652 REPORT—1896. 
formula of a lost religious rite, and of usages which go back to pre- 
historic civilisation for their only possible explanation—when it has been 
found that these conceptions cluster round the burning embers of the 
modern fire, the case for deciding that the whole group of evidence 
belongs to the ancient tribal fire cult is provisionally at all events amply 
made out, and there only remains the work of comparison with the 
tribal fire cult of a primitive people to complete the proof. 
Let us, however, first note whither this conclusion almost insensibly 
leads us. Nearly every writer on this subject has, it seems to me, 
begun at the wrong end. He has commenced with the few references to 
the god Bel, and has built up a theory of sacrifice and worship which 
has little or no evidence in its favour in the examples which have been 
examined in the previous pages. And in thus accentuating the re- 
ligious element of these rites he has left wholly untouched the one 
clue to their origin, namely, the social organisation of the people who 
performed them. It is always useless to discuss early religions with- 
out taking count of the social organism of which the religion is 
only a portion. Early peoples did not differentiate, as modern peoples 
do, between the various elements of their culture ; all the parts were 
closely interwoven, and cannot be divorced from each other even for 
the purpose of a separate analysis. To have established that these fire 
customs are intimately connected with a social unit is to connect them 
with a tribal religion and tribal society, and to limit their interpretation 
and meaning by what is conveyed by the term ¢ribal. That term is 
applicable to the conditions of both the Celtic and Teutonic settlers of 
this country ; and it is to these peoples, therefore, branches of the Aryan- 
speaking peoples, that we must provisionally at all events allot that 
portion of the tribal system which has been revealed by the customs 
already examined. They reveal the solemn rekindling of the tribal fire 
at least once a year, and the carrying of the sacred flame therefrom to 
the fire of the household, as the two essential details of the cult ; and 
the several very significant rites which accompany these details are all 
illustrative of the tribal conditions to which the whole ceremonial 
belongs. 
Having ascertained all there is to be deduced from the several elements 
preserved in the customs, there is one very important matter finally to be 
considered from an element which does not appear in the customs—I mean 
the entire absence of anything like a priestly caste as the necessary 
performers of the sacred rites ; and the question is: Is this absence due to 
the degradation of the modern forms in survival, or is it due to the original 
conditions from which the survivals have descended? This is one of the 
questions not to be answered from the study of survivals, but which can 
only be deferred until the conclusions to be drawn from comparison with 
primitive rites are before us. 
We will now turn, for confirmation of these views, to the comparison 
of the survivals of the British tribal fire cult with the system belonging to 
the early Aryan tribes elsewhere than in Britain. 
The points of analogy are numerous and important enough to establish 
the intimate connection between the British and non-British evidence. 
But in one very important particular, just where it might be expected 
perhaps that the analogy of the modern survival to the early Aryan 
survival would not obtain, the conclusions drawn are very considerably 
