is attached to it.  As Lammas was a Christian harvest thanksgiving, so also was Lugnasad a pagan harvest feast, part of the ritual of which passed over to Samhain.  The people made glad before the sun-god—­Lug perhaps having that character—­who had assisted them in the growth of the things on which their lives depended.  Marriages were also arranged at this feast, probably because men had now more leisure and more means for entering upon matrimony.  Possibly promiscuous love-making also occurred as a result of the festival gladness, agricultural districts being still notoriously immoral.  Some evidence points to the connection of the feast with Lug’s marriage, though this has been allegorised into his wedding the “sovereignty of Erin.”  Perhaps we have here a hint of the rite of the sacred marriage, for the purpose of magically fertilising the fields against next year’s sowing.

Due observance of the feast produced abundance of corn, fruit, milk, and fish.  Probably the ritual observed included the preservation of the last sheaf as representing the corn-spirit, giving some of it to the cattle to strengthen them, and mingling it with next year’s corn to impart to it the power of the corn-spirit.  It may also have included the slaying of an animal or human incarnation of the corn-spirit, whose flesh and blood quickened the soil and so produced abundance next year, or, when partaken of by the worshippers, brought blessings to them.  To neglect such rites, abundant instances of which exist in folk-custom, would be held to result in scarcity.  This would also explain, as already suggested, why the festival was associated with the death of Tailtiu or of Carman.  The euhemerised queen-goddess Tailtiu and the woman Carman had once been corn-goddesses, evolved from more primitive corn-spirits, and slain at the feast in their female representatives.  The story of their death and burial at the festival was a dim memory of this ancient rite, and since the festival was also connected with the sun-god Lug, it was easy to bring him into relationship with the earlier goddess.  Elsewhere the festival, in its memorial aspect, was associated with a king, probably because male victims had come to be representatives of a corn-god who had taken the place of the goddess.

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Some of the ritual of these festivals is illustrated by scattered notices in classical writers, and on the whole they support our theory that the festivals originated in a female cult of spirits or goddesses of fertility.  Strabo speaks of sacrifices offered to Demeter and Kore, according to the ritual followed at Samothrace, in an island near Britain, i.e. to native goddesses equated with them.  He also describes the ritual of the Namnite women on an island in the Loire.  They are called Bacchantes because they conciliated Bacchus with mysteries and sacrifices; in other words, they observed an orgiastic cult of a god equated with Bacchus.  No man must set foot