custom of driving cattle through or between fires on May Day or the eve of May Day persisted in Ireland down to a time within living memory.  Thus Sir John Rhys was informed by a Manxman that an Irish cattle-dealer of his acquaintance used to drive his cattle through fire on May Day so as to singe them a little, since he believed that it would preserve them from harm.  When the Manxman was asked where the dealer came from, he answered, “From the mountains over there,” pointing to the Mourne Mountains then looming faintly in the mists on the western horizon.[390]

[Fires on the Eve of May Day in Sweden; fires on the Eve of May Day in Austria and Saxony for the purpose of burning the witches.]

The first of May is a great popular festival in the more midland and southern parts of Sweden.  On the eve of the festival, huge bonfires, which should be lighted by striking two flints together, blaze on all the hills and knolls.  Every large hamlet has its own fire, round which the young people dance in a ring.  The old folk notice whether the flames incline to the north or to the south.  In the former case, the spring will be cold and backward; in the latter, it will be mild and genial.[391] Similarly, in Bohemia, on the eve of May Day, young people kindle fires on hills and eminences, at crossways, and in pastures, and dance round them.  They leap over the glowing embers or even through the flames.  The ceremony is called “burning the witches.”  In some places an effigy representing a witch used to be burnt in the bonfire.[392] We have to remember that the eve of May Day is the notorious Walpurgis Night, when the witches are everywhere speeding unseen through the air on their hellish errands.  On this witching night children in Voigtland also light bonfires on the heights and leap over them.  Moreover, they wave burning brooms or toss them into the air.  So far as the light of the bonfire reaches, so far will a blessing rest on the fields.  The kindling of the fires on Walpurgis Night is called “driving away the witches."[393] The custom of kindling fires on the eve of May Day (Walpurgis Night) for the purpose of burning the witches is, or used to be, widespread in the Tyrol, Moravia, Saxony and Silesia.[394]

Sec. 4. The Midsummer Fires

[The great season for fire-festivals in Europe is the summer solstice, Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day, which the church has dedicated to St. John the Baptist; the bonfires, the torches, and the burning wheels of the festival.]

But the season at which these fire-festivals have been mostly generally held all over Europe is the summer solstice, that is Midsummer Eve (the twenty-third of June) or Midsummer Day (the twenty-fourth of June).  A faint tinge of Christianity has been given to them by naming Midsummer Day after St. John the Baptist, but we cannot doubt that the celebration dates from a time long before the beginning of our era.  The summer solstice, or Midsummer Day, is the great turning-point