a, or Parilia, downwards, there is a useful
collection in Brand's Popular Antiquities under the heading 'Midsummer
Eve.' One exception must be made for a passage from Torreblanca's
Demonologia (p. 106). People are said 'pyras circumire et transilire in
futuri mali averruncatione'--to 'go round about and leap over lighted
pyres for the purpose of averting future evils,' as in Mannhardt's theory
of the Hirpi. This may be connected with the Bulgarian rite, to be
described later, but, as a rule, in all these instances, the fire is a
light one of straw, and no sort of immunity is claimed by the people who
do not walk through, but leap across it.

These kinds of analogous examples, then, it suffices merely to mention.
For the others, in all affairs of this sort, the wide diffusion of a tale
of miracle is easily explained. The fancy craves for miracles, and the
universal mode of inventing a miracle is to deny the working, on a given
occasion, of a law of Nature. Gravitation was suspended, men floated in
air, inanimate bodies became agile, or fire did not burn. No less
natural than the invention of the myth is the attempt to feign it by
conjuring or by the use of some natural secret. But in the following
modern instances the miracle of passing through the fire uninjured is
apparently feigned with considerable skill, or is performed by the aid of
some secret of Nature not known to modern chemistry. The evidence is
decidedly good enough to prove that in Europe, India, and Polynesia the
ancient rite of the Hirpi of Soracte is still a part of religious or
customary ceremony.

Fijian Fire-walk

The case which originally drew my attention to this topic is that given
by Mr. Basil Thomson in his South Sea Yarns (p. 195). Mr. Thomson
informs me that he wrote his description on the day after he witnessed
the ceremony, a precaution which left no room for illusions of memory. Of
course, in describing a conjuring trick, one who is not an expert
records, not what actually occurred, but what he was able to see, and the
chances are that he did not see, and therefore omits, an essential
circumstance, while he misstates other circumstances. I am informed by
Mrs. Steel, the author of The Potter's Thumb and other stories of Indian
life, that, in watching an Indian conjurer, she generally, or frequently,
detects his method. She says that the conjurer often begins by whirling
rapidly before the eyes of the spectators a small poli