'Hallowe'en was celebrated at Balmoral Castle with unusual ceremony,
in the presence of her Majesty, the Princess Beatrice, the ladies
and gentlemen of the royal household, and a large gathering of the
tenantry. The leading features of the celebration were a torchlight
procession, the lighting of large bonfires, and the burning in effigy
of witches and warlocks. Upwards of 150 torch-bearers assembled at
the castle as dark set in, and separated into two parties, one band
proceeding to Invergelder, and the other remaining at Balmoral. The
torches were lighted at a quarter before six o'clock, and shortly
after the Queen and Princess Beatrice drove to Invergelder, followed
by the Balmoral party of torchbearers. The two parties then united
and returned in procession to the front of Balmoral Castle, where
refreshments were served to all, and dancing was engaged in round a
huge bonfire. Suddenly there appeared from the rear of the Castle a
grotesque apparition representing a witch with a train of followers
dressed like sprites, who danced and gesticulated in all fashions. Then
followed a warlock of demoniac shape, who was succeeded by another
warlock drawing a car, on which was seated the figure of a witch,
surrounded by other figures in the garb of demons. The unearthly
visitors having marched several times round the burning pile,
the principal figure was taken from the car and tossed into the
flames amid the burning of blue lights and a display of crackers
and fireworks. The health of her Majesty the Queen was then pledged,
and drunk with Highland honours by the assembled hundreds. Dancing
was then resumed, and was carried on till a late hour at night.'
The Sixth Council of Constantinople (an. 680), by its sixty-fifth
canon, forbids these fires in the following terms:--'Those bonefires
that are kindled by certain people before their shops and houses,
over which also they use ridiculously to leap, by a certain ancient
custom, we command them from henceforth to cease. Whoever, therefore,
shall do any such thing, if he be a clergyman, let him be deposed;
if he be a layman, let him be excommunicated. For in the Fourth Book
of the Kings it is thus written: And Manasseh built an altar to all
the host of heaven, in the two courts of the Lord's house, and made
his children to pass through the fire.' There is a charming naïveté
in this denunciation. It is no longer doubtful that this 'bonefire'
over which people leaped came from the same source as that Gehenna
from which the Church derived the orthodox theory of hell, as we have
already seen. When Shakespeare speaks (Macbeth) of 'the primrose way
to the everlasting bonfire,' [38] he is, with his wonted felicity,
assigning the flames of hell and the fires of Moloch and Baal their
right archæological relation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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