Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

The three great festivals of the Druids took place on Mayday Eve, on Midsummer Eve, and on All Hallow-e’en. On those days went up from cairns, foothills, and Belenian heights fires and sacrifices to the sun-god Beal: and from such fires the lord of the neighbourhood would take the entrails of the sacrificed animal, and, walking barefoot over the ashes, carry them to the Druid who presided over the ceremonies. These fires have descended to us as the famous Beltane fires, lit still, or till lately, in Ireland, Scotland, Northern England, and Cornwall, on the eve of the summer solstice and at the equinoxes, usually on hill tops, with rejoicing and merriment and leaping through the flames on the part of all ages and sexes of the population.[442] It is possible that this leaping through the flames is a relic of the time when men fell victims to them, a modification of the more barbarous custom. In the Highlands, where at the Beltane feast an oatmeal cake is toasted and portions of it drawn for blindfold by the company as they sit in a trench round a grass table, whosoever is the drawer of that portion which has been purposely toasted black is devoted to Baal to be sacrificed, and must leap perforce three times through the flames. In the same country it is, or was, customary on Yeule or Christmas Eve to burn in a cartload of lighted peat the stump of an old tree, which went by the name of Callac Nollic, or Christmas Old Wife. And in several Continental traditions we find the memory of a sacrifice still adhering to Midsummer Eve, or St. John the Baptist’s Vigil. On that day, in Livonia, one or two old boats were burned to the songs and dances of young and old; whilst at Reichenbach, in the Voightland, a May-pole, planted on the green, was, after similar festivities, thrown into the water. On the same day many watermen still refrain from committing themselves to the Elbe, the Unstrut, or the Elster, from the belief that upon that day those rivers require a sacrifice; and the Saale is avoided for the same reason on Walpurgis, or Mayday Eve, as well. From the latter cases we may infer that, where rivers flowed near, a sacrifice by water was as usual as one by fire, which possibly explains the custom so common in many places in connection with these Beltane fires of rolling something lighted down a hill, and, if possible, into a river. At Conz, on the Moselle, a burning wheel was rolled down the hill into the river, and Scotch children at the Beltane feast used to roll their bannocks three times down a hill before consuming them round a good fire of heath and brushwood. So in Swabia, wheels of lighted straw were rolled down the Frauenberg, and on Scheiblen-Sonntag the young people still go by night to a hill, and after dancing and singing round a fire, swing wooden wheels by means of a stick round and round till they are thoroughly alight, and then fling them down the hill. In North Germany, where the fires take place at Easter instead of at Midsummer, lighted tar-barrels are rolled down the Osterberge. The Church, to sanctify these fires, made the day of John the Baptist coincident with Midsummer-day, and taught that the heathen customs were symbolical of Christian doctrine. The fires themselves signified the Baptist, that burning and shining light who was to precede the true light; whilst the rolling wheels, as they represented the gradual descent of the sun in heaven after it had reached the highest point, so they illustrated the diminution of the fame of John, who was at first thought to be the real Messiah, till on his own testimony he said, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ It has even been attempted in recent times to show that the Midsummer fires, in spite of all their heathen surroundings, were really of Christian origin, and in some way connected with John the Baptist. The two chief objections to this theory are, the survival of heathen names for the fires, as for instance, among others, the name Himmelsfeuer, and not the usual Johannisfeuer, in one of the districts of Upper Swabia, and also the close analogy, both in the idea and mode of purification, which exists between the Midsummer fire for men and the Needfires for cattle.

