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When the moon was rising—for she too had to witness this glorious deed—he came forward, dressed in his usual fashion, and with him the leaders of the Cynics; in particular, the gentleman from Patras, with a torch—no bad understudy. Proteus too was bearing a torch. Men, approaching from this side and that, kindled the fire into a very great flame, since it came from torchwood and brush. Peregrinus—and give me your close attention now!— laying aside the wallet, the cloak, and that notable Heracles-club, stood there in a shirt that was downright filthy. Then he requested incense to throw on the fire; when someone had proffered it, he threw it on, and gazing towards the south—even the south, too, had to do with the showC. R. Lanman (in Allinson, Lucian: Selected Writings, p. 200) thus explains the mystic allusion to the South: “It is to be noted that Yama—the first man who died and found out for all men the pathway ‘to a distant home, a dwellingplace secure ’—conducts souls to the ‘ Blessed Fathers’ in the south, the region of the Manes. See Atharvaveda 18, 3, 13; 4, 40, 2. So the monthly offerings (¢raddhas) to the Manes are performed in such a way that they end in the south (Manu’s Laws, 3,214). The invoking of the daipoves is in accord with Hindu thought; eg. the liturge in Hiranyakegin’s Grhya-sutra, 2, 10° (see F. Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the Kast, XXX, p. 226), after inviting the Manes, sprinkles water towards the south, saying: ‘ Divine waters, send us Agni.’ The νεκράγγελοι and νερτεροδρόμοι in 41 may be an echo of Yama’s messengers that has reached Lucian. See Atharvaveda 18, 2, 27 and H. C. Warren’s Buddhism in Translations, pp. 225-262.” —he said: “Spirits of my mother and my father, receive me with favour.”
