Entirely in keeping with this psychological result of the calendar is the fact, to which I have already alluded, that it supplies us with hardly any evidence of the existence of magic, or of those "beastly devices of the heathen" which may roughly be included under that word; to use the language of Mr. Lang, we find none of those "distressing vestiges of savagery and barbarism which meet us in the society of ancient Greece." It is true enough that we do not know much about what was done at the various festivals of the calendar, but what we do know, with one or two exceptions, suggests an idea of worship as clean and rational as that of the Homeric poems, which stands in such striking contrast to that reflected in later Greek literature.[208] When we do read of any kind of grossness in worship or the accompanying festivities, it is almost always in the case of some rite which is _not_ among those in the Fasti. Such was the old festival of Anna Perenna in March, where the plebs in Ovid's time spent the day in revelry and drinking, and prayed for as many years of life as they could drink cups of wine. Such again was that of the October horse, when after a chariot-race in the Campus the near horse of the winning team was sacrificed, and his tail carried in hot haste to the Regia, where the blood was allowed to drip on the sacred hearth; while the head was the object of a fight between the men of the Via Sacra and those of the Subura.[209] We may perhaps include in the list the ritual of the Argei, if it was indeed, as I believe, of great antiquity;[210] on May 15, as we have seen, twenty-seven puppets of reeds or straw were thrown into the Tiber from the _pons sublicius_, possibly with the object of procuring rain for the growing crops. Let us also note that _dies religiosi_ were not marked in the Fasti, _i.e._ days on which some uncomfortable feeling prevailed, such as the three days on which the _mundus_ was open to allow the Manes to come up from their shadowy abode below the earth; with the character of such days as "uncanny" the calendar has simply nothing to do. It is a document of religious law, not of _superstitio_, a word which in Roman usage almost invariably means what is outside that religious law, outside the _ius divinum_; and it is a document of _religio_ only so far as it is meant to organise and carry out the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, the natural results of that feeling which the Romans called _religio_. It stands on exactly the same footing as the Law of the Israelites, which supplied them in full detail with the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, and rigidly excluded all foreign and barbarous rites and superstitions.