Needfires were fires through which cattle were driven if any disease broke out amongst them. Such a fire was lit in Mull in 1767, and was not only the method lately employed in Lower Saxony, but is said to be still actually prevalent in Caithness. It would thus appear that after the sacrifice to fire had been modified into the custom of passing through or over it, the newer mode of cure gradually found its explanation in the idea, that fire was a healing or purifying agent on account of its power to drive away those evil spirits, which in savage estimation cause or constitute natural disease. The essential thing was that all fires in the neighbourhood should be first extinguished and new ones relit by means of friction for the cattle to go through. The virtue lay in the new virgin fire uncontaminated by previous use for any purpose whatsoever; and the Forlorn Fires, which are said to be still lighted in Scotland when any man thinks himself the victim of witchcraft,[443] agree closely in ceremonial with the Needfires for cattle. A notice having been given to all the householders within the two nearest streams to extinguish all lights and fires on a given morning, the sufferer and his friends on the day cause the emission of new fire by a spinning-wheel or other means of friction, and having spread it from some tow to a candle, thence to a torch, and from the torch to a peatload, send it by messengers to the expectant houses. But exactly similar purificatory effects were attributed to the Midsummer fires. As far as their light reached, crops enjoyed immunity from sorcery for a year, and the ashes collected from them were a constant insurance against calamities of all sorts. Leaping through them was held to avert malignant spirits for a year, and in many places not only did men leap, but cattle were driven, through the flames. Both America and Africa supply curious analogues to the Needfires of Scotland. In the former the Mayas at a festivity in honour of their gods of agriculture danced about the ashes of a burnt pile of wood, and passed barefooted over the coals with or without injury, believing that thus they would avert misfortune and appease the anger of the gods.[444] And among the Hottentots Kolbe attests the custom of driving sheep through a fire, and though the reason told to him for it was, the warding off the attacks of wild dogs by the smell of smoke, the other ceremonies usual on the occasion suggest the interpretation applicable to the Scotch custom.[445] Purification by passing between two fires was also a custom of the Tartars.[446]

Hence there is reason to think that the Midsummer fires were simply annual and public Needfires, resembling the yearly harvest feasts of the Creeks of North America, among whom, as among the ancients who annually imported fresh fire from Delos to Lemnos, there was an idea of a new and purified life commencing with a new and pure flame, after all fires, debased by their subservience to human needs, had been first extinguished. The Minnetarees at their feast of the new corn made a new fire by drilling the end of a stick into a piece of hard wood;[447] and the Sioux at their sacred feasts were wont to remove all fire from the lodge and rekindle a fresh fire before cooking the food, in order to have nothing unclean at the feast.[448] In India the Nagas, when they clear a fresh piece of jungle, first put out their old fires, and produce a new fire by friction, that of ordinary domestic use not being considered pure enough for the purpose.[449]

The same idea has been found among the Indian tribes of South America. There it was the duty of the high-priests ‘to guard the Eternal Fire in the Rotunda; and, in the solemn, annual festival of the Busque, when all the fires of the nation were extinguished, the high-priest alone was commissioned, in the temple, to reproduce the celestial spark and give new fire to the community.’[450] So that from this most remarkable identity of conception between our forefathers and the native tribes of America, it is evident there is nothing exclusively Indo-Germanic in the holiness ascribed to virgin-fire, and that there is no need to ascribe to Phœnician influence customs which occur where such influence is at most uncertain. The wheel ignited by friction of its axle was, it has been suggested, an emblem of the sun, and the old Aryan belief, that when the sun was hidden by clouds its light was extinguished and needed renewing, which could only take place by some god working a ‘pramantha’ in its cold wheel till it glowed again, has been referred to as the possible root of the custom. But such an origin being of difficult application outside the geographical limits of Aryanism, it is obviously better to refer the myth to the custom than the custom to the myth, and to a custom moreover which is as wide as the world.

It may here be noticed in connection with the sacrificial customs which were once a part of the heathen worship, that the idea of a sacrifice to appease an angry spirit that has caused a disease is still far from extinct. The burial of a live animal is still believed in Wärend and North Sweden to prevent the cattle-plague, and an instance of such a sacrifice to the earth spirits is said to have occurred in Jönköping so recently as 1843. In Moray not long ago, whenever a herd of cattle was seized with the murrain, one of them was buried alive, just as in the North-west Highlands and in Cornwall a black cock is buried alive on the spot where a person is first attacked by epilepsy; or as, in Algeria, one is drowned in a sacred well for a similar purpose. A case is even cited in this century of an Englishman who burned a live calf to counteract the attacks of evil spirits.[451] Near Speier in Germany, if many hens or pigs or ducks died in quick succession, one of their kind was thrown into the fire, and the Esthonians, if a fire broke out, were wont to throw in a black living fowl to appease the flames.

