustan era, with larvae being used only once by Horace. However, lemures is also uncommon: Ovid being the other main figure to employ it, in his Fasti, the six-book calendar poem on Roman holidays and religious customs.
Later the two terms were used nearly or completely interchangeably, e.g. by St. Augustine in De Civitate Dei.
The word lemures can be traced to the Proto-Indo-European stem lem-, which also appears in the name of the Greek monster Lamia.
Description
Lemures may represent the wandering and vengeful spirits of those not afforded proper burial, funeral rites or affectionate cult by the living: they are thus not attested by tomb or votive inscriptions. Ovid interprets them as vagrant, unsatiated and potentially vengeful di manes or di parentes, ancestral gods or spirits of the underworld. To him, the rites of their cult suggest an incomprehensibly archaic, quasi-magical and probably very ancient rural tradition.Lemures were formless and liminal, associated with darkness and its dread. In Republican and Imperial Rome, May 9, 11, and 13 were dedicated to their placation in the household practices of Lemuralia or Lemuria. The head of household would rise at midnight and cast black beans behind him with averted gaze; the Lemures were presumed to feast on them. Black was the appropriate colour for offerings to chthonic deities. William Warde Fowler interprets the gift of beans as an offer of life, and points out that they were a ritual pollution for priests of Jupiter. The lemures themselves were both fearsome and fearful: any malevolent shades dissatisfied with the offering of the paterfamilias could be startled into flight by the loud banging of bronze pots.