ANTICKÁ GENEZE DNEŠNÍCH SVÁTKŮ: IMAGINES MAIORUM A KULT PŘEDKŮ VE STAROVĚKÉM ŘÍMĚ

If the museums serve, among other things, to preserve the cultural heritage of mankind, we can then see the calendar as a museum of human feasts and festivals. At least since antiquity, they have revolved around two basic principles, life (birth, regeneration, harvest, fertility…) and death. And it is the cult of worship of deceased ancestors and the associated celebrations that stand at the beginning of many celebrated festivals and tradition even today. In antiquity, the remembrance of the dead greatly varied in their forms. And one of the most visible forms was the post-mortem masks and portraits. These are today the „showcase“ of a number of world museums, showing the complexity of the funerary practices of ancient civilizations. In Rome, this phenomenon is called imagines maiorum and is an essential element in the Roman cult of ancestors.