Lustratio

One reason for a Lustratio was to rid newborn children of any harmful spirits that may have been acquired at birth.

The men sat down to compose a list of those who should be notified of the birth and the grand lustratio nine days later.

In historical times, the Compitalia included a purification (lustratio) and the sacrifice of a pig who was first paraded around the city.

But then the lustratio, or naming-day, arrived, and Sabinus' house was thronged with a merry mélange of guests.

Lustration, "cleansing", derives from Latin lustratio, a Roman purification ceremony.

Lustratio ceremonies were also used to bless crops, farm animals, new colonies, and armies before going into battle or passing into review.

Lustratio ceremonies were also used to purify cities, objects or buildings, and on some occasions to purify an area where a crime had been committed.

Fiat lustratio, omnium altarium Tuorum," Queron murmured.

One notable occasion was a Lustratio held to purify Athens by Epimenides of Crete, after the Cylonian massacre.

The Lustratio ceremony culminated with the naming of the child, the name being added to official Roman registers, and the observation of a flight of birds in order to discern the child's future.

A ram, a boar and a bull were ritually garlanded, led around the outer perimeter of the camp (a lustratio exercitus) and in through a gate, then sacrificed: Trajan's column shows three such events from his Dacian wars.

Although Latin lustratio is usually translated as "purification", lustral ceremonies should perhaps be regarded as realignments and restorations of good order: "lustration is another word for maintaining, creating or restoring boundary lines between the centric order and the ex-centric disorder".

Animal sacrifice has turned up in almost all cultures, from the Hebrews to the Greeks and Romans (particularly the purifying ceremony Lustratio), Ancient Egyptians (for example in the cult of Apis) and from the Aztecs to the Yoruba.

Instructions on the Lustratio performed for the Roman town of Iguvium illustrate that the ceremony consisted of a procession of priests and sacrificial victims around the town's citadel, stopping at the three gates to the citadel itself, where the sacrifices took place, as the gates were viewed as the weak points which required strengthening.