Section 2. The Burning of Men and Animals in the Fires.
IN THE POPULAR customs connected with the fire-festivals of Europe
there are certain features which appear to point to a former practice of
human sacrifice. We have seen reasons for believing that in Europe living
persons have often acted as representatives of the tree-spirit and
corn-spirit and have suffered death as such. There is no reason,
therefore, why they should not have been burned, if any special
advantages were likely to be attained by putting them to death in that way.
The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the
calculations of primitive man. Now, in the fire-festivals which we are
discussing, the pretence of burning people is sometimes carried so far that
it seems reasonable to regard it as a mitigated survival of an older custom
of actually burning them. Thus in Aachen, as we saw, the man clad in
peas-straw acts so cleverly that the children really believe he is being
burned. At Jumièges in Normandy the man clad all in green, who bore the
title of the Green Wolf, was pursued by his comrades, and when they
caught him they feigned to fling him upon the midsummer bonfire. Similarly
at the Beltane fires in Scotland the pretended victim was seized, and a
show made of throwing him into the flames, and for some time afterwards
people affected to speak of him as dead. Again, in the Hallowe'en bonfires
of Northeastern Scotland we may perhaps detect a similar pretence in the
custom observed by a lad of lying down as close to the fire as possible
and allowing the other lads to leap over him. The titular king at Aix, who
reigned for a year and danced the first dance round the midsummer
bonfire, may perhaps in days of old have discharged the less agreeable
duty of serving as fuel for that fire which in later times he only kindled. In
the following customs Mannhardt is probably right in recognising traces of
an old custom of burning a leaf-clad representative of the spirit of
vegetation. At Wolfeck, in Austria, on Midsummer Day, a boy completely
clad in green fir branches goes from house to house, accompanied by a
noisy crew, collecting wood for the bonfire. As he gets the wood he sings:
"Forest trees I want,
No sour milk for me,
But beer and wine,
So can the wood-man be jolly and gay." 1
In some parts of Bavaria, also, the boys who go from house to house
collecting fuel for the midsummer bonfire envelop one of their number from
head to foot in green branches of firs, and lead him by a rope through the
whole village. At Moosheim, in Wurtemberg, the festival of St. John's Fire
usually lasted for fourteen days, ending on the second Sunday after
Midsummer Day. On this last day the bonfire was left in charge of the
children, while the older people retired to a wood. Here they encased a
young fellow in leaves and twigs, who, thus disguised, went to the fire,
scattered it, and trod it out. All the people present fled at the sight of
him. 2
But it seems possible to go farther than this. Of human sacrifices offered
on these occasions the most unequivocal traces, as we have seen, are
those which, about a hundred years ago, still lingered at the Beltane fires
in the Highlands of Scotland, that is, among a Celtic people who, situated
in a remote corner of Europe and almost completely isolated from foreign
influence, had till then conserved their old heathenism better perhaps than
any other people in the West of Europe. It is significant, therefore, that
human sacrifices by fire are known, on unquestionable evidence, to have
been systematically practised by the Celts. The earliest description of
these sacrifices has been bequeathed to us by Julius Caesar. As
conqueror of the hitherto independent Celts of Gaul, Caesar had ample
opportunity of observing the national Celtic religion and manners, while
these were still fresh and crisp from the native mint and had not yet been
fused in the melting-pot of Roman civilisation. With his own notes Caesar
appears to have incorporated the observations of a Greek explorer, by
name Posidonius, who travelled in Gaul about fifty years before Caesar
carried the Roman arms to the English Channel. The Greek geographer
Strabo and the historian Diodorus seem also to have derived their
descriptions of the Celtic sacrifices from the work of Posidonius, but
independently of each other, and of Caesar, for each of the three
derivative accounts contain some details which are not to be found in
either of the others. By combining them, therefore, we can restore the
original account of Posidonius with some probability, and thus obtain a
picture of the sacrifices offered by the Celts of Gaul at the close of the
