With these examples before us we may surmise that the woollen
effigies, which at the festival of the Compitalia might be seen
hanging at the doors of all the houses in ancient Rome, were not
substitutes for human victims who had formerly been sacrificed at
this season, but rather vicarious offerings presented to the Mother
or Grandmother of Ghosts, in the hope that on her rounds through the
city she would accept or mistake the effigies for the inmates of the
house and so spare the living for another year. It is possible that
the puppets made of rushes, which in the month of May the pontiffs
and Vestal Virgins annually threw into the Tiber from the old
Sublician bridge at Rome, had originally the same significance; that
is, they may have been designed to purge the city from demoniac
influence by diverting the attention of the demons from human beings
to the puppets and then toppling the whole uncanny crew, neck and
crop, into the river, which would soon sweep them far out to sea. In
precisely the same way the natives of Old Calabar used periodically
to rid their town of the devils which infested it by luring the
unwary demons into a number of lamentable scarecrows, which they
afterwards flung into the river.
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