ANTERUS, Pope. - Sepulchral inscription - Rome, cemetery of St. Callistus.
(Int. Pont. Comm. d'Arc. note)
a great solemnity by the mihado, especially at the solemn moments of national life.
The a., invoked as "fathers," receive a solemn cult in ancient India, a cult that constitutes the first of the duties for the survivors, pindapitryajna, that is, "sacrifice of the cake (śraddā) to the fathers." This consists in offering three of these cakes on a layer of grass before a fire placed to the south, the region of the dead. The Fravati of the Iranians, now considered as the sanctified souls of the just, were originally the spirits of the a.
Nicola Turchi
Among the Greeks the traces of it are very scanty. They are entirely lacking in Homer, which is easily explained by the fact that the environment for which the rhapsodes sang was still too little rooted in the soil (he sang especially in maritime cities), for a cult of the a. to be able to develop there. Even later, the superimposition of the democratic State upon the primitive gentilician constitution, the development of urbanism and above all the sense, overwhelmingly alive among the Greeks, of the individual, which later led to the cult of heroes, made it very weak. We must nevertheless perhaps see a trace of it in the festival of the Apaturia (v.). Among the Romans we have faint but nonetheless undoubted traces of the cult of the a. in the religious figure of the di Manes. In a more recent age, the di Manes are conceived either as infernal divinities (in Gk. βαίμονος κατωχθόνοι) or as the soul of a particular deceased person; but the very use of the plural - a formula that in strict logic makes no sense when it designates a single individual - and the fact that the festivals sacred to the Manes are private, even though made obligatory by the laws of the State, demonstrates that the Manes are originally the a. of the individual gentes. That the familiar Lares should be identified with the spirits of the a. is probable, but not certain; more probable, instead, but not even this certain, is that the imagines maiorum, kept in the atrium of the gentilician houses, were originally an object of cult on the part of the members of the gens. For the cult of the a. among primitive peoples v. PRIMITIVI, RELIGIONE DEI.