the
season. Formerly, these adolescent guizards used to seat themselves in
crates, and accompanied by fiddlers, were dragged through the
town."[686]

[Persian festival of fire at the winter solstice.]

The Persians used to celebrate a festival of fire called _Sada_ or
_Saza_ at the winter solstice. On the longest night of the year they
kindled bonfires everywhere, and kings and princes tied dry grass to the
feet of birds and animals, set fire to the grass, and then let the birds
and beasts fly or run blazing through the air or over the fields and
mountains, so that the whole air and earth appeared to be on fire.[687]

Sec. 8. _The Need-fire_

[European festivals of fire in seasons of distress and calamity; the
need-fire.]

The fire-festivals hitherto described are all celebrated periodically at
certain stated times of the year. But besides these regularly recurring
celebrations the peasants in many parts of Europe have been wont from
time immemorial to resort to a ritual of fire at irregular intervals in
seasons of distress and calamity, above all when their cattle were
attacked by epidemic disease. No account of the popular European
fire-festivals would be complete without some notice of these remarkable
rites, which have all the greater claim on our attention because they
may perhaps be regarded as the source and origin of all the other
fire-festivals; certainly they must date from a very remote antiquity.
The general name by which they are known among the Teutonic peoples is
need-fire.[688]

[The needfire in the Middle Ages; the needfire at Neustadt in 1598.]

The history of the need-fire can be traced back to early Middle Ages;
for in the reign of Pippin, King of Franks, the practice of kindling
need-fires was denounced as a heathen superstition by a synod of
prelates and nobles held under the presidency of Boniface, Archbishop of
Mainz.[689] Not long afterwards the custom was again forbidden, along
with many more relics of expiring paganism, in an "Index of
Superstitions and Heathenish Observances," which has been usually
referred to the year 743 A.D., though some scholars assign it a later
date under the reign of Charlemagne.[690] In Germany the need-fires
would seem to have been popular down to the second half of the
nineteenth century. Thus in the year 1598, when a fatal cattle-plague
was raging at Neustadt, near Marburg, a wise man of the name of Joh.
Koehler induced the authorities of the town to