second century before our era. The following seem to have been the main
outlines of the custom. Condemned criminals were reserved by the Celts in
order to be sacrificed to the gods at a great festival which took place once
in every five years. The more there were of such victims, the greater was
believed to be the fertility of the land. If there were not enough criminals to
furnish victims, captives taken in war were immolated to supply the
deficiency. When the time came the victims were sacrificed by the Druids
or priests. Some they shot down with arrows, some they impaled, and some
they burned alive in the following manner. Colossal images of wicker-work
or of wood and grass were constructed; these were filled with live men,
cattle, and animals of other kinds; fire was then applied to the images, and
they were burned with their living contents. 3
Such were the great festivals held once every five years. But besides
these quinquennial festivals, celebrated on so grand a scale, and with,
apparently, so large an expenditure of human life, it seems reasonable to
suppose that festivals of the same sort, only on a lesser scale, were held
annually, and that from these annual festivals are lineally descended some
at least of the fire-festivals which, with their traces of human sacrifices,
are still celebrated year by year in many parts of Europe. The gigantic
images constructed of osiers or covered with grass in which the Druids
enclosed their victims remind us of the leafy framework in which the human
representative of the tree-spirit is still so often encased. Hence, seeing
that the fertility of the land was apparently supposed to depend upon the
due performance of these sacrifices, Mannhardt interpreted the Celtic
victims, cased in osiers and grass, as representatives of the tree-spirit or
spirit of vegetation. 4
These wicker giants of the Druids seem to have had till lately, if not down
to the present time, their representatives at the spring and midsummer
festivals of modern Europe. At Douay, down at least to the early part of the
nineteenth century, a procession took place annually on the Sunday
nearest to the seventh of July. The great feature of the procession was a
colossal figure, some twenty or thirty feet high, made of osiers, and called
"the giant," which was moved through the streets by means of rollers and
ropes worked by men who were enclosed within the effigy. The figure was
armed as a knight with lance and sword, helmet and shield. Behind him
marched his wife and his three children, all constructed of osiers on the
same principle, but on a smaller scale. At Dunkirk the procession of the
giants took place on Midsummer Day, the twenty-fourth of June. The
festival, which was known as the Follies of Dunkirk, attracted multitudes of
spectators. The giant was a huge figure of wicker-work, occasionally as
much as forty-five feet high, dressed in a long blue robe with gold stripes,
which reached to his feet, concealing the dozen or more men who made it
dance and bob its head to the spectators. This colossal effigy went by the
name of Papa Reuss, and carried in its pocket a bouncing infant of
Brobdingnagian proportions. The rear was brought up by the daughter of
the giant, constructed, like her sire, of wicker-work, and little, if at all,
inferior to him in size. Most towns and even villages of Brabant and
Flanders have, or used to have, similar wicker giants which were annually
led about to the delight of the populace, who loved these grotesque
figures, spoke of them with patriotic enthusiasm, and never wearied of
gazing at them. At Antwerp the giant was so big that no gate in the city
was large enough to let him go through; hence he could not visit his
brother giants in neighbouring towns, as the other Belgian giants used to
do on solemn occasions. 5
In England artificial giants seem to have been a standing feature of the
midsummer festival. A writer of the sixteenth century speaks of "Midsommer
pageants in London, where to make the people wonder, are set forth great
and uglie gyants marching as if they were alive, and armed at all points,
but within they are stuffed full of browne paper and tow, which the shrewd
boyes, underpeering, do guilefully discover, and turne to a greate
derision." At Chester the annual pageant on Midsummer Eve included the
effigies of four giants, with animals, hobby-horses, and other figures. At
Coventry it appears that the giant's wife figured beside the giant. At
Burford, in Oxfordshire, Midsummer Eve used to be celebrated with great
jollity by the carrying of a giant and a dragon up and down the town. The
last survivor of these perambulating English giants lingered at Salisbury,
