Among the ancient Romans, Lemures (singular lemur) is a term applied to departed spirits, especially those of ancestors who hovered about during the night. Probably the word was derived from the festival Lemuria held 9, 11 and 13 May, when at midnight the father of the family, with special ceremonies, nine times threw black beans over his head, thus banishing the spirits from the household for another year.
The Lemures inspired Linnaeus's Modern Latin backformation Lemur to characterise the "ghostly stare", nocturnal habits and unearthly calls of the infraorder. In Goethe's Faust, a chorus of Lemurs who serve Mephistopheles dig Faustus' grave.
