eir violent deaths.
Certain of the dead were thus commemorated at Lugnasad, a festival of
fertility. Both the corn-spirit or divinity slain in the reaping of the
corn, and the human victims, were appeased by its observance.[548] The
legend of Carman makes her hostile to the corn--a curious way of
regarding a corn-goddess. But we have already seen that gods of
fertility were sometimes thought of as causing blight, and in
folk-belief the corn-spirit is occasionally believed to be dangerous.
Such inversions occur wherever revolutions in religion take place.

The great commemoration of the dead was held on Samhain eve, a festival
intended to aid the dying powers of vegetation, whose life, however, was
still manifested in evergreen shrubs, in the mistletoe, in the sheaf of
corn from last harvest--the abode of the corn-spirit.[549] Probably,
also, human representatives of the vegetation or corn-spirit were slain,
and this may have suggested the belief in the presence of their ghosts
at this festival. Or the festival being held at the time of the death of
vegetation, the dead would naturally be commemorated then. Or, as in
Scandinavia, they may have been held to have an influence on fertility,
as an extension of the belief that certain slain persons represented
spirits of fertility, or because trees and plants growing on the barrows
of the dead were thought to be tenanted by their spirits.[550] In
Scandinavia, the dead were associated with female spirits or _fylgjur_,
identified with the _disir_, a kind of earth-goddesses, living in hollow
hills.[551] The nearest Celtic analogy to these is the _Matres_,
goddesses of fertility. Bede says that Christmas eve was called
_Modranicht_, "Mothers' Night,"[552] and as many of the rites of Samhain
were transferred to Yule, the former date of _Modranicht_ may have been
Samhain, just as the Scandinavian _Disablot_, held in November, was a
festival of the _disir_ and of the dead.[553] It has been seen that the
Celtic Earth-god was lord of the dead, and that he probably took the
place of an Earth-goddess or goddesses, to whom the _Matres_ certainly
correspond. Hence the connection of the dead with female Earth-spirits
would be explained. Mother Earth had received the dead before her place
was taken by the Celtic Dispater. Hence the time of Earth's decay was
the season when the dead, her children, would be commemorated. Whatever
be the reason, Celts, Teutons, and others have commemorated the