(M146) In Switzerland on Midsummer Eve fires are, or used to be, kindled on high places in the cantons of Bern, Neuchatel, Valais, and Geneva.(422) In Austria the midsummer customs and superstitions resemble those of Germany. Thus in some parts of the Tyrol bonfires are kindled and burning discs hurled into the air.(423) In the lower valley of the Inn a taterdemalian effigy is carted about the village on Midsummer Day and then burned. He is called the _Lotter_, which has been corrupted into Luther. At Ambras, one of the villages where Martin Luther is thus burned in effigy, they say that if you go through the village between eleven and twelve on St. John’s Night and wash yourself in three wells, you will see all who are to die in the following year.(424) At Gratz on St. John’s Eve (the twenty-third of June) the common people used to make a puppet called the _Tatermann_, which they dragged to the bleaching ground, and pelted with burning besoms till it took fire.(425) At Reutte, in the Tyrol, people believed that the flax would grow as high as they leaped over the midsummer bonfire, and they took pieces of charred wood from the fire and stuck them in their flax-fields the same night, leaving them there till the flax harvest had been got in.(426) In Lower Austria fires are lit in the fields, commonly in front of a cross, and the people dance and sing round them and throw flowers into the flames. Before each handful of flowers is tossed into the fire, a set speech is made; then the dance is resumed and the dancers sing in chorus the last words of the speech. At evening bonfires are kindled on the heights, and the boys caper round them, brandishing lighted torches drenched in pitch. Whoever jumps thrice across the fire will not suffer from fever within the year. Cart-wheels are often smeared with pitch, ignited, and sent rolling and blazing down the hillsides.(427)