where an antiquary found him mouldering to decay in the neglected hall of
the Tailors' Company about the year 1844. His bodily framework was a lath
and hoop, like the one which used to be worn by Jack-in-the-Green on
May Day. 6
In these cases the giants merely figured in the processions. But
sometimes they were burned in the summer bonfires. Thus the people of
the Rue aux Ours in Paris used annually to make a great wicker-work
figure, dressed as a soldier, which they promenaded up and down the
streets for several days, and solemnly burned on the third of July, the
crowd of spectators singing Salve Regina. A personage who bore the title
of king presided over the ceremony with a lighted torch in his hand. The
burning fragments of the image were scattered among the people, who
eagerly scrambled for them. The custom was abolished in 1743. In Brie,
Isle de France, a wicker-work giant, eighteen feet high, was annually
burned on Midsummer Eve. 7
Again, the Druidical custom of burning live animals, enclosed in
wicker-work, has its counterpart at the spring and midsummer festivals. At
Luchon in the Pyrenees on Midsummer Eve "a hollow column, composed
of strong wicker-work, is raised to the height of about sixty feet in the
centre of the principal suburb, and interlaced with green foliage up to the
very top; while the most beautiful flowers and shrubs procurable are
artistically arranged in groups below, so as to form a sort of background to
the scene. The column is then filled with combustible materials, ready for
ignition. At an appointed hour-about 8 P.M.-a grand procession,
composed of the clergy, followed by young men and maidens in holiday
attire, pour forth from the town chanting hymns, and take up their position
around the column. Meanwhile, bonfires are lit, with beautiful effect, in the
surrounding hills. As many living serpents as could be collected are now
thrown into the column, which is set on fire at the base by means of
torches, armed with which about fifty boys and men dance around with
frantic gestures. The serpents, to avoid the flames, wriggle their way to the
top, whence they are seen lashing out laterally until finally obliged to drop,
their struggles for life giving rise to enthusiastic delight among the
surrounding spectators. This is a favourite annual ceremony for the
inhabitants of Luchon and its neighbourhood, and local tradition assigns it
to a heathen origin." In the midsummer fires formerly kindled on the Place
de Grève at Paris it was the custom to burn a basket, barrel, or sack full of
live cats, which was hung from a tall mast in the midst of the bonfire;
sometimes a fox was burned. The people collected the embers and ashes
of the fire and took them home, believing that they brought good luck. The
French kings often witnessed these spectacles and even lit the bonfire
with their own hands. In 1648 Louis the Fourteenth, crowned with a wreath
of roses and carrying a bunch of roses in his hand, kindled the fire,
danced at it and partook of the banquet afterwards in the town hall. But this
was the last occasion when a monarch presided at the midsummer bonfire
in Paris. At Metz midsummer fires were lighted with great pomp on the
esplanade, and a dozen cats, enclosed in wicker cages, were burned
alive in them, to the amusement of the people. Similarly at Gap, in the
department of the High Alps, cats used to be roasted over the midsummer
bonfire. In Russia a white cock was sometimes burned in the midsummer
bonfire; in Meissen or Thuringia a horse's head used to be thrown into it.
Sometimes animals are burned in the spring bonfires. In the Vosges cats
were burned on Shrove Tuesday; in Alsace they were thrown into the
Easter bonfire. In the department of the Ardennes cats were flung into the
bonfires kindled on the first Sunday in Lent; sometimes, by a refinement of
cruelty, they were hung over the fire from the end of a pole and roasted
alive. "The cat, which represented the devil, could never suffer enough."
While the creatures were perishing in the flames, the shepherds guarded
their flocks and forced them to leap over the fire, esteeming this an
infallible means of preserving them from disease and witchcraft. We have
seen that squirrels were sometimes burned in the Easter fire. 8
Thus it appears that the sacrificial rites of the Celts of ancient Gaul can
be traced in the popular festivals of modern Europe. Naturally it is in
France, or rather in the wider area comprised within the limits of ancient
Gaul, that these rites have left the clearest traces in the customs of burning
giants of wicker-work and animals enclosed in wicker-work or baskets.
