Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I.

Fire-festiva

f the European fire-fe

by the evidence which I have collected these modes of distributing the beneficial influence of the fire have been confined in the main to Central Europe. The ceremonial of the Yule log is distinguished from that of the other fire-festivals by the privacy and domesticity which characterize it; but, as we have already seen, this distinction may well be due simply to the rough weather of midwinter, which is apt not only to render a public assembly in the open air disagreeable, but also at any moment to defeat the object of the assembly by extinguishing the all-important fire under a downpour of rain or a fall of snow. Apart from these local or seasonal differences, the general resemblance between the

ey are charms to secure a supply of sunshine; according to Dr. E. Westermarck th

ne hand it has been held that they are sun-charms or magical ceremonies intended, on the principle of imitative magic, to ensure a needful supply of sunshine for men, animals, and plants by kindling fires which mimic on earth the great source of light and heat in the sky. This was the view of Wilhelm Mannhardt.798 It may be called the solar theory. On the other hand it has been maintained that the ceremonial fires have no necessary reference to the sun but are simply purificatory in intention, being designed to burn up and destroy all harmful influences, whether these are conceived in a personal form as witches, demons, and monsters, or in an impersonal form as a sort of pervading taint or corruption of the air. This is the view of Dr. Edward Westermar

ns are perhaps not

t conclude that, while the imitation of sunshine in these ceremonies was primary and original, the purification attributed to them was secondary and derivative. Such a conclusion, occupying an intermediate position between the two opposing theories and recognizing an element of truth in both of them, was adopted by me in earlier editions of this work;801 but in the meantime Dr. Westermarck has argued powerfully in favour of the purificatory theory alone, and I am bound to say that his argum

Theory of the

tivals are charms to ensu

shall find it natural that sun-charms should have played a much more prominent part among the superstitious practices of European peoples than among those of savages who live nearer the equator and who consequently are apt to get in the course of nature mor

of the festivals w

st elevation at noon. Indeed with respect to the midwinter celebration of Christmas we are not left to conjecture; we know from the express testimony of the ancients that it was instituted by the church to supersede an old heathen festival of the birth of the sun,803 which was apparently conceived to be born again on the shortest day of the year, af

rm up the fire of Sirius in m

er to increase the celestial source of heat at midwinter savages resort to a practice analogous to that of our Yule log, if the kindling of the Yule log was originally a magical rite intended to rekindle the sun. In the southern hemisphere, where the order of the seasons is the reverse of ours, the rising of Sirius or the Dog Star in July marks the season of the greatest cold instea

man says to him: 'I wish thee to burn a stick for us towards Sirius; that the sun may shining come out for us; that Sirius may not coldly come out' The other man (the one who saw Sirius) says to his son: 'Bring me the small piece of wood yonder, that I may put the end of it in the fire, that I may burn it towards grandmother; that grandmother may ascend the sky, like the other one, Canopus.' The child brings him the piece of wood, he (the father) holds the end of it in the fire. He points it burning towards Sirius; he says that Sirius shall twinkle like Canopus. He sings; he sings about Canopus, he sings about Sirius; he points to t

of the fire-festivals may be

s interpreted by some of those who have recorded it.809 Not less graphic, it may be said, is the mimicry of his apparent revolution by swinging a burning tar-barrel round a pole.810 Again, the common practice of throwing fiery discs, sometimes expressly said to be shaped like suns, into the air at the festivals may well be a piece of imitative magic. In these, as in so many cases, the magic force may be supposed to ta

ndle the fire by friction may a

cture that the wheel employed for this purpose represents the sun,814 and if the fires at the regularly recurring celebrations were formerly produced in the same way, it might be regarded as a confirmation of the view that they were originally sun-charms. In point of fact there is, as Kuhn has indicated,815 some evidence to shew that the midsummer fire was originally thus produced. We have seen that many Hungarian swineherds make fire on Midsummer Eve by rotating a wheel round a wooden axle wrapt in hemp, and that they drive their pigs through the fire thus made.816 At Obermedlingen, in Swabia, the "fire of heaven," as it was called, was made on St. Vitus's Day (the fifteenth of June) by igniting a cartwheel, which, smeared with pitch and plaited with straw, was fastened on a pole twelve feet high, the top of the pole being inserted in the nave of

on the weather and vegetation may be thought to be du

view may have been not merely that the smoke and flames prognosticated, but that they actually produced an abundant harvest, the heat of the flames acting like sunshine on the corn. Perhaps it was with this view that people in the Isle of Man lit fires to windward of their fields in order that the smoke might blow over them.824 So in South Africa, about the month of April, the Matabeles light huge fires to the windward of their gardens, "their idea being that the smoke, by passing over the crops, will assist the ripening of them."825 Among the Zulus also "medicine is burned on a fire placed to windward of the garden, the fumigation which the plants in consequence receive being held to improve the crop."826 Again, the idea of our European peasants that the corn will grow well as far as the blaze of the bonfire is visible,827 may be interpreted as a remnant of the belief in the quickening and fertilizing power of the bonfires. The same belief, it may be argued, reappears in the notion that embers taken from the bonfires and inserted in the fields will promote the growth of the crops,828 and it may be thought to underlie the customs of sowing flax-seed in the direction in which the flames blow,829 of mixing the ashes of the bonfire with the seed-corn at sowing,830 of scattering the ashes by themselves over the field to fertilize it,831 and of incorporating a piece of the Yule log in the pl

