preted as a sun-charm. Again, we have seen
that in the Vosges Mountains the people believe that the midsummer fires
help to preserve the fruits of the earth and ensure good crops.[821] In
Sweden the warmth or cold of the coming season is inferred from the
direction in which the flames of the May Day bonfire are blown; if they
blow to the south, it will be warm, if to the north, cold.[822] No doubt
at present the direction of the flames is regarded merely as an augury
of the weather, not as a mode of influencing it. But we may be pretty
sure that this is one of the cases in which magic has dwindled into
divination. So in the Eifel Mountains, when the smoke blows towards the
corn-fields, this is an omen that the harvest will be abundant.[823] But
the older view may have been not merely that the smoke and flames
prognosticated, but that they actually produced an abundant harvest, the
heat of the flames acting like sunshine on the corn. Perhaps it was with
this view that people in the Isle of Man lit fires to windward of their
fields in order that the smoke might blow over them.[824] So in South
Africa, about the month of April, the Matabeles light huge fires to the
windward of their gardens, "their idea being that the smoke, by passing
over the crops, will assist the ripening of them."[825] Among the Zulus
also "medicine is burned on a fire placed to windward of the garden, the
fumigation which the plants in consequence receive being held to improve
the crop."[826] Again, the idea of our European peasants that the corn
will grow well as far as the blaze of the bonfire is visible,[827] may
be interpreted as a remnant of the belief in the quickening and
fertilizing power of the bonfires. The same belief, it may be argued,
reappears in the notion that embers taken from the bonfires and inserted
in the fields will promote the growth of the crops,[828] and it may be
thought to underlie the customs of sowing flax-seed in the direction in
which the flames blow,[829] of mixing the ashes of the bonfire with the
seed-corn at sowing,[830] of scattering the ashes by themselves over the
field to fertilize it,[831] and of incorporating a piece of the Yule log
in the plough to make the seeds thrive.[832] The opinion that the flax
or hemp will grow as high as the flames rise or the people leap over
them[833] belongs clearly to the same class of ideas. Again, at Konz, on
the banks of the Moselle, if the blazing wheel which was trundled down