ighted, and all the hearths of the village were
rekindled from the blaze thus obtained. Cattle were "passed through the
fire" to preserve them from the attacks of fiends; and perhaps even
children were sometimes treated in the same manner. The ceremony,
originally adopted, perhaps, by the English from their Celtic serfs,
still lingers in remote parts of the country, as the lighting of fires
on St. John's Eve. Tattooing the face was practised by the noble
classes. It seems probable that the early English sacrificed human
victims, as the Germans certainly did to Wuotan (the High Dutch Woden);
and we know that the practice of suttee existed, and that widows slew
themselves on the death of their husbands, in order to accompany them to
the other world. Even more curious are the vestiges of Totemism, or
primitive animal worship, common to all branches of the Aryan race, as
well as to the North American Indians, the Australian black fellows, and
many other savages. Totemism consists in the belief that each family is
literally descended from a particular plant or animal, whose name it
bears; and members of the family generally refuse to pluck the plant or
kill the animal after which they are named. Of these beliefs we find
apparently several traces in Anglo-Saxon life. The genealogies of the
kings include such names as those of the horse, the mare, the ash, and
the whale. In the very early Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, two of the
characters bear the names of Wulf and Eofer (boar). The wolf and the
raven were sacred animals, and have left their memory in many places, as
well as in such personal titles as AEthelwulf, the noble wolf. The boar
was also greatly reverenced; its head was used as an amulet, or as a
crest for helmets, and oaths were taken upon it till late in the middle
ages. Our own boar's head at Christmas is a relic of the old belief. The
sanctity of the horse and the ash has been already mentioned. Now many
of the Anglo-Saxon clans bore names implying their descent from such
plants or animals. Thus a charter mentions the AEscings, or sons of the
ash, in Surrey; another refers to the Earnings, or sons of the eagle
(earn); a third to the Heartings, or sons of the hart; a fourth to the
Wylfings, or sons of the wolf; and a fifth to the Thornings, or sons of
the thorn. The oak has left traces of his descendants at Oakington, in
Cambridge: the birch, at Birchington, in Kent; the boar (Eofer) at
Evringham, in Yorkshire; the h