Arrian (ap. Eust. 1615. 3) described a feast of the dead among the Bithynians,
who were perhaps of Thracian origin. The souls of those who had died
abroad were called three times by name and invited to come up from below to
share in the sacrificial meal.
At Rome there were two relevant festivals, the Parentalia^59 in February
and the Lemuria in May. Offerings were put out for the souls of the ancestors,
and they were supposed to come and feed while no one watched. Ovid gives
the expulsion formula for the Lemuria as Manes exite paterni.^60
No such custom, so far as I know, survived in Ireland in historical
times. But it was believed that on the night before Samain (1 November) the
fairy mounds opened and their inhabitants could be seen by mortal eyes.^61
This implies that the dead returned to the upper world once a year at that
time.
In Germany the ghosts of the departed visited homesteads at Yuletide. A
room was prepared for them and a table laid with offerings. A popular legend
related that a man rode to a hill or mound at that season and invited the spirit
who lived in it to a drinking feast.^62
The Slavonic peoples had many festivals of the dead, the main ones being
around the winter solstice and in spring. In Russia those honoured were the
rodítali, ‘the parents’, but in Belarus they were dzjady, ‘the grandfathers’. They
were invited to the feast in these words:
Ye sacred grandfathers, we call you,
ye sacred grandfathers, come to us!
Here is all that God has given...
Ye sacred grandfathers, we implore you,
come fly to us!Afterwards they were given their marching orders:
Ye sacred grandfathers! Ye have flown hither,
ye have eaten and drunk,
now fly away home again!
Tell us, do you wish anything more?(^59) Parentes, in legal language, comprised parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents
(Festus 247. 11 L.). In India it was these three generations that received offerings at the
ceremony for the dead (Manu 9. 186). The same three were also covered by the Athenian law
about providing for one’s living γονε4 (Isaeus 8. 32). Cf. Tritopatores as the name of the
ancestral spirits worshipped in Attic cult; Schrader (1909), 23.
(^60) Ov. Fast. 2. 533–616; 5. 419–92 (the expulsion formula: 443); W. Warde Fowler, The Roman
Festivals (London 1899), 106–10, 306–10.
(^61) Thurneysen (1921), 63.
(^62) de Vries (1956), i. 449.
- Mortality and Fame 395