flame have already come before us; but a few more examples may here be cited for the sake of illustrating the wide diffusion of a custom which has found its way into the ritual both of the Eastern and of the Western Church.

The Incas of Peru celebrated a festival called Raymi, a word which their native historian Garcilasso de la Vega tells us was equivalent to our Easter. It was held in honour of the sun at the solstice in June. For three days before the festival the people fasted, men did not sleep with their wives, and no fires were lighted in Cuzco, the capital. The sacred new fire was obtained direct from the sun by concentrating his beams on a highly polished concave plate and reflecting them on a little cotton wool. With this holy fire the sheep and lambs offered to the sun were consumed, and the flesh of such as were to be eaten at the festival was roasted. Portions of the new fire were also conveyed to the temple of the sun and to the convent of the sacred virgins, where they were kept burning all the year, and it was an ill omen if the holy flame went out. When the sun happened to be hidden by clouds at the time of the festival, as might often happen in the rainy climate of Cuzco, the new fire was obtained by the friction of two sticks; but the people looked on it as an evi augury if the fire had to be kindled in this manner, for they said that the sun must be angry with them since he refused to light the flame with his own hand. At a festival held in the last month of the old Mexican year all the fires both in the temples and in the houses were extinguished, and the priest kindled a new fire by rubbing two sticks against each other before the image of the fire-god. Once a year the Iroquois priesthood supplied the people with a new fire. As a preparation for the annual rite the fires in all the huts were extinguished and the ashes scattered about. Then the priest, wearing the insignia of his office, went from hut to hut relighting the fires by means of a flint. Among the Esquimaux

1 See above, vol. ii. pp. 329 899., 469.

2 Garcilasso de la Vega, Royal Com mentaries of the Yncas, Markham's translation, vol. ii. pp. 155-163.

3 Sahagun, Histoire générale des choses de la Nouvelle Espagne, bk. ii.

ch. 18 and 37, pp. 76, 161 (French translation by Jourdanet and Simeon); Brasseur de Bourbourg, Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amérique-Centrale, iii. 136.

Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois,

p. 137.

with whom C. F. Hall resided, it was the custom that at a certain time, which answered to our New Year's Day, two men went about from house to house blowing out every light in the village. One of the men was dressed to represent a woman. Afterwards the lights were rekindled from a fresh fire. An Esquimaux woman being asked what all this meant, replied, "New sun-new light.”1

In the Soudanese kingdom of Wadai all the fires in the villages are put out and the ashes removed from the houses on the day which precedes the New Year festival. At the beginning of the new year a new fire is lit by the friction of wood in the great straw hut where the village elders lounge away the sultry hours together; and every man takes from thence a burning brand with which he rekindles the fire on his domestic hearth. Among the Swahilis of East Africa the greatest festival is that of the New Year, which falls in the second half of August. At a given moment all the fires are extinguished with water and afterwards relit by the friction of two dry pieces of wood. Formerly no awkward questions were asked about any crimes committed on this occasion, so some people improved the shining hour by knocking a few poor devils on the head. Shooting still goes on during the whole day, and at night the proceedings generally wind up with a great dance. The King of Benamatapa in East Africa used to send commissioners annually to every town in his dominions; on the arrival of one of these officers the inhabitants of each town had to put out all their fires and to receive a new fire from him. Failure to comply with this custom was treated as rebellion.1 Some tribes of British Central Africa carefully extinguish the fires on the hearths at the beginning of the hocing season and at harvest; the fires are afterwards rekindled by friction, and the people indulge in dances of various kinds.5

1 C. F. Hall, Life with the Esquimaux, ii. 323.

2 G. Nachtigal, Sahărâ und Sûdân, iii. 251 (Leipsic, 1889).

3 Jerome Becker, La vie en Afrique (Paris and Brussels, 1887), ii. 36; O. Baumann, Usambara und seine Nachbargebiete (Berlin, 1891), p. 55 sq. 4 Barbosa, Description of the coasts

of East Africa and Malabar (Hakluyt Society, 1866), p. 8. It is to this custom doubtless that Montaigne refers in his essays (i. 22, vol. i. p. 140 of Charpentier's edition), though he mentions no names.

