e. The community at Iona
perambulated a newly sown field with S. Columba's relics in time of
drought, and shook his tunic three times in the air, and were rewarded
by a plentiful rain, and later, by a bounteous harvest.[951]

Many of these local cults were pre-Celtic, but we need not therefore
suppose that the Celts, or the Aryans as a whole, had no such
cults.[952] The Aryans everywhere adopted local cults, but this they
would not have done if, as is supposed, they had themselves outgrown
them. The cults were local, but the Celts had similar local cults, and
easily accepted those of the people they conquered. We cannot explain
the persistence of such primitive cults as lie behind the great Celtic
festivals, both in classical times and over the whole area of Europe
among the peasantry, by referring them solely to a pre-Aryan folk. They
were as much Aryan as pre-Aryan. They belong to those unchanging strata
of religion which have so largely supplied the soil in which its later
and more spiritual growths have flourished. And among these they still
emerge, unchanged and unchanging, like the gaunt outcrops of some
ancient rock formation amid rich vegetation and fragrant flowers.

FOOTNOTES:

[889] Pliny, xvi. 45; Caesar, vi. 18. See my article "Calendar (Celtic)"
in Hastings' _Encyclopaedia of Rel. and Ethics_, iii. 78 f., for a full
discussion of the problems involved.

[890] O'Donovan, _Book of Rights_, Intro. lii f.

[891] O'Donovan, li.; Bertrand, 105; Keating, 300.

[892] Samhain may mean "summer-end," from _sam_, "summer," and _fuin_,
"sunset" or "end," but Dr. Stokes (_US_ 293) makes _samani_- mean
"assembly," i.e. the gathering of the people to keep the feast.

[893] Keating, 125, 300.

[894] See MacBain, _CM_ ix. 328.

[895] Brand, i. 390; Ramsay, _Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth
Century_, ii. 437; _Stat. Account_, xi. 621.

[896] Hazlitt, 297-298, 340; Campbell, _Witchcraft_, 285 f.

[897] Curtin, 72.

[898] Fitzgerald, _RC_ vi. 254.

[899] See Chambers, _Mediaeval Stage_, App. N, for the evidence from
canons and councils regarding these.

[900] Tille, _Yule and Christmas_, 96.

[901] Chambers, _Popular Rhymes_, 166.

[902] Hutchinson, _View of Northumberland_, ii. 45; Thomas, _Rev. de
l'Hist. des Rel._ xxxviii. 335 f.

[903] _Patrol. Lot._ xxxix. 2001.

[904] _IT_ i. 205; _RC_ v. 331; Leahy, i. 57.

[905] See p. 169, _supra_.

[906] The writer has himself seen such bonfires in th