• For hundreds of years, every October 5, August 25, and November 8, a truly creepy event took place on Palatine Hill in the ancient city of Rome. At this sacred spot, there was an opening, a pit that descended into the earth like a crude root cellar. They called it Mundus Cereris—the pit of Ceres (goddess of harvest). On this gloomy trio of days, the stone that hid the opening was slid aside.

• With that ceremonious and deliberate act,  Rome’s priests and Vestal Virgins opened the gates of the underworld to the ghostly realm.  Like smoke, the spirits of the dead, now freed, could rise  upward and began to rub ethereal elbows with flesh-and-blood Romans, most of whom were petrified with fear.
• Why did they do this?
• It was but one of various spirit-placating, ghost-busting activities that long-ago Romans (and others in the neighborhood, including the ancient Greeks) performed, believing “better safe than sorry” when it came to malign phantoms and restless dear departeds.
• That is our simplistic modern view of things.
• In times more ancient than Roman, people had honored each year’s harvest and protected the most precious part of it—the seeds for the following year—with ceremonies hiding the communal treasure beneath the earth. As time went on, Rome lost much of its agriculture-based religion, and along with it, the meaning of the old traditions.

• At the same time, Rome gradually crushed or drove out the Etruscans who’d first lived on this terrain. Without realizing it, the conquerers soaked up certain Etruscan ways and customs, such as the shedding of blood at funeral games (which led to Roman gladiators and slaughter spectacles). They also absorbed Etruscan beliefs in a hellish underworld, ruled by harsh gods.

• Today’s historians and archaeologists are still unspooling the threads of this cross-mingling. The stone covering the mundus, for example, was originally a “rain stone,” a holy object carried about the city in drought times by priests. By the Imperial centuries, that notion was likewise forgotten.
• On the three days of mundus patet, no business could be carried out. No marriages performed, no battles fought. It’s likely that priests carried out solemn sacrifices of various animals to the gods below. Underworld deities had exacting requirements: animal victims had to be consumed by flames. No tasty bits saved out for the priests, no free barbecue for the masses. Believe it or not, such sacrifices were called “holocausts,” back then meaning completely burnt. Coincidence? An eerie foretelling of history? Who can say.

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