English country boys, when on the sight of a new moon they turn the money in their pockets to ensure a constant supply there, have no idea of the reason that once underlay the practice. But a wide comparison of customs supplies us with a key; for we find everywhere a prevalent mental association between the increase or wane of the moon and the increase or wane of things on earth. Maladies, it is thought, will wane more readily if the medicine be taken in the moon’s wane, and wood cut at that time will burn better, just as, on the other hand, crops are more likely to be plentiful if sown whilst the moon is young, and marriages more likely to be happy. In some English counties pigs must be killed at the same season, lest the pork should waste in boiling. In Germany it is the best time for the father of a family to die, for in the latter half of the month his death would portend the decrease of his whole family; it is also the best time for counting money which it is desired may increase. An invalid in face of a waning moon should pray that his pains may diminish with it. Hence, too, the French idea that hair cut in the moon’s wane will never grow again, or the similar one in Devonshire and Iceland, that the rest will fall off; and hence probably the popular English belief that the weather of the new moon foreshadows the weather for the month. But are all these fancies relics of an old moon-worship, of the existence of which we have other evidence, or simply expressions of that feeling, once so prevalent, that there existed an intimate sympathy between man and nature, and that everything which affected the former was in some way or another typified by the latter? Analogy seems to favour the latter hypothesis. For instance, all along the East coast of England it is thought that most deaths occur at the fall of the tide, a sympathy being imagined between the ebbing of the water and the ebbing of life; and it is curious that Aristotle and Pliny entertained a similar idea, the former with respect to all animals, the latter only about man; and though Pliny’s observation of the fact was instigated by the statement of his predecessor, it is likely that the latter was led to the inquiry by the notoriety of a popular belief. The Cornish idea that deaths are delayed till the ebb-tide, or the Icelandic one that more blood flows from sheep killed while the sea is running out, or that chimneys smoke more if built when the sea is running in, may be cited as similar instances. The inhabitants of Esthonia, if a wolf runs away with a lamb, think, by a kind of sympathy, to cause the wolf to drop it by themselves dropping something out of their pockets. And in parts of England to this day, the bloodstone is a remedy for a bleeding nose, and nettle-tea for a nettle-rash; just as turmeric was once accounted a cure for the jaundice on account of its yellow colour, and the lungs of a fox were held good for asthma on account of that animal’s respiratory powers.

Water-worship, whether as river, lake, or spring, seems as widely spread as that of trees or other natural objects, and the numerous traditions connected with it form yet another link between our civilised present and our barbarous past. ‘There is scarcely,’ says a writer on Lancashire Folk-Lore, ‘a stream of any magnitude in either Lancashire or Yorkshire, which does not possess a presiding spirit in some part of its course.’ A water-spirit that haunts some stepping-stones near Clitheroe is still believed once in every seven years to require a human life; nor is it long since a farmer in Anglesea had to drain a well belonging to him, on account of the damage done by persons resorting thither, under the belief that if they cursed the disease they suffered from and dropped pins about the well, they would shortly be cured. There is still a pin-well in Northumberland, and another in Westmoreland, wherein country girls in passing throw an offering of pins to the resident spirits. So in Ireland, votive rags may be seen on trees and hedges that surround sacred wells, whither people travel great distances in order to crawl an uneven number of times in the sun’s direction round the water, hoping thereby to propitiate the fairies and to avert sorceries.[452] St. Gowen’s well on the coast of Pembroke was lately or is still frequented for the cure of paralysis and other maladies, and there are few counties in England where the dedication of curative wells to Christian saints does not betray the attempt to hallow and hide a heathen practice under a Christian name. In Northampton alone we find St. Lawrence’s at Peterborough, St. John’s at Boughton, St. Rumbald’s at Brackley, St. Loy’s at Weedon-Loys, St. Dennis’ at Naseby, St. Mary’s at Hardwick, and St. Thomas’ at Northampton. So in Normandy, people still resort from all parts of the province, on the eve of the first of June, to the fountain of St. Clotilde, near Andelys, and there are other French wells of no inferior celebrity. As English peasants propitiate bad water-spirits by presents of pins, so do the Bretons by slices of bread and butter; and the Livonians, before starting on a voyage, calm the sea-mother by a libation of brandy.[453] But water, in addition to its dangerous and curative properties, is supposed to contain prophetic ones as well. The Castalian fountain in Greece was prophetic; and as the Laconians, by cakes thrown into a pool sacred to Juno, used to augur good or bad to themselves according as their cakes sank or floated, so do our Cornish countrymen by dropping pins or pebbles into wells read futurity in the signs of the bubbles.

