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
on the approach of summer that he drives his cattle out into the open to
crop the fresh grass, and it is on the approach of winter that he leads
them back to the safety and shelter of the stall. Accordingly it seems
not improbable that the Celtic bisection of the year into two halves at
the beginning of May and the beginning of November dates from a time
when the Celts were mainly a pastoral people, dependent for their
subsistence on their herds, and when accordingly the great epochs of the
year for them were the days on which the cattle went forth from the
homestead in early summer and returned to it again in early winter.[567]
Even in Central Europe, remote from the region now occupied by the
Celts, a similar bisection of the year may be clearly traced in the
great popularity, on the one hand, of May Day and its Eve (Walpurgis
Night), and, on the other hand, of the Feast of All Souls at the
beginning of November, which under a thin Christian cloak conceals an
ancient pagan festival of the dead.[568] Hence we may conjecture that
everywhere throughout Europe the celestial division of the year
according to the solstices was preceded by what we may call a
terrestrial division of the year according to the beginning of summer
and the beginning of winter.
[The two great Celtic festivals, Beltane and Hallowe'en.]
Be that as it may, the two great Celtic festivals of May Day and the
first of November or, to be more accurate, the Eves of these two days,
closely resemble each other in the manner of their celebration and in
the superstitions associated with them, and alike, by the antique
character impressed upon both, betray a remote and purely pagan origin.
The festival of May Day or Beltane, as the Celts called it, which
ushered in summer, has already been described;[569] it remains to give
some account of the corresponding festival of Hallowe'en, which
announced the arrival of winter.
[Hallowe'en (the evening of October 31st) seems to have marked the
beginning of the Celtic year; the many forms of divination resorted to
at Hallowe'en are appropriate to the beginning of a New Year; Hallowe'en
also a festival of the dead.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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