ON THE ETHNOGRAPHICAL SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 6309 
beneficent influence affording help to those who performed the necessary 
rites. Other examples only confirm this view, the significance of which 
will presently appear. The Manx custom was to light fires on the hill- 
tops on the eve of St. John the Baptist and on May-day. The household 
fires were put out on that day and rekindled with some of the sacred fire. 
This fire was also placed on the windward side of fields, so that the smoke 
might pass over the corn ; and the cattle were driven between two fires as 
an antidote against murrain or any pestilential distemper.! This preserves 
four elements of the typical form—d, d, e, and g—and one important 
divergence, 0. The contact with fire as the means of obtaining its 
support is here extended to animals. Beginning with the fields and boats 
in the Burghead type form, the action was extended to crops generally, 
and to human beings in the Irish example, and to the corn crops and 
animals in the Manx example. There can be no doubt that we are 
dealing with the same rite in all these cases ; and as no idea of a sacrifice 
could occur in the case of the fields and crops, as no idea of a sacrifice is 
conveyed by the actual ceremony performed by animals and human beings, 
it is important to note that the evidence so far distinctly points to the 
conception of contact with some sacred power to ensure help and protec- 
tion, and therefore negatives any supposition of a sacrifice. In the 
western islands of Scotland the ceremony was for “eighty-one married 
men (being thought the necessary number for effecting this design)” to 
take two great planks of wood, and nine of them were employed by turns 
to rub one of the planks against the other until the heat thereof produced 
fire. From this forced fire each family is supplied with new flame to light 
its household fire which had previously been put out.? Elsewhere it is 
mentioned that it was an ancient custom to make a fiery circle about the 
houses, corn, cattle, &c., belonging to each particular family ; a man carried 
fire in his right hand and went round.* This example equates with ele- 
ments 6, e, and g of the type, and supplies a new and very important 
variant of the method of kindling the fire, c. 
In the Burghead example it was noted that the sanction of married 
life was an element in the choice of the man who was to be the bearer of 
the fire ; in this western isle example it is the same sanction which governs 
the choice of the men to create the fire, and the significant repetition of 
this feature cannot be wholly due to accident. But the Scottish historian, 
Hector Boece, tells a curious legend about the fire on the same island— 
-Lewis—to which Martin refers. ‘The fame is,’ says Boece, ‘als sone as 
the fire gangis furth (dies out) in this ile, the man that is haldin of maist 
clene and innocent life layis one wosp of stra on the alter, and when the 
pep are gevin maist devotly to thair praers, the wosp kindelies in ane 
bleis.’* Here the resort is to the church, where miraculous fire is obtained 
_ for the same purpose as the sacred forced fire ; and it may be that we have 
“3 late example of the method the Church adopted to occupy the place of 
_ the older religion. The point is of some importance, because we shall 
_ presently have to note the survival of these fire customs among the ritual 
observances of the early Church. 
All these examples point to a periodical renewal of fire on some par- 
1 Mona Miscellany, p. 143. 
_ # Martin’s Western Islands, 113. 
 * Ibid. 116. Cf. Proc. Soc. Antig. Scot. xii. 556, for the importance of fire as a 
symbol of possession in Lewis and St. Kilda. 
* Brown’s Early Descriptions of Scotland, p. 89. 