These customs, it will have been remarked, are generally observed at or
about midsummer. From this we may infer that the original rites of which
these are the degenerate successors were solemnised at midsummer. This
inference harmonises with the conclusion suggested by a general survey
of European folk-custom, that the midsummer festival must on the whole
have been the most widely diffused and the most solemn of all the yearly
festivals celebrated by the primitive Aryans in Europe. At the same time we
must bear in mind that among the British Celts the chief fire-festivals of the
year appear certainly to have been those of Beltane (May Day) and
Hallowe'en (the last day of October); and this suggests a doubt whether
the Celts of Gaul also may not have celebrated their principal rites of fire,
including their burnt sacrifices of men and animals, at the beginning of
May or the beginning of November rather than at Midsummer. 9
We have still to ask, What is the meaning of such sacrifices? Why were
men and animals burnt to death at these festivals? If we are right in
interpreting the modern European fire-festivals as attempts to break the
power of witchcraft by burning or banning the witches and warlocks, it
seems to follow that we must explain the human sacrifices of the Celts in
the same manner; that is, we must suppose that the men whom the Druids
burnt in wicker-work images were condemned to death on the ground that
they were witches or wizards, and that the mode of execution by fire was
chosen because burning alive is deemed the surest mode of getting rid of
these noxious and dangerous beings. The same explanation would apply
to the cattle and wild animals of many kinds which the Celts burned along
with the men. They, too, we may conjecture, were supposed to be either
under the spell of witchcraft or actually to be the witches and wizards, who
had transformed themselves into animals for the purpose of prosecuting
their infernal plots against the welfare of their fellow-creatures. This
conjecture is confirmed by the observation that the victims most commonly
burned in modern bonfires have been cats, and that cats are precisely the
animals into which, with the possible exception of hares, witches were
most usually supposed to transform themselves. Again, we have seen that
serpents and foxes used sometimes to be burnt in the midsummer fires; and
Welsh and German witches are reported to have assumed the form both of
foxes and serpents. In short, when we remember the great variety of
animals whose forms witches can assume at pleasure, it seems easy on
this hypothesis to account for the variety of living creatures that have been
burnt at festivals both in ancient Gaul and modern Europe; all these
victims, we may surmise, were doomed to the flames, not because they
were animals, but because they were believed to be witches who had
taken the shape of animals for their nefarious purposes. One advantage of
explaining the ancient Celtic sacrifices in this way is that it introduces, as
it were, a harmony and consistency into the treatment which Europe has
meted out to witches from the earliest times down to about two centuries
ago, when the growing influence of rationalism discredited the belief in
witchcraft and put a stop to the custom of burning witches. Be that as it
may, we can now perhaps understand why the Druids believed that the
more persons they sentenced to death, the greater would be the fertility of
the land. To a modern reader the connexion at first sight may not be
obvious between the activity of the hangman and the productivity of the
earth. But a little reflection may satisfy him that when the criminals who
perish at the stake or on the gallows are witches, whose delight it is to
blight the crops of the farmer or to lay them low under storms of hail, the
execution of these wretches is really calculated to ensure an abundant
harvest by removing one of the principal causes which paralyse the efforts
and blast the hopes of the husbandman. 10
The Druidical sacrifices which we are considering were explained in a
different way by W. Mannhardt. He supposed that the men whom the
Druids burned in wicker-work images represented the spirits of vegetation,
and accordingly that the custom of burning them was a magical ceremony
intended to secure the necessary sunshine for the crops. Similarly, he
seems to have inclined to the view that the animals which used to be burnt
in the bonfires represented the cornspirit, which, as we saw in an earlier
part of this work, is often supposed to assume the shape of an animal. This
theory is no doubt tenable, and the great authority of W. Mannhardt entitles
it to careful consideration. I adopted it in former editions of this book; but on
reconsideration it seems to me on the whole to be less probable than the
theory that the men and animals burnt in the fires perished in the character
of witches. This latter view is strongly supported by the testimony of the
people who celebrate the fire-festivals, since a popular name for the
custom of kindling the fires is "burning the witches," effigies of witches are
sometimes consumed in the flames, and the fires, their embers, or their
ashes are supposed to furnish protection against witchcraft. On the other
hand there is little to show that the effigies or the animals burnt in the fires
are regarded by the people as representatives of the vegetation-spirit, and
that the bonfires are sun-charms. With regard to serpents in particular,
which used to be burnt in the midsummer fire at Luchon, I am not aware of
any certain evidence that in Europe snakes have been regarded as
embodiments of the tree-spirit or corn-spirit, though in other parts of the
world the conception appears to be not unknown. Whereas the popular
faith in the transformation of witches into animals is so general and deeply
rooted, and the fear of these uncanny beings is so strong, that it seems
safer to suppose that the cats and other animals which were burnt in the
fire suffered death as embodiments of witches than that they perished as
representatives of vegetation-spirits. 11