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Manes and Lemures

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Who are those Manes we find in the ancient Roman literature? Servius citing an unpublished excerpt writes:
“The souls of the most upright men are called “Manes”. While we are living they are our “Genii” and become “Lemures” when they leave our bodies. Afterward the spirits who with their invasions infest the houses are called “Larvae”. Instead when the “Lemures” are good and propitious they are called “Lares”.
Then Apuleius in his “De deo Socratis” defined what were the “Larvae”.
“Larvae” are called those spirits who, punished for their wretched life, are condemned to wander about aimlessly as if they had been exiled: Ghosts who can’t harm upright men but who could be very dangerous for the evil ones.”
Thus the “Larvae” didn’t rest in a tomb, but wandered around the world, frightening all mortals and infesting places and houses, and together with the “Larvae” of the wretched people there were also the ghosts of all dead men who, not having had a regular burial, were also them condemned to ramble around and to manifest themselves to the men asking them to correct the wrong that they had suffered. The places in which this “Larvae” appeared were obviously avoided by everybody, and in the case of an house it was considered infested.
The infested houses. How real were those ghosts?
We always say “ Nothing new under the sun” and this is absolutely true: Always ghosts stories were told and always there were houses that everybody avoided because they were believed to be haunted. Of course people says that those are silly women’s talks. This is not completely true: often the question has been taken in serious examination. At least it has been studied by the legislature and in the codes we find norms that rule what to do about the plaints of whom, having bought or rented an haunted house, went to court asking the breach of the contract. We find very ancient cases done lots of time ago, and that had different outcomes. In certain periods, as, for examples in the centuries between the 1400 and 1600, the judges always ruled that the tenants were right. With the arrival of 1700 and the illuminism the situation was reversed and all the reports of ghosts were considered simple hallucinations.
However in Italy the question is still discussed and updated to the progress of the researches of parapsycology. So from time to time on the articles of the legal magazines we find the rules “ on the renting of haunted houses”. We still find them in the “Rivista di Diritto Commerciale (8 (1910) 1. 218” and exactly in an article written by a well known lawyer, M. D’Amelio, “Case infestate dagli spiriti e il diritto della risoluzione del contratto di locazione”. Then in the 1949-1950, A.Corti, adjourning the problem to the most recent hypothesis on the phenomenon, discussed it again, and concluded that if the facts were not a consequence of the tenant’s mediumism, but were really due to ghosts and pre-existed to his arrival in the house, he had the right to cancel the contract and also receive a compensation for damage from the landlord who, knowing it, didn’t tell him beforehand.
As a matter of fact if the judge deemed that the tenants had been really disturbed by a paranormal phenomena the contract was cancelled and they didn’t have to pay a cent to the locator. If, on the contrary, he considered that they were wrong, the poor people were obliged to pay all the rent till due, and it was absolutely not taken in account if, put to flight by a real or imaginary ghost, they hadn’t been able to live in the house.
It is evident that the lawsuits were not as easy and plain as that. In fact it was clear that to be able to define the trouble as an infestation, the tenant had to adduce incontrovertible testimonies, and not only cite facts by him personally verified, but he had to prove that they were not explicable by natural effects, and also that other people had assisted to them or, even better, bring to the court other people who had previously lived in the house and could confirm his assertions. Then it was the judge who had to pronounce his verdict and decide if these phenomena had been some kind of hallucinations or not, and who of the two rivals was right. It seems quite evident that to be the