6 Sir H. H. Johnston, British Central Africa (London, 1897), pp. 426, 439.

When the Nagas of Northern India have felled the timber and cut down the scrub in those patches of jungle which they propose to cultivate, they put out all the fires in the village and light a new fire by rubbing two dry pieces of wood together. Then having kindled torches at it they proceed with them to the jungle and ignite the felled timber and brushwood. The flesh of a cow or buffalo is also roasted on the new fire and furnishes a sacrificial meal.1 Near the small town of Kahma in Burma, between Prome and Thayetmyo, certain gases escape from a hollow in the ground and burn with a steady flame during the dry season of the year. The people regard the flame as the forge of a spectral smith who here carried on his business after death had removed him from his old smithy in the village. Once a year all the household fires in Kahma are extinguished and then lighted afresh from the ghostly flame. In China every year, about the beginning of April, certain. officials, called Sz'hüen, used of old to go about the country armed with wooden clappers. Their business was to summon the people and command them to put out every firc. This was the beginning of a season called Han-shih-tsieh, or "cating cold food." For three days all household fires remained extinct as a preparation for the solemn renewal of the fire, which took place on the fifth or sixth day of April, being the hundred and fifth day after the winter solstice. The ceremony was performed with great pomp by the same officials, who procured the new fire from heaven by reflecting the sun's rays either from a metal mirror or from a crystal on dry moss. Fire thus obtained is called by the Chinese heavenly fire, and its use is enjoined in sacrifices; whereas fire elicited by the friction of wood is termed by them carthly fire, and its use is prescribed for cooking and other domestic purposes. When once the new fire had thus been drawn down from the sun, all the people were free to rekindle their domestic hearths; and, as a Chinese distich has it

1 Lieut. R. Stewart, "Notes on Northern Cachar," Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, xxiv. (1855), p. 612.

A. Bastian, Die Volker des estlichen Asien, ii. 49 sq.; Shway Yoe, The Burman, ii. 325 sq.

"At the festival of the cold food there are a thousand white stalks among the flowers;

On the day Tsing-ming, at sunrise, you may see the smoke of ten thousand houses."

According to a Chinese philosopher, the reason for thus renewing fire periodically is that the vital principle grows weaker and weaker in old fire, whereas in new fire it is young and vigorous. This annual renewal of fire was a ceremony of very great antiquity in China, since it is known to have been observed in the time of the first dynasty, about two thousand years before Christ. Under the Tcheou dynasty a change in the calendar led to shifting the fire-festival from spring to the summer solstice, but afterwards it was brought back to its original date. Although the custom appears to have long fallen into disuse, the barbarous inhabitants of Hainan, an island to the south of China, still call a year "a fire," as if in memory of the time when the years were reckoned by the annually recurring ceremony of rekindling the sacred fire.1 In classical antiquity the Greek island of Lemnos was devoted to the worship of the smith-god Hephaestus, who was said to have fallen on it when Zeus hurled him from heaven. Once a year every fire in the island was extinguished and remained extinct for nine days, during which sacrifices were offered to the dead and to the infernal powers. New fire was brought in a ship from the sacred isle of Delos, and with it the fires in the houses and the workshops were relit. The people said that with the new fire they made a new beginning of life. If the ship that bore the sacred flame arrived too soon, it might not put in to shore, but had to cruise in the offing till the nine days were expired. At Rome the sacred fire in the temple of Vesta was kindled anew every year on the first of March, which used to be the beginning of the Roman year; the task of lighting it was entrusted to the Vestal Virgins, and they performed it by drilling a hole in a board of lucky

1 G. Schlegel, Uranographie Chinoise (The Hague and Leyden, 1875), pp. 139-143; C. Puini, "Il fuoco nella tradizione degli antichi Cinesi," Gior nale della Società Asiatica Italiana, i. (1887), pp. 20-23.

Ovid, Fasti, iii. 82; Homer, Iliad, i. 590 sqq.

3 Philostratus, Heroica, xx. 24.

Ovid, Fasti, iii. 143 sq.; Macrobius, Saturn. i. 12. 6.

wood till the flame was elicited by friction.

The new fire

thus produced was carried into the temple of Vesta by one of the virgins in a bronze sieve.1 Among the Celts of Ireland a new fire was kindled at a place called Tlachtga on the eve of the first of November, which was the beginning of the Irish new year, and from this fresh fire all the hearths in Ireland are said to have been rekindled. In the villages near Moscow at the present time the peasants put out all their fires on the eve of the first of September, and next morning at sunrise a wise man or a wise woman rekindles them with the help of muttered incantations and spells.3

Instances of such practices might doubtless be multiplied, but the foregoing examples may suffice to render it probable that the ecclesiastical ceremony of lighting a sacred new fire on Easter Saturday had originally nothing to do with Christianity, but is merely one case of a world-wide custom which the Church has seen fit to incorporate in its ritual. It might be supposed that in the Western Church the custom was merely a survival of the old Roman usage of renewing the fire on the first of March, were it not that the observance by the Eastern Church of the custom on the same day seems to point back to a still older period when the ceremony of lighting a new fire in spring, perhaps at the vernal equinox, was common to many peoples of the Mediterranean area. We may conjecture that wherever such a ceremony has been observed, it originally marked the beginning of a new year, as it did in ancient Rome and Ireland, and as it still does in the Soudanese kingdom of Wadai and among the Swahilis of Eastern Africa.

1 Festus, ed. Müller, p. 106, s.v'. "Ignis." Plutarch describes a method of rekindling the sacred fire by means of the sun's rays reflected from a hollow mirror (Numa, 9); but he seems to be referring to a Greek rather than to the Roman custom. The rule of celibacy imposed on the Vestals, whose duty it was to relight the sacred fire as well as to preserve it when it was once made, is perhaps explained by a superstition current among French peasants that if a girl can blow up a smouldering candle into a flame she is a virgin, but that if she fails to do so, she is not.