The lemures were shades or spirits of the restless or malignant dead in Roman religion,[
]
The term lemures was first used by the Augustan poet Horace (in Epistles 2.2.209),[Horace, Epistles 2.2.209; Ovid, Fasti 2.500-539.]
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 * , which also appears in the name of the Greek monster Lamia.
Description
Lemures may represent the wandering and
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
Manes or
parentalia, 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 deity, associated with darkness and its dread. In Roman Republic and Roman Empire, May 9, 11, and 13 were dedicated to their placation in the household practices of Lemuralia or Lemuria. The head of household ( paterfamilias) 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.[W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the period of the Republic, MacMillan (New York, 1899) Mensis Maius, 106–10: ] 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.[Thaniel, G. (1973). Lemures and Larvae, The American Journal of Philology, 94.2, 182–187.][Beard, M., North, J., Price, S. (1998). Religions of Rome, Vol 1, 31, 50, Cambridge.]
In scientific Latin
The lemures inspired
Carl Linnaeus's Modern Latin backformation
lemur (denoting a type of primates). According to Linnaeus' own explanation, the name was selected because of the nocturnal activity and slow movements of the slender loris.
[A.R. Dunkel, J.S. Zijlstra, and C.P. Groves, C.P. (2011/2012). "Giant Rabbits, Marmosets, and British Comedies: Etymology of Lemur Names, part 1" Lemur News 16 (2100/12) 64–70. ISSN 1608-1439.[1]] Being familiar with the works of
Virgil and
Ovid and seeing an analogy that fit with his naming scheme, Linnaeus adapted the term
lemur for these nocturnal primates.
[W. Blunt and W.T. Stearn, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist (Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 252. 978-0-691-09636-0] However, it has been commonly and falsely assumed that Linnaeus was referring to the ghost-like appearance,
Tapetum lucidum, and ghostly cries of lemurs.
[Dunkel et al., "Giant Rabbits, Marmosets, and British Comedies," p. 65.] In
Goethe's
Faust, a chorus of Lemurs who serve
Mephistopheles dig Faustus' grave.
[Goethe, Faust 11515-11611.]
In the English Daemonologie
In the book by King James I of England,
Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogie, Divided into three Bookes, it is written:
