of milk, fruit, and fish for its observance.[547] These may be aetiological myths explaining the origin of these festivals on the analogy of funeral festivals, but more likely, since Lugnasad was a harvest festival, they are connected with the custom of slaying a representative of the corn-spirit.  The festival would become a commemoration of all such victims, but when the custom itself had ceased it would be associated with one particular personage, the corn-goddess regarded as a mortal.

This would be the case where the victim was a woman, but where a male was slain, the analogy of the slaying of the divine king or his succedaneum would lead to the festivals being regarded as commemorative of a king, e.g.  Garman.  This agrees with the statement that observance of the festival produced plenty; non-observance, dearth.  The victims were slain to obtain plenty, and the festival would also commemorate those who had died for this good cause, while it would also appease their ghosts should these be angry at their violent deaths.  Certain of the dead were thus commemorated at Lugnasad, a festival of fertility.  Both the corn-spirit or divinity slain in the reaping of the corn, and the human victims, were appeased by its observance.[548] The legend of Carman makes her hostile to the corn—­a curious way of regarding a corn-goddess.  But we have already seen that gods of fertility were sometimes thought of as causing blight, and in folk-belief the corn-spirit is occasionally believed to be dangerous.  Such inversions occur wherever revolutions in religion take place.

The great commemoration of the dead was held on Samhain eve, a festival intended to aid the dying powers of vegetation, whose life, however, was still manifested in evergreen shrubs, in the mistletoe, in the sheaf of corn from last harvest—­the abode of the corn-spirit.[549] Probably, also, human representatives of the vegetation or corn-spirit were slain, and this may have suggested the belief in the presence of their ghosts at this festival.  Or the festival being held at the time of the death of vegetation, the dead would naturally be commemorated then.  Or, as in Scandinavia, they may have been held to have an influence on fertility, as an extension of the belief that certain slain persons represented spirits of fertility, or because trees and plants growing on the barrows of the dead were thought to be tenanted by their spirits.[550] In Scandinavia, the dead were associated with female spirits or fylgjur, identified with the disir, a kind of earth-goddesses, living in hollow hills.[551] The nearest Celtic analogy to these is the Matres, goddesses of fertility.  Bede says that Christmas eve was called Modranicht, “Mothers’ Night,"[552] and as many of the rites of Samhain were transferred to Yule, the former date of Modranicht may have been Samhain, just as the Scandinavian Disablot, held in November, was a festival of the disir