Evils having been or being about to be cast off in the New Year ritual, a few more added to the number can make little difference.  Hence among primitive peoples New Year is often characterised by orgiastic rites.  These took place at the Calends in Gaul, and were denounced by councils and preachers.[903] In Ireland the merriment at Samhain is often mentioned in the texts,[904] and similar orgiastic rites lurk behind the Hallowe’en customs in Scotland and in the licence still permitted to youths in the quietest townships of the West Highlands at Samhain eve.

Samhain, as has been seen, was also a festival of the dead, whose ghosts were fed at this time.[905]

As the powers of growth were in danger and in eclipse in winter, men thought it necessary to assist them.  As a magical aid the Samhain bonfire was chief, and it is still lit in the Highlands.  Brands were carried round, and from it the new fire was lit in each house.  In North Wales people jumped through the fire, and when it was extinct, rushed away to escape the “black sow” who would take the hindmost.[906] The bonfire represented the sun, and was intended to strengthen it.  But representing the sun, it had all the sun’s force, hence those who jumped through it were strengthened and purified.  The Welsh reference to the hindmost and to the black sow may point to a former human sacrifice, perhaps of any one who stumbled in jumping through the fire.  Keating speaks of a Druidic sacrifice in the bonfire, whether of man or beast is not specified.[907] Probably the victim, like the scapegoat, was laden with the accumulated evils of the year, as in similar New Year customs elsewhere.  Later belief regarded the sacrifice, if sacrifice there was, as offered to the powers of evil—­the black sow, unless this animal is a reminiscence of the corn-spirit in its harmful aspect.  Earlier powers, whether of growth or of blight, came to be associated with Samhain as demoniac beings—­the “malignant bird flocks” which blighted crops and killed animals, the samhanach which steals children, and Mongfind the banshee, to whom “women and the rabble” make petitions on Samhain eve.[908] Witches, evil-intentioned fairies, and the dead were particularly active then.

Though the sacrificial victim had come to be regarded as an offering to the powers of blight, he may once have represented a divinity of growth or, in earlier times, the corn-spirit.  Such a victim was slain at harvest, and harvest is often late in northern Celtic regions, while the slaying was sometimes connected not with the harvest field, but with the later threshing.  This would bring it near the Samhain festival.  The slaying of the corn-spirit was derived from the earlier slaying of a tree