day of October, from
which the Irish new year began; and all the hearths throughout the
country are said to have been relighted from the fresh fire. The place
where this holy flame was lit bore the name of Tlachtga or Tlactga; it
has been identified with a rath or native fort on the Hill of Ward near
Athboy in the county of Meath. "It was there," says the old Irish
historian, Geoffrey Keating, "that the Festival of the Fire of Tlactga
was ordered to be held, and it was thither that the Druids of Ireland
were wont to repair and to assemble, in solemn meeting, on the eve of
Samhain, for the purpose of making a sacrifice to all the gods. It was
in that fire at Tlactga, that their sacrifice was burnt; and it was made
obligatory, under pain of punishment, to extinguish all the fires of
Ireland, on that eve; and the men of Ireland were allowed to kindle no
other fire but that one; and for each of the other fires, which were all
to be lighted from it, the king of Munster was to receive a tax of a
_sgreball_, that is, of three pence, because the land, upon which
Tlactga was built, belongs to the portion of Meath which had been taken
from Munster."[348] In the villages near Moscow at the present time the
peasants put out all their fires on the eve of the first of September,
and next morning at sunrise a wise man or a wise woman rekindles them
with the help of muttered incantations and spells.[349]

[Thus the ceremony of the new fire in the Eastern and Western Church is
probably a relic of an old heathen rite.]

Instances of such practices might doubtless be multiplied, but the
foregoing examples may suffice to render it probable that the
ecclesiastical ceremony of lighting a sacred new fire on Easter Saturday
had originally nothing to do with Christianity, but is merely one case
of a world-wide custom which the Church has seen fit to incorporate in
its ritual. It might be supposed that in the Western Church the custom
was merely a survival of the old Roman usage of renewing the fire on the
first of March, were it not that the observance by the Eastern Church of
the custom on the same day seems to point back to a still older period
when the ceremony of lighting a new fire in spring, perhaps at the
vernal equinox, was common to many peoples of the Mediterranean area. We
may conjecture that wherever such a ceremony has been observed, it
originally marked the beginning of a new year, as it did in ancient Rome
and Ireland, and as i