The belief in unseen spirits, which underlies many of the foregoing superstitions, as it is one of the earliest beliefs of the human mind, so it is one of the most persistent. The worship of water, fire, and other natural objects probably arose from a dread of spirits thought to be resident within them, whom it was as well to cajole by gifts and prayers. Earth and air, like fire and water, were peopled respectively with invisible demons, which survive in still current traditions of the Gabriel Hounds, the Seven Whistlers, fairies, elves, and all their tribe. Our countrymen in Cornwall, if the breeze fail while they are winnowing, whistle to the Spriggian, or air-spirits, to bring it back; and the Esthonians on the Gulf of Finland do, or did, precisely the same. In Northamptonshire, till lately, women used to sweep the hearth before they went to bed, and leave vessels of water for the ablutions of the fairies or spirits of the earth, just as in Siberia food is placed daily in the cellar for the benefit of the Domavoi or house-spirits. In Scotland green patches may still be seen on field or moor left uncultivated as ‘the gudeman’s croft,’ by which it has been hoped to buy the goodwill of the otherwise evil-disposed Devil or earth-spirit; and it is doubtless from a similar fear of showing neglect or disrespect that Esthonian peasants dislike parting with any earth from their fields, and in drinking beer or eating bread recognise the existence and wants of the earth-spirit by letting some drops of the one and some crumbs of the other find their way to the floor.[454]

The foregoing instances of actual Folk-Lore, many of them now mere meaningless survivals, seem only intelligible on the ground that they have descended to us either from the earliest inhabitants of Western Europe, or from times when our Aryan progenitors were perhaps not unlike modern Fuejians. The existence has been proved, not only in England but throughout Europe, of phases of thought and modes of worship closely similar to those still found among actual savages. There is no nation that we know in the present or read of in the past so cultivated as not to retain many spots from the dark ages of its infancy and ignorance; but these, absurd as they may seem, hold the rank and claim the interest of prehistoric antiquities. The fact that there still survive among civilised people ideas and practices, corresponding in structure to those found in the various stages of the lower races, is of the same force to prove that we once went through those several stages, as the survival of traits in the growth of the individual, similar to those actually found in lower animals, point to our gradual ascent from a lower scale of being. The belief in, and dread of, evil spirits; the endeavour to affect them by acting on their fetishes or substitutes; the worship of natural objects, as trees, animals, water or even stones; the mistaking of mere sequence in time for causal connection and the consequent importance attached to such occurrences as have been observed to precede remarkable phenomena,—these and many other characteristics of modern savages find abundant representation in modern civilisation, and it is more likely they are there as survivals than as importations.

But it may be urged that no necessary antiquity can be asserted of traditions simply on account of the wide area they range over, and instances may be cited of Christian superstitions no less widely extended than many above mentioned. The belief, for instance, that about midnight on Christmas Eve, cattle rise on their knees to salute the Nativity, is found with slight modifications in England, Brittany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. In Cornwall a strong prejudice exists against burying on the north side of a church, and precisely the same feeling is found in Esthonia, for the reason there given that at the end of the world all churches will fall on that side. So, too, the custom of opening all doors and windows at a death, to give free outlet to the departing soul, prevails no less in the south of Spain than in England or in parts of Germany.