Possibly the intention may once have been to drive away the rain. We shall see immediately that swinging is sometimes resorted to for the purpose of expelling the powers of evil. About the middle of March the Hindoos observe a swinging festival of a different sort in honour of the god Krishna, whose image is placed in the seat or cradle of a swing and then, just when the dawn is breaking, rocked gently to and fro several times. The same ceremony is repeated at noon and at sunset.(740) In the Rigveda the sun is called, by a natural metaphor, “the golden swing in the sky,” and the expression helps us to understand a ceremony of Vedic India. A priest sat in a swing and touched with the span of his right hand at once the seat of the swing and the ground. In doing so he said, “The great lord has united himself with the great lady, the god has united himself with the goddess.” Perhaps he meant to indicate in a graphic way that the sun had reached that lowest point of its course where it was nearest to the earth.(741) In this connexion it is of interest to note that in the Esthonian celebration of St. John’s Day or the summer solstice swings play, along with bonfires, the most prominent part. Girls sit and swing the whole night through, singing old songs to explain why they do so. For legend tells of an Esthonian prince who wooed and won an Islandic princess. But a wicked enchanter spirited away the lover to a desert island, where he languished in captivity, till his lady-love contrived to break the magic spell that bound him. Together they sailed home to Esthonia, which they reached on St. John’s Day, and burnt their ship, resolved to stray no longer in far foreign lands. The swings in which the Esthonian maidens still rock themselves on St. John’s Day are said to recall the ship in which the lovers tossed upon the stormy sea, and the bonfires commemorate the burning of it. When the fires have died out, the swings are laid aside and never used again either in the village or at the solitary alehouse until spring comes round once more.(742) Here it is natural to connect both swings and bonfires with the apparent course of the sun, who reaches the highest and turning point of his orbit on St. John’s Day. Bonfires and swings perhaps were originally charms intended to kindle and speed afresh on its heavenly road “the golden swing in the sky.” Among the Letts of South Livonia and Curland the summer solstice is the occasion of a great festival of flowers, at which the people sing songs with the constant refrain of _lihgo, lihgo_. It has been proposed to derive the word _lihgo_ from the Lettish verb _ligot_, “to swing,” with reference to the sun swinging in the sky at this turning-point of his course.(743)