n fertilizing cattle and women may also be attributed

by leaping over the midsummer bonfire.841 It is an Irish belief that a girl who jumps thrice over the midsummer bonfire will soon marry and become the mother of many children;842 in Flanders women leap over the Midsummer fires to ensure an easy delivery;843 and in various parts of France they think that if a girl dances round nine fires she will be sure to marry within the year.844 On the other hand, in Lechrain people say that if a young man and woman, leaping over the midsummer fire together, escape unsmirched, the young woman will not become a mother within twelve months:845 the flames have not touched and fertilized her. In parts of Switzerland and France the lighting of the Yule log is accompanied by a prayer that the women may bear children, the she-goats bring forth kids, and the ewes drop lambs.846 The rule observed in some places that the bonfires should be kindled by the person who was

t the country at the festival may be explain

or the express purpose of fertilizing them,850 and for the same purpose live coals from the bonfires are sometimes placed in the fields "to prevent blight."851 On the Eve of Twelfth Day in Normandy men, women, and children run wildly through the fields and orchards with lighted torches, which they wave about the branches and dash against the trunks of the fruit-trees for the sake of burning the moss and driving away the moles and field mice. "They believe that the ceremony fulfils the double object of exorcizing the vermin whose multiplication would be a real calamity, and of imparting fecundity to the trees, the fields, and even the cattle"; and they imagine that the more the ceremony is prolonged, the greater will be the crop of fruit next autumn.852 In Bohemia they say that the corn will grow as high as they fling the blazing besoms int

atory Theory of

ivals are purificatory, being inte

st, for corn and fruits. It remains to consider what may be said against this theory and in favour of the view that in these rites fire is employed not as a creative but as a cleansin

leged by the people who light them; the great evil against which

he minds even of the rude peasantry with whom these festivals originated. On the other hand the conception of fire as an emanation of the sun, or at all events as linked to it by a bond of physical sympathy, is far less simple and obvious; and though the use of fire as a charm to produce sunshine appears to be undeniable,857 nevertheless in attempting to explain popular customs we should never have recourse to a more recondite idea when a simpler one lies to hand and is supported by the explicit testimony of the people themselves. Now in the case of the fire-festivals the destructive aspect of fire is one upon which the people dwell again and again; and it is

ed remedies the foremost is cattle-disease, and cattle-d

suggests, what on general grounds seems probable, that the custom of kindling the need-fire goes back to a time when the ancestors of the European peoples subsisted chiefly on the products of their herds, and when agriculture as yet played a subordinate part in their lives. Witches and wolves are the two great foes still dreaded by the herdsman in many parts of Europe;862 and we need not wonder that he should resort to fire as a powerful means of banning them both. Among Slavonic peoples it appears that the foes whom the need-fire is designed to combat are not so much living witches as vampyres and oth

under, lightning, and other maladies, all of which

monly kept in the houses to guard them against conflagration;867 and though this may perhaps be done on the principle of homoeopathic magic, one fire being thought to act as a preventive of another, it is also possible that the intention may be to keep witch-incendiaries at bay. Again, people leap over the bonfires as a preventive of colic,868 and look at the flames steadily in orde

burning discs and brooms thrown into the air m

the air on broomsticks or other equally convenient vehicles; and if they do so, how can you get at them so effectually as by hurling lighted missiles, whether discs, torches, or besoms, after them as they flit past overhead in the gloom? The South Slavonian peasant believes that witches ride in the dark hail-clouds; so he shoots at the clouds to bring down the hags, while he curses them, saying, "Curse, curse Herodias, thy mother is a heathen, damned of God and fettered through the Redeemer's blood." Also he brings out a pot of glowing charcoal on which he has

follow the use of fire results indirec

freeing the reproductive powers of plants and animals from the fatal obstruction of witchcraft. And what is true of the reproduction of plants and animals may hold good also of the fertility of the human sexes. We have seen that the bonfires are supposed to promote marriage and to procure off

atory or destructive intention of the f

sewhere the passage through the flames or smoke or over the glowing embers of a bonfire, which is the central feature of most of the rites, has been employed as a cure or a preventive of various ills. We have seen that the midsummer ritual of fire in Morocco is practically identical with that of our

te

ove, pp. 116 sq., 119, 14

116, 117 sq., 119, 141, 143, 161

r Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nac

The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (London, 1906-1908), i. 56; id., Ceremonies and Beliefs connecte

