For the purpose of the present inquiry I also omit all the rites of leaping sportfully, and of driving cattle through light fires.  Of these cases, from the Roman Palilia, or Parilia, downwards, there is a useful collection in Brand’s Popular Antiquities under the heading ’Midsummer Eve.’  One exception must be made for a passage from Torreblanca’s Demonologia (p. 106).  People are said ’pyras circumire et transilire in futuri mali averruncatione’—­to ’go round about and leap over lighted pyres for the purpose of averting future evils,’ as in Mannhardt’s theory of the Hirpi.  This may be connected with the Bulgarian rite, to be described later, but, as a rule, in all these instances, the fire is a light one of straw, and no sort of immunity is claimed by the people who do not walk through, but leap across it.

These kinds of analogous examples, then, it suffices merely to mention.  For the others, in all affairs of this sort, the wide diffusion of a tale of miracle is easily explained.  The fancy craves for miracles, and the universal mode of inventing a miracle is to deny the working, on a given occasion, of a law of Nature.  Gravitation was suspended, men floated in air, inanimate bodies became agile, or fire did not burn.  No less natural than the invention of the myth is the attempt to feign it by conjuring or by the use of some natural secret.  But in the following modern instances the miracle of passing through the fire uninjured is apparently feigned with considerable skill, or is performed by the aid of some secret of Nature not known to modern chemistry.  The evidence is decidedly good enough to prove that in Europe, India, and Polynesia the ancient rite of the Hirpi of Soracte is still a part of religious or customary ceremony.

Fijian Fire-walk

The case which originally drew my attention to this topic is that given by Mr. Basil Thomson in his South Sea Yarns (p. 195).  Mr. Thomson informs me that he wrote his description on the day after he witnessed the ceremony, a precaution which left no room for illusions of memory.  Of course, in describing a conjuring trick, one who is not an expert records, not what actually occurred, but what he was able to see, and the chances are that he did not see, and therefore omits, an essential circumstance, while he misstates other circumstances.  I am informed by Mrs. Steel, the author of The Potter’s Thumb and other stories of Indian life, that, in watching an Indian conjurer, she generally, or frequently, detects his method.  She says that the conjurer often begins by whirling rapidly before the eyes of the spectators a small polished skull of a monkey, and she is inclined to think that the spectators who look at this are, in some way, more easily deluded.  These facts are mentioned that I may not seem unaware of what can be said to impugn the accuracy of the descriptions of the Fire Rite, as given by Mr. Thomson and other witnesses.