mmer, Lammas that of Lugnasad, and some
attempt was made to hallow, if not to oust, the older ritual.

The Celtic festivals being primarily connected with agricultural and
pastoral life, we find in their ritual survivals traces not only of a
religious but of a magical view of things, of acts designed to assist
the powers of life and growth. The proof of this will be found in a
detailed examination of the surviving customs connected with them.

SAMHAIN.

Samhain,[892] beginning the Celtic year, was an important social and
religious occasion. The powers of blight were beginning their
ascendancy, yet the future triumph of the powers of growth was not
forgotten. Probably Samhain had gathered up into itself other feasts
occurring earlier or later. Thus it bears traces of being a harvest
festival, the ritual of the earlier harvest feast being transferred to
the winter feast, as the Celts found themselves in lands where harvest
is not gathered before late autumn. The harvest rites may, however, have
been associated with threshing rather than ingathering. Samhain also
contains in its ritual some of the old pastoral cults, while as a New
Year feast its ritual is in great part that of all festivals of
beginnings.

New fire was brought into each house at Samhain from the sacred
bonfire,[893] itself probably kindled from the need-fire by the friction
of pieces of wood. This preserved its purity, the purity necessary to a
festival of beginnings.[894] The putting away of the old fires was
probably connected with various rites for the expulsion of evils, which
usually occur among many peoples at the New Year festival. By that
process of dislocation which scattered the Samhain ritual over a wider
period and gave some of it to Christmas, the kindling of the Yule log
may have been originally connected with this festival.

Divination and forecasting the fate of the inquirer for the coming year
also took place. Sometimes these were connected with the bonfire, stones
placed in it showing by their appearance the fortune or misfortune
awaiting their owners.[895] Others, like those described by Burns in his
"Hallowe'en," were unconnected with the bonfire and were of an erotic
nature.[896]

The slaughter of animals for winter consumption which took place at
Samhain, or, as now, at Martinmas, though connected with economic
reasons, had a distinctly religious aspect, as it had among the Teutons.
In recent times in Ireland one of the an