Nope, not the small furry things (although I do love a small furry lemur – the smallest one is called Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur, which is a freaking awesome name. Sorry, I digress). I’m talking about lemures, which are spirits of the restless dead (nasty ones), in Roman mythology. So they’re angry ghosts, basically, often of people who didn’t get a proper burial or funeral rites. On 3, 11 and 13 May, the head of a Roman household would get up in the middle of the night and throw black beans over his (presumably) shoulder. This was apparently enough to placate the lemures for another year. Which doesn’t make them seem very frightening. Apparently you could also scare them off by banging a couple of brass pans together. Not exactly ‘The Exorcist’ is it?
Lemures were also called larvae, but again this isn’t anything to do with the animal (or rather insect) kingdom. It’s from the Latin ‘larva’ for ‘mask’ – presumably because they had scary-ass faces.
When I was young I had a book called ‘The Changeover’ by Margaret Mahy (I still have it actually – I re-read it every now and again when I’m feeling nostalgic). The villain in this is a lemur (again, not furry), who slowly sucks the life out of the heroine’s younger brother after stamping his image on the little boy’s hand. If you have a young person in your life I thoroughly recommend giving them a copy. (Netflix have also just released a film version of it which I was very excited about – obviously it’s nowhere near as good as the book, but worth a watch.)
Oh, and the furry lemurs are named after these bad boys, but not because they’re scary soul-sucking phantoms – apparently it’s only because they tend to be nocturnal. Which seems a bit mean.
