people themselves.  Now in the case of the fire-festivals the destructive aspect of fire is one upon which the people dwell again and again; and it is highly significant that the great evil against which the fire is directed appears to be witchcraft.  Again and again we are told that the fires are intended to burn or repel the witches;[858] and the intention is sometimes graphically expressed by burning an effigy of a witch in the fire.[859] Hence, when we remember the great hold which the dread of witchcraft has had on the popular European mind in all ages, we may suspect that the primary intention of all these fire-festivals was simply to destroy or at all events get rid of the witches, who were regarded as the causes of nearly all the misfortunes and calamities that befall men, their cattle, and their crops.[860]

[Amongst the evils for which the fire-festivals are deemed remedies the foremost is cattle-disease, and cattle-disease is often supposed to be an effect of witchcraft.]

This suspicion is confirmed when we examine the evils for which the bonfires and torches were supposed to provide a remedy.  Foremost, perhaps, among these evils we may reckon the diseases of cattle; and of all the ills that witches are believed to work there is probably none which is so constantly insisted on as the harm they do to the herds, particularly by stealing the milk from the cows.[861] Now it is significant that the need-fire, which may perhaps be regarded as the parent of the periodic fire-festivals, is kindled above all as a remedy for a murrain or other disease of cattle; and the circumstance suggests, what on general grounds seems probable, that the custom of kindling the need-fire goes back to a time when the ancestors of the European peoples subsisted chiefly on the products of their herds, and when agriculture as yet played a subordinate part in their lives.  Witches and wolves are the two great foes still dreaded by the herdsman in many parts of Europe;[862] and we need not wonder that he should resort to fire as a powerful means of banning them both.  Among Slavonic peoples it appears that the foes whom the need-fire is designed to combat are not so much living witches as vampyres and other evil spirits,[863] and the ceremony, as we saw, aims rather at repelling these baleful beings than at actually consuming them in the flames.  But for our present purpose these distinctions are immaterial.  The important thing to observe is that among the Slavs the need-fire, which is probably the original of all the ceremonial fires now under consideration, is not a sun-charm, but clearly and unmistakably nothing but a means of protecting man and beast against the attacks of maleficent creatures, whom the peasant thinks to burn or scare by the heat of the fire, just as he might burn or scare wild animals.

[Again, the bonfires are thought to avert hail, thunder, lightning, and other maladies, all of which are attributed to the maleficent arts of witches.]