We have these records of fires:—
(1) In February, May, August and November of the original May year.
(2) In June and December on the longest and shortest days of the solstitial year, concerning which there could not be, and has not been, any such change of date as has occurred in relation to the May year festivals.
(3) A fire at Easter, in all probability added not long before or at the introduction of Christianity. I find no traces of a fire festival at the corresponding equinox in September.
We learn from Cormac that the fires were generally double and that cattle were driven between them.
Concerning this question of fire, both Mr. Frazer and the Rev. S. Baring-Gould[34] suggest that we are justified in considering the Christian treatment of the sacred fire as a survival of pagan times. Mr. Baring-Gould writes as follows:—“When Christianity became dominant, it was necessary to dissociate the ideas of the people from the central fire as mixed up with the old gods; at the same time the central fire was an absolute need. Accordingly the Church was converted into the sacred depository of the perpetual fire.”
He further points out that there still remain in some of our churches (in Cornwall, York, and Dorset) the contrivances—now called cresset-stones—used. They are blocks of stone with cups hollowed out. Some are placed in lamp-niches furnished with flues. On these he remarks (p. 122):—
“Now although these lamps and cressets had their religious signification, yet this religious signification was an afterthought. The origin of them lay in the necessity of there being in every place a central light, from which light could at any time be borrowed; and the reason why this central light was put in the church was to dissociate it from the heathen ideas attached formerly to it. As it was, the good people of the Middle Ages were not quite satisfied with the central church fire, and they had recourse in times of emergency to other, and as the Church deemed them unholy, fires. When a plague and murrain appeared among cattle, then they lighted need-fires from two pieces of dry wood, and drove the cattle between the flames, believing that this new flame was wholesome to the purging away of the disease. For kindling the need-fires the employment of flint and steel was forbidden. The fire was only efficacious when extracted in prehistoric fashion, out of wood. The lighting of these need-fires was forbidden by the Church in the eighth century. What shows that this need-fire was distinctly heathen is that in the Church new fire was obtained at Easter annually by striking flint and steel together. It was supposed that the old fire in a twelvemonth had got exhausted, or perhaps that all light expired with Christ, and that new fire must be obtained. Accordingly the priest solemnly struck new fire out of flint and steel. But fire from flint and steel was a novelty; and the people, Pagan at heart, had no confidence in it, and in time of adversity went back to the need-fire kindled in the time-honoured way from wood by friction, before this new-fangled way of drawing it out of stone and iron was invented.”
The same authority informs us that before Christianity was introduced into Ireland by St. Patrick there was a temple at Tara “where fire burned ever, and was on no account suffered to go out.”
Mr. Frazer,[35] quoting Cerbied, shows that in the ancient religion of Armenia the new fire was kindled at the February festival of the May year, in honour of the fire-god Mihr. “A bonfire was made in a public place, and lamps kindled at it were kept burning throughout the year in each of the fire-god’s temples.” This festival now takes place at Candlemas, February 2.