associated with mountains or hills.  The Celtic bonfires were held at the beginning of May, while the Teutonic May-day, or Walpurgisnacht, is a very ancient sacred festival, associated with erotic ceremonial, and regarded by Grimm as having a common origin with the Roman floralia and the Greek dionysia.  Thus, in Europe, Grimm concludes:  “there are four different ways of welcoming summer.  In Sweden and Gothland a battle of winter and summer, a triumphal entry of the latter.  In Schonen, Denmark, Lower Saxony, and England, simply May-riding, or fetching of the May-wagon.  On the Rhine merely a battle of winter and summer, without immersion, without the pomp of an entry.  In Franconia, Thuringia, Meissen, Silesia, and Bohemia only the carrying out of wintry death; no battle, no formal introduction of summer.  Of these festivals the first and second fall in May, the third and fourth in March.  In the first two, the whole population take part with unabated enthusiasm; in the last two only the lower poorer class....  Everything goes to prove that the approach of summer was to our forefathers a holy tide, welcomed by sacrifice, feast, and dance, and largely governing and brightening the people’s life."[144] The early spring festival of March, the festival of Ostara, the goddess of spring, has become identified with the Christian festival of Resurrection (just as the summer solstice festival has been placed beneath the patronage of St. John the Baptist); but there has been only an amalgamation of closely-allied rites, for the Christian festival also may be traced back to a similar origin.  Among the early Arabians the great ragab feast, identified by Ewald and Robertson Smith with the Jewish paschal feast, fell in the spring or early summer, when the camels and other domestic animals brought forth their young and the shepherds offered their sacrifices.[145] Babylonia, the supreme early centre of religious and cosmological culture, presents a more decisive example of the sex festival.  The festival of Tammuz is precisely analogous to the European festival of St. John’s Day.  Tammuz was the solar god of spring vegetation, and closely associated with Ishtar, also an agricultural deity of fertility.  The Tammuz festival was, in the earliest times, held toward the summer solstice, at the time of the first wheat and barley harvest.  In Babylonia, as in primitive Europe, there were only two seasons; the festival of Tammuz, coming at the end of winter and the beginning of summer, was a fast followed by a feast, a time of mourning for winter, of rejoicing for summer.  It is part of the primitive function of sacred ritual to be symbolical of natural processes, a mysterious representation of natural processes with the object of bringing them about.[146] The Tammuz festival was an appeal to the powers of Nature to exhibit their generative functions; its erotic character is indicated not only by the well-known fact that the priestesses