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Updated: June 27, 2025
Tom said nothing, but, with the most imperturbable air in the world, walked twice around the room, and then pushing a chair up before the dressing-bureau, took therefrom a bottle of hair lustral, and, pouring the palm of his little hand full of the liquid, commenced rubbing it upon his head.
The first gave him feverish chills by waving his fan, the second burned him with the fire from his gourd, the third encircled his head with the ring, causing him violent headache, the fourth struck him with his stick, and the fifth poured out his cup of lustral water on his head. The same night a similar tragedy took place in the palace of the Empress and the two chief imperial concubines.
"Yes, those of us who believe, who still hold the immortal things sacred, have a great trust vested in us. It is for us, the few still faithful, to keep the lustral fires pure from defilement by the unbelievers. What would the great draughtsmen of old, the great true colorists among the masters, say if we should betray them to the wild, criminal vagaries of these falsest of false prophets?"
Armitage found a faint trail, and with Claiborne struck off into the forest near the main gate of his own grounds. In less than an hour they rode out upon a low-wooded ridge and drew up their panting, sweating horses two shadowy videttes against the lustral dome of stars. A keen wind whistled across the ridge and the horses pawed the unstable ground restlessly.
He was not only disgraced, but ruined; he was an exile and a pauper. What a fall! What an unmerited treatment! Very few people conceive what a dreadful punishment it was in Greece and Rome to be banished; or, as the formula went, "to be interdicted from fire and water," the sacred fire of the hearth, the lustral water which served for sacrifices.
Were man to make a practice of rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour.
To pursue: the offended deity consents to withdraw his waters on the condition of a lustral sacrifice of the fairest virgin of the land, who is to be exposed bound to a tree by the shore, whence she is carried off by the monster Agar, in whom we may no doubt see a personification of the 'eagre' or tidal wave of the Humber.
It is a breath of delicious fragrance blown back to us from the antique world; nothing is lost or faded, the bloom of that glad bright world is upon every page; the wide temples, the lustral water the youths apportioned out for divine service, and already happy with a sense of dedication, the altars gay with garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort of flowers, the colour of the open air, with the scent of the beanfields, mingling with the cloud of incense."
The thought of this indissoluble union kept alive the sense of brotherhood within me, of responsibility in life, of interest in all that happens; and whether it was the daily contraction of a pond in drought, or a battle of ants by the wayside, or the first tinge of autumn upon the woods, all was ennobled by symbolic relationships to man's experience, which in the unceasing flow of their perception were lustral to a solitary heart, without them choked and stagnant.
So, in their religious festivals, the Jewish chorus surrounded the high altar of their worship, gorgeously dressed, and with an harmonious tread; they mounted and remounted the steps; they offered sacrifices; they bore branches of trees in their hands; they scattered the lustral water; they burnt incense; they pealed the responsive anthem.
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