tice of kindling the need-fire in this primitive fashion is
merely a survival from the time when our savage forefathers lit all
their fires in that way. Nothing is so conservative of old customs as
religious or magical ritual, which invests these relics of the past with
an atmosphere of mysterious virtue and sanctity. To the educated mind it
seems obvious that a fire which a man kindles with the sweat of his brow
by laboriously rubbing one stick against each other can possess neither
more nor less virtue than one which he has struck in a moment by the
friction of a lucifer match; but to the ignorant and superstitious this
truth is far from apparent, and accordingly they take infinite pains to
do in a roundabout way what they might have done directly with the
greatest ease, and what, even when it is done, is of no use whatever for
the purpose in hand. A vast proportion of the labour which mankind has
expended throughout the ages has been no better spent; it has been like
the stone of Sisyphus eternally rolled up hill only to revolve eternally
down again, or like the water poured for ever by the Danaids into broken
pitchers which it could never fill.

[The belief that the need-fire cannot kindle if any other fire remains
alight in the neighbourhood.]

The curious notion that the need-fire cannot kindle if any other fire
remains alight in the neighbourhood seems to imply that fire is
conceived as a unity which is broken up into fractions and consequently
weakened in exact proportion to the number of places where it burns;
hence in order to obtain it at full strength you must light it only at a
single point, for then the flame will burst out with a concentrated
energy derived from the tributary fires which burned on all the
extinguished hearths of the country. So in a modern city if all the gas
were turned off simultaneously at all the burners but one, the flame
would no doubt blaze at that one burner with a fierceness such as no
single burner could shew when all are burning at the same time. The
analogy may help us to understand the process of reasoning which leads
the peasantry to insist on the extinction of all common fires when the
need-fire is about to be kindled. Perhaps, too, it may partly explain
that ceremonial extinction of all old fires on other occasions which is
often required by custom as a preliminary to the lighting of a new and
sacred fire.[740] We have seen that in the Highlands of Scotland all
common fir