It is no doubt possible that these illuminations and fireworks, like the assassinations, are merely the natural and spontaneous expressions of that overflowing joy with which the thought of the birth of the Virgin must fill every pious heart; but when we remember how often the Church has skilfully decanted the new wine of Christianity into the old bottles of heathendom, we may be allowed to conjecture that the ecclesiastical authorities adroitly timed the Nativity of the Virgin so as to coincide with an old pagan festival of that day, in which fire, noise, and uproar, if not broken heads and bloodshed, were conspicuous features.  The penny trumpets blown on this occasion recall the like melodious instruments which figure so largely in the celebration of Befana (the Eve of Epiphany) at Rome.[565]

Sec. 6. The Hallowe’en Fires

[On the other hand the Celts divided their year, not by the solstices, but by the beginning of summer (the first of May) and the beginning of winter (the first of November).]

From the foregoing survey we may infer that among the heathen forefathers of the European peoples the most popular and widespread fire-festival of the year was the great celebration of Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day.  The coincidence of the festival with the summer solstice can hardly be accidental.  Rather we must suppose that our pagan ancestors purposely timed the ceremony of fire on earth to coincide with the arrival of the sun at the highest point of his course in the sky.  If that was so, it follows that the old founders of the midsummer rites had observed the solstices or turning-points of the sun’s apparent path in the sky, and that they accordingly regulated their festal calendar to some extent by astronomical considerations.

[The division seems to have been neither astronomical nor agricultural but pastoral, being determined by the times when cattle are driven to and from their summer pasture.]

But while this may be regarded as fairly certain for what we may call the aborigines throughout a large part of the continent, it appears not to have been true of the Celtic peoples who inhabited the Land’s End of Europe, the islands and promontories that stretch out into the Atlantic ocean on the North-West.  The principal fire-festivals of the Celts, which have survived, though in a restricted area and with diminished pomp, to modern times and even to our own day, were seemingly timed without any reference to the position of the sun in the heaven.  They were two in number, and fell at an interval of six months, one being celebrated on the eve of May Day and the other on Allhallow Even or Hallowe’en, as it is now commonly called, that is, on the thirty-first of October, the day preceding All Saints’ or Allhallows’ Day.  These dates coincide with none of the four great hinges on which the solar year revolves, to wit, the solstices and the equinoxes.  Nor do they agree with the principal seasons of the agricultural year, the sowing