In the Armenian Church the sacred new fire is kindled not at Easter but at Candlemas, that is, on the second of February, or on the eve of that festival.  The materials of the bonfire are piled in an open space near a church, and they are generally ignited by young couples who have been married within the year.  However, it is the bishop or his vicar who lights the candles with which fire is set to the pile.  All young married pairs are expected to range themselves about the fire and to dance round it.  Young men leap over the flames, but girls and women content themselves with going round them, while they pray to be preserved from the itch and other skin-diseases.  When the ceremony is over, the people eagerly pick up charred sticks or ashes of the fire and preserve them or scatter them on the four corners of the roof, in the cattle-stall, in the garden, and on the pastures; for these holy sticks and ashes protect men and cattle against disease, and fruit-trees against worms and caterpillars.  Omens, too, are drawn from the direction in which the wind blows the flames and the smoke:  if it carries them eastward, there is hope of a good harvest; but if it inclines them westward, the people fear that the crops will fail.[326]

[The new fire and the burning of Judas at Easter are probably relics of paganism.]

In spite of the thin cloak of Christianity thrown over these customs by representing the new fire as an emblem of Christ and the figure burned in it as an effigy of Judas, we can hardly doubt that both practices are of pagan origin.  Neither of them has the authority of Christ or of his disciples; but both of them have abundant analogies in popular custom and superstition.  Some instances of the practice of annually extinguishing fires and relighting them from a new and sacred flame have already come before us;[327] but a few examples may here be cited for the sake of illustrating the wide diffusion of a custom which has found its way into the ritual both of the Eastern and of the Western Church.

[The new fire at the summer solstice among the Incas of Peru; the new fire among the Indians of Mexico and New Mexico; the new fire among the Esquimaux.]

The Incas of Peru celebrated a festival called Raymi, a word which their native historian Garcilasso de la Vega tells us was equivalent to our Easter.  It was held in honour of the sun at the solstice in June.  For three days before the festival the people fasted, men did not sleep with their wives, and no fires were lighted in Cuzco, the capital.  The sacred new fire was obtained direct from the sun by concentrating his beams on a highly polished concave plate and reflecting them on a little cotton wool.  With this holy fire the sheep and lambs offered to the sun were consumed, and the flesh of such as were to be eaten at the festival was roasted.  Portions of the new fire were also conveyed to the temple of the sun and to the convent of the sacred virgins, where