Balder the Beautiful, Volume I.: A Study in Magic and Religion: the Golden Bough, Part VII., The; Fire-Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the External SoulFrazer, James George
Religion
Balder the Beautiful, Volume I.: A Study in Magic and Religion: the Golden Bough, Part VII., The; Fire-Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the External Soul
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
three and four feet long; the flames of some of these almost equal those
of the tar-barrels. Rows of lighted candles, also, when the air is calm,
are fixed outside the windows or along the sides of the streets. In St.
Just, and other mining parishes, the young miners, mimicking their
fathers' employments, bore rows of holes in the rocks, load them with
gunpowder, and explode them in rapid succession by trains of the same
substance. As the holes are not deep enough to split the rocks, the same
little batteries serve for many years. On these nights, Mount's Bay has
a most animating appearance, although not equal to what was annually
witnessed at the beginning of the present century, when the whole coast,
from the Land's End to the Lizard, wherever a town or a village existed,
was lighted up with these stationary or moving fires. In the early part
of the evening, children may be seen wearing wreaths of flowers--a
custom in all probability originating from the ancient use of these
ornaments when they danced around the fires. At the close of the
fireworks in Penzance, a great number of persons of both sexes, chiefly
from the neighbourhood of the quay, used always, until within the last
few years, to join hand in hand, forming a long string, and run through
the streets, playing 'thread the needle,' heedless of the fireworks
showered upon them, and oftentimes leaping over the yet glowing embers.
I have on these occasions seen boys following one another, jumping
through flames higher than themselves."[511]
[The Midsummer fires in Wales and the Isle of Man; burning wheel rolled
down hill.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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