Di inferi

The most likely origin of the word Manes is from manus or manis (more often in Latin as its antonym immanis), meaning "good" or "kindly," which was a euphemistic way to speak of the inferi so as to avert their potential to harm or cause fear.

In general, animal sacrifice to gods of the upper world usually resulted in communal meals, with the cooked victim apportioned to divine and human recipients.

This prohibition is reflected also in funeral rites, where the deceased's passage into the realm of the dead is marked with a holocaust to his Manes at his tomb, while his family returns home to share a sacrificial meal at which his exclusion from the feast was ritually pronounced.

[12] The rarely raced three-horse chariot (triga, from which the trigarium, as a generic term for "field for equestrian exercise", took its name) was sacred to the di inferi.

[15] The early Christian poet Prudentius regarded the di inferi as integral to the ancestral religion of Rome, and criticized the gladiatorial games held for them as representative of the underworld gods' inhumane and horrifying nature.

[16] The following list includes deities who were thought to dwell in the underworld, or whose functions mark them as primarily or significantly chthonic or concerned with death.