I am new to all. I have blocked religion since 2005. Small town, bible belt..

Fast forward to now. I was a single mother 2012-2017 until I reconnected with a man who was a single dad and needed us as we needed them.. since then I have had many spiritual moments with nature. I bottle fed an orphaned doe in 2019 until she found her place. I lived about 3 miles over and always wondered if my girl was okay. May 2021 she appeared in the woods in front of my house. I called her name (Polly) and she came to me. She had one pink toenail and it was still there. It was a bad time in my life and I feel she came to check on me and has come to show me her babies over the years.. anyways.. I found this pendant in a post for a local antique store and had to have it. After obtaining it, i did my Google searches and really am intrigued at the tethers and if anyone wants to share more or what they think? What should I study or learn? It feels like a sign.

While it may seem strange to us today, especially those of us in the Pagan community, who grow up thinking of May as a spring-summer time of growth and fertility and life, the Romans did not see things that way. A preoccupation with death, the spirits of the dead, and the more insidious aspects thereof, predominated in the month.

Today marks the end of the Lemuralia (or Lemuria), a Roman festival of the dead held on three non-consecutive days on the 9th, 11th, and 13th of May. It was an ancestral feast held more in the privacy of the home than in the public square, to appease the vengeful or angry spirits of one's dead ancestors and family.

At midnight on the 9th, the head of the household would go through the house barefoot and toss beans behind him, saying, "With these cast, I redeem me and mine". The others in the house would clash bronze pots together, saying "spirits of my ancestors, begone!" This was done to exorcise malevolent or angry ancestral spirits, or other ghosts of the home. A class of the dead termed lemurae and or larvae became a part of folklore, restless or angry spirits. Sometimes a bowl could be left out for this on these three nights, filled with flour, salt, olive oil, or perhaps a coin, something to appease them. Unlike other dead, this was not done to cultivate their presence but to bribe them, after a fashion. To give them what they needed so that they would go on their way. The Vestal priestesses would, it is said, conduct similar rites in their temple to propitiate the founders of the city itself.

A myth developed, which Ovid relates, that the festival originated from Romulus conducting rites to appease the vengeful spirit of his brother Remus. Ovid was of the opinion that the Lemuralia was originally the Remuralia, though this almost certainly a flight of fancy on Ovid's part.

This exorcism of the dead left a dark mark across the whole month, and the Romans considered May to be an unlucky and gloomy month for certain kinds of endeavors to be started. In particular, marriages were seen as ill-omened if they began after May 9th.

The Lemuralia, for such an intimately domestic Roman festival, has a long legacy and cultural reach. The Christians appropriated certain Roman customs as they became, bit by bit, integrated into mainstream Roman society and the dominant religion in the Roman Empire as the 4th century rolled on. Among this was an observation of a day of the dead in early-to-mid May; Saint Ephrem is attested as having celebrated a festival to the dead Saints on 13 May among his Syrian congregants in the mid-300s.

In 609, the Pantheon temple in Rome was rededicated as a church to St Mary and All the Martyrs, in which Pope Boniface IV placed relics of the martyrs on 13 May, the final day of the ancient Lemuria, following in established tradition of attending to the souls of the dead. From this, we have the foundations of All Saint's Day, and the accompanying Allhallowtide.

In the 730s, Pope Gregory moved the feast day to early November. In that time, a plague or fever was coursing its way through Rome, and the summer months were usually the worst. To avert a major public health crisis, the festival was moved to a later, cooler month in anticipation of the large numbers of pilgrims. In the British Isles this change coincided with existing local festivals, resulting in a unique form of the Allhallowtide festivity and All Hallow's Eve in particular. From that we get Halloween as we know of it.

Image is an image from a Pompeii mosaic, speculatively named "the Skull and the Level". It is a kind of memento mori, a reminder of mortality and death.