the fire, smear the soles of their feet with a drug’ (medicamentum).  Silius Italicus (v. 175) speaks of the ancient rite, when ’the holy bearer of the bow (Apollo) rejoices in the kindled pyres, and the ministrant thrice gladly bears entrails to the god through the harmless flames.’  Servius gives an aetiological myth to account for the practice.  ’Wolves came and carried off the entrails from the fire; shepherds, following them, were killed by mortal vapours from a cave; thence ensued a pestilence, because they had followed the wolves.  An oracle bade them “play the wolf,” i.e. live on plunder, whence they were called Hirpi, wolves,’ an attempt to account for a wolf clan-name.  There is also a story that, when the grave of Feronia seemed all on fire, and the people were about carrying off the statue, it suddenly grew green again. {150a}

Mannhardt decides that the so-called wolves leaped through the sun-god’s fire, in the interest of the health of the community.  He elucidates this by a singular French popular custom, held on St. John’s Eve, at Jumieges.  The Brethren of the Green Wolf select a leader called Green Wolf, there is an ecclesiastical procession, cure and all, a souper maigre, the lighting of the usual St. John’s fire, a dance round the fire, the capture of next year’s Green Wolf, a mimicry of throwing him into the fire, a revel, and next day a loaf of pain benit, above a pile of green leaves, is carried about. {150b}

The wolf, thinks Mannhardt, is the Vegetation-spirit in animal form.  Many examples of the ‘Corn-wolf’ in popular custom are given by Mr. Frazer in The Golden Bough (ii. 3-6).  The Hirpi of Soracte, then, are so called because they play the part of Corn-wolves, or Korndamonen in wolf shape.  But Mannhardt adds, ‘this seems, at least, to be the explanation.’  He then combats Kuhn’s theory of Feronia as lightning goddess. {151a} He next compares the strange Arcadian cannibal rites on Mount Lycaeus. {151b}

Mannhardt’s Deficiency

In all this ingenious reasoning, Mannhardt misses a point.  What the Hirpi did was not merely to leap through light embers, as in the Roman Palilia, and the parallel doings in Scotland, England, France, and elsewhere, at Midsummer (St. John’s Eve).  The Hirpi would not be freed from military service and all other State imposts for merely doing what any set of peasants do yearly for nothing.  Nor would Varro have found it necessary to explain so easy and common a feat by the use of a drug with which the feet were smeared.  Mannhardt, as Mr. Max Muller says, ventured himself little ‘among red skins and black skins.’  He read Dr. Tylor, and appreciated the method of illustrating ancient rites and beliefs from the living ways of living savages. {151c} But, in practice, he mainly confined himself to illustrating ancient rites and beliefs by survival in modern rural folk-lore.  I therefore supplement Mannhardt’s evidence from European folk-lore by evidence from savage life, and by a folk-lore case which Mannhardt did not know.