he equinoxes. Nor do they
agree with the principal seasons of the agricultural year, the sowing in
spring and the reaping in autumn. For when May Day comes, the seed has
long been committed to the earth; and when November opens, the harvest
has long been reaped and garnered, the fields lie bare, the fruit-trees
are stripped, and even the yellow leaves are fast fluttering to the
ground. Yet the first of May and the first of November mark
turning-points of the year in Europe; the one ushers in the genial heat
and the rich vegetation of summer, the other heralds, if it does not
share, the cold and barrenness of winter. Now these particular points of
the year, as has been well pointed out by a learned and ingenious
writer,[566] while they are of comparatively little moment to the
European husbandman, do deeply concern the European herdsman; for it is
on the approach of summer that he drives his cattle out into the open to
crop the fresh grass, and it is on the approach of winter that he leads
them back to the safety and shelter of the stall. Accordingly it seems
not improbable that the Celtic bisection of the year into two halves at
the beginning of May and the beginning of November dates from a time
when the Celts were mainly a pastoral people, dependent for their
subsistence on their herds, and when accordingly the great epochs of the
year for them were the days on which the cattle went forth from the
homestead in early summer and returned to it again in early winter.[567]
Even in Central Europe, remote from the region now occupied by the
Celts, a similar bisection of the year may be clearly traced in the
great popularity, on the one hand, of May Day and its Eve (Walpurgis
Night), and, on the other hand, of the Feast of All Souls at the
beginning of November, which under a thin Christian cloak conceals an
ancient pagan festival of the dead.[568] Hence we may conjecture that
everywhere throughout Europe the celestial division of the year
according to the solstices was preceded by what we may call a
terrestrial division of the year according to the beginning of summer
and the beginning of winter.

[The two great Celtic festivals, Beltane and Hallowe'en.]

Be that as it may, the two great Celtic festivals of May Day and the
first of November or, to be more accurate, the Eves of these two days,
closely resemble each other in the manner of their celebration and in
the superstitions associated with them, and alike, by the anti