mbers or even through the
flames. The ceremony is called "burning the witches." In some places an
effigy representing a witch used to be burnt in the bonfire.[392] We
have to remember that the eve of May Day is the notorious Walpurgis
Night, when the witches are everywhere speeding unseen through the air
on their hellish errands. On this witching night children in Voigtland
also light bonfires on the heights and leap over them. Moreover, they
wave burning brooms or toss them into the air. So far as the light of
the bonfire reaches, so far will a blessing rest on the fields. The
kindling of the fires on Walpurgis Night is called "driving away the
witches."[393] The custom of kindling fires on the eve of May Day
(Walpurgis Night) for the purpose of burning the witches is, or used to
be, widespread in the Tyrol, Moravia, Saxony and Silesia.[394]

Sec. 4. _The Midsummer Fires_

[The great season for fire-festivals in Europe is the summer solstice,
Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day, which the church has dedicated to St.
John the Baptist; the bonfires, the torches, and the burning wheels of
the festival.]

But the season at which these fire-festivals have been mostly generally
held all over Europe is the summer solstice, that is Midsummer Eve (the
twenty-third of June) or Midsummer Day (the twenty-fourth of June). A
faint tinge of Christianity has been given to them by naming Midsummer
Day after St. John the Baptist, but we cannot doubt that the celebration
dates from a time long before the beginning of our era. The summer
solstice, or Midsummer Day, is the great turning-point in the sun's
career, when, after climbing higher and higher day by day in the sky,
the luminary stops and thenceforth retraces his steps down the heavenly
road. Such a moment could not but be regarded with anxiety by primitive
man so soon as he began to observe and ponder the courses of the great
lights across the celestial vault; and having still to learn his own
powerlessness in face of the vast cyclic changes of nature, he may have
fancied that he could help the sun in his seeming decline--could prop
his failing steps and rekindle the sinking flame of the red lamp in his
feeble hand. In some such thoughts as these the midsummer festivals of
our European peasantry may perhaps have taken their rise. Whatever their
origin, they have prevailed all over this quarter of the globe, from
Ireland on the west to Russia on the east, and from Norway and Swede