LUSTRAZIONE. — From the Latin *lustro* “I illuminate” and hence “I purify,” it is the purification of things and persons. This may be required: either with a view to a sacred destination of the object or person (consecratory lustration), inasmuch as the world of the “sacred” and the world of the “profane” are rigorously separated, and the passage from one to the other cannot occur without suitable preparation; or to repair any kind of pollution that restores the contaminated thing or person to the normal state (expiatory lustration); or to prevent and neutralize at the root possible evil influences that may infest a person or place (preventive lustration).
Consecratory lustration renders the victim fit for sacrifice or the priest or object destined for sacred use fit for its particular office; it is performed by means of ablutions with water, suspension of purifying substances upon the sacrificial victim (barley and salt in Greece and Rome, butter in India). Expiatory lustration is performed by the suspension of the blood of a victim destined for this purpose (e.g., the pig in Greece, the ram in Babylon, the goat in Israel). Preventive lustration is performed by the circumambulation (v.) of the place or object to be preserved, by sprinkling or immersion in water, by fumigation with resinous plants, by salt which preserves and conserves, by fire which illuminates and warms and which demands ritual purity of those who tend it or of the material that feeds II. From the solemn quinquennial lustral circumambulation performed in Rome by the censor around the people assembled as an army in the Campus Martius, the word *lustro* has come to denote a period of five years.
LUSTRAZIONE — Egyptian rite of lustral ceremony with water from the Nile. Painting from Pompeii — Naples, National Museum.