uche im Kreislauf des Jahres," in R. Wuttke's S?c

ost powerful of all purificatory agents"; and again, id. iii. 314: "It is quite possible that in these customs the idea of the quickening power of fire may be combined with the conception of it as a purgative agent for the expulsion or destruction of evil beings, such as witches and the vermin that destroy the fruits of the earth. Certainly the fires

e Magic Art and the Evolu

Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Se

urn) Manilius, Ast

n vastos su

at

Canis, latra

am

e suo gemina

li

e facem ter

nte"

vocamus, sole partem primam leonis ingresso. Hoc fit post solstitium XXIII. die. Sentiunt id maria et terrae, multae vero et ferae,

oyd (London, 1911), pp. 339, 341. In quoting the passage I have omitted the brackets which the editors prin

e warm, when this star appears in winter"

ck that he had held in the fire, mov

rm out of the kaross, thereby exposing

14 sqq.; William Simpson, The Buddhist Praying Wheel (London, 1896), pp. 87 sqq. It is a popular Armenian idea that "the body of the sun has the shape of the wheel of a water-mill; it revolves and moves forward. As drops of water sputter from the mill-wheel, so sunbeams shoot out from the spokes of the sun-wheel" (M. Abeghian, Der armen

: (return) A

p. 225; F. Panzer, Beitrag zur deutschen Mythologie (Munich, 1848-1855), ii. 240; Anton Birlinger, Volk

p. 521. Lindenbrog in his Glossary on the Capitularies (quoted by J. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie,4 i. 502) expressly says: "The rustics in many parts of Germany, particularly on the festival of St. John the Baptist, wrench a stake from a fence, wind a rope round it, and pull it to and f

ve, pp. 144 sq., 147 sq.,

n Mythologie, i. 117; A. Kuhn, Die Herabkunft des Feuers,2 pp. 47 sq.; W. Mannhardt, Baumkultus

Herabkunft des Feuers und des G?tt

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Beitrag zur deutschen Mythologie (

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(return) Abo

(return) Abo

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le, Three Years in Savage Afr

oter, The Kafirs of Natal and the

(return) Above

rn) Above, pp. 119,

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Above, pp. 141, 170,

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) Above, pp. 119, 165

return) Above,

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turn) Above, pp.

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rn) Above, p. 185,

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ve, pp. 107, 109, 111, 119

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nnhardt thought (Baumkultus, p. 536) that the torches in the modern European customs are imitations of lightning. At some of their ceremonies the Indians of North-West America imitate lightning by means of pitch-wood torches which ar

: (return) A

(Paris and Rouen, 1845), pp. 295 sq.; Jules Lecoeur, Esquisses du Bocage Norm

geschichte mid Volkskunde B?hmens," Mittheilungen der a

ishop, Korea and her Neighbou

(return) Abo

eturn) Above, pp

The Magic Art and the Evo

293, 295, 297. For more evidence of the use of fire to burn or expel witches on certain days of the year, see The Scapegoat pp. 158 sqq. Less often the fires are thought to

rn) Above, pp. 107,

ncolnshire, collected by Mrs. Gutch and Mabel Peacock, London, 1908, p. 76). "The county of Salop is no exception to the rule of superstition. The late vicar of a parish on the Clee Hills, startled to find that his parishioners still believed in witchcraft, once proposed to preach a sermon against it, but he was dissuaded from doing so by the parish schoolmaster, who assured him that the belief was so deeply rooted in the people's minds that he would be more likely to alienate them from the Church than to weaken their faith in witchcraft" (Miss C.F. Burne and Miss G.F. Jackson, Shropshire Folk-lore, London, 1883, p. 145). "Wherever a man or any living creature falls sick, or a misfortune of any kind happens, without any natural cause being discoverable or rather lying on the surface, there in all probability witchcraft is at work. The sudden stiffness in the small of the back, which few people can account for at the time, is therefore called a 'witch-shot' and is really ascribed

ed by witches (A. Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube,2 Berlin, 1869, p. 149 § 216). The Scotch Highlanders thought that a witch could destroy the whole of a farmer's live stock by hiding a sm

e Magic Art and the Evolu

return) Above,

rn) Above, pp. 118,

, 140 sq., 145, 146, 174, 176, 183, 184, 187, 1

and Leipsic, 1864), p. 32 § 182; A. Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube,2 (Berlin, 1869), pp. 149 sq., §216; J. Ceredig Davies, Folk-lore

p. 108, 121, 140, 146, 165, 183

return) Above,

rn) Above, pp. 162,

e, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube

n) Above, pp. 165, 1

1869), p. 351, § 395; L. Strackerjan, Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogt

a charm against witchcraft and is especially intended to protect the cattle as they are driven out and in. See L. Strackerjan, Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg

ksglaube und religi?ser Brauch der Süds

,4 ii. 897, 983; A. Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube,2 (Berlin, 1869), p. 252 § 396; K. Doutté, Magic et Religion dans l'Afrique du