Aside from Vesta, the Genius, the Lar, and the Penates, possibly the
most important element in family worship was the cult of the dead
ancestors. This cult is, of course, common to almost all religions, and
its presence in Roman religion is in so far not surprising, but the form
in which it occurs there is curious and relatively rare. Just as the
living man has a "double," the Genius, so the dead man also must have a
double, but this double is originally not the Genius, who seems to have
been thought of at first as ceasing with the individual. On the contrary
as death is the great leveller and the remover of individuality, so the
double of the dead was not thought of at first as an individual double
but merely as forming a part of an indefinite mass of spirits, the "good
gods" (_Di Manes_) as they were called because they were feared as being
anything but good. These _Di Manes_ had therefore no specific relation
to the individual, and the individual really ceased at death; the only
human relation which the _Di Manes_ seem to have preserved was a
connection with the living members of the family to which they had
originally belonged. It is therefore very misleading to assert that the
Romans had from the beginning a belief in immortality, when we
instinctively think of the immortality of the individual. The thing that
was immortal was not the individual but the family. It is thoroughly in
keeping with the practical character of the Roman mind that they did not
concern themselves with the place in which these spirits of the dead
were supposed to reside, but merely with the door through which they
could and did return to earth. We have no accounts of the Lower World
until Greece lent her mythology to Rome, and imagination never built
anything like the Greek palace of Pluto. But while they did not waste
energy in furnishing the Lower World with the fittings of fancy, they
did keep a careful guard over the door of egress. This door they called
the _mundus_, and represented it crudely by a trench or shallow pit, at
the bottom of which there lay a stone. On certain days of the year this