que
character impressed upon both, betray a remote and purely pagan origin.
The festival of May Day or Beltane, as the Celts called it, which
ushered in summer, has already been described;[569] it remains to give
some account of the corresponding festival of Hallowe'en, which
announced the arrival of winter.

[Hallowe'en (the evening of October 31st) seems to have marked the
beginning of the Celtic year; the many forms of divination resorted to
at Hallowe'en are appropriate to the beginning of a New Year; Hallowe'en
also a festival of the dead.]

Of the two feasts Hallowe'en was perhaps of old the more important,
since the Celts would seem to have dated the beginning of the year from
it rather than from Beltane. In the Isle of Man, one of the fortresses
in which the Celtic language and lore longest held out against the siege
of the Saxon invaders, the first of November, Old Style, has been
regarded as New Year's day down to recent times. Thus Manx mummers used
to go round on Hallowe'en (Old Style), singing, in the Manx language, a
sort of Hogmanay song which began "To-night is New Year's Night,
_Hog-unnaa_!"[570] One of Sir John Rhys's Manx informants, an old man of
sixty-seven, "had been a farm servant from the age of sixteen till he
was twenty-six to the same man, near Regaby, in the parish of Andreas,
and he remembers his master and a near neighbour of his discussing the
term New Year's Day as applied to the first of November, and explaining
to the younger men that it had always been so in old times. In fact, it
seemed to him natural enough, as all tenure of land ends at that time,
and as all servant men begin their service then."[571] In ancient
Ireland, as we saw, a new fire used to be kindled every year on
Hallowe'en or the Eve of Samhain, and from this sacred flame all the
fires in Ireland were rekindled.[572] Such a custom points strongly to
Samhain or All Saints' Day (the first of November) as New Year's Day;
since the annual kindling of a new fire takes place most naturally at
the beginning of the year, in order that the blessed influence of the
fresh fire may last throughout the whole period of twelve months.
Another confirmation of the view that the Celts dated their year from
the first of November is furnished by the manifold modes of divination
which, as we shall see presently, were commonly resorted to by Celtic
peoples on Hallowe'en for the purpose of ascertaining their destiny,
especially their fortun