Mannhardt’s Deficiency
In all this ingenious reasoning, Mannhardt misses a point. What the Hirpi did was not merely to leap through light embers, as in the Roman Palilia, and the parallel doings in Scotland, England, France, and elsewhere, at Midsummer (St. John’s Eve). The Hirpi would not be freed from military service and all other State imposts for merely doing what any set of peasants do yearly for nothing. Nor would Varro have found it necessary to explain so easy and common a feat by the use of a drug with which the feet were smeared. Mannhardt, as Mr. Max Müller says, ventured himself little ‘among red skins and black skins.’ He read Dr. Tylor, and appreciated the method of illustrating ancient rites and beliefs from the living ways of living savages. [{151c}] But, in practice, he mainly confined himself to illustrating ancient rites and beliefs by survival in modern rural folk-lore. I therefore supplement Mannhardt’s evidence from European folk-lore by evidence from savage life, and by a folk-lore case which Mannhardt did not know.