Thus it came to pass that in Sclavonic lands the cultus of St. Vitus usurped the worship of the sun-god. But to return to the dances. As we have seen, the solar dances held in honour of Swanto Wit were held an entire month. St. Vitus’ Day falls on June 15th, very near to Midsummer Day, and as these dances continued in Christian times, and St. Vitus had taken the place of the sun-god, they acquired his name; they were called the dances of St. Vitus.
In 1370 an epidemic of chorœa broke out in Germany, especially along the valley of the Rhine. Young people of both sexes were the victims; they danced, jerked, and fell into hysterical convulsions. Those who saw them were affected in like manner. The phenomenon so much resembled the annual St. Vitus’ dances that the disorder thenceforth took as its special designation, “St. Vitus’ Dance.”
Dancing in a circle was a piece of sacred ritual in honour of the revolving wheel of the sun. In the Bavarian highlands at Midsummer a fiery wheel is waved and rolled down the mountain sides. The same sort of rite was anciently observed at the same time in England. A monk of Winchelscombe, in the reign of Henry VI., gives an account of the popular festivals in his time. He speaks of three sorts of amusements that take place on the vigil of St. John the Baptist. One of these is the whirling of a cart wheel. Another writer of the following century, in his poem, “Regnum papisticum,” gives further details. He says that the country people take an old wheel, surround it with straw, so as completely to cover it, and carry it to a height. At nightfall they set it on fire and roll it down; a monstrous sight, he adds, and one would believe that the sun was rolling down out of heaven.
Exactly the same usage is, or was, common in Belgium. In a charter, by which the Abbess of Epinal ceded a wood to the magistrates of that town in 1505, she made provision that every year, as an acknowledgment, they should furnish “The Wheel of Fortune, and the straw wherewith to cover it.”
Pages might be crowded with illustrations. I must refer the curious to the treatise of M. Gaidoz. Sufficient evidence has been collected that the wheel was the sacred symbol of the sun among the Gauls, the Teutons, and the Sclaves. We can, therefore, see how that an execution on the wheel was in its original conception a sacrifice to the sun.
Long after this was forgotten the wheel remained, as has the gallows with us, as the instrument for the execution of criminals. In Germany, even in cases of decapitation, the person executed was placed on a wheel and his head on a pole, when separated from the body. The last instances of breaking on the wheel were in the first forty years of this century. The fact of the use of the wheel as a means of execution continuing so many hundreds of years after the worship of the sun-god had ceased, and of the gallows with us, for the same purpose, is a very curious and instructive illustration of the persistence of customs of which the original significance is absolutely lost.
XII.
Holes.
In the village churchyard where as a boy I often played, is a tomb, built up to the height of about five feet, with a slate slab let into the south face, on which is an inscription. In this slab is a hole, and it used to be said among the village boys that any one who looked in through this hole and knocked at the slate would see the dead man within open his eyes. Often have I and my brother peeped in and knocked, but the experiment failed, because, when the eye was applied to the hole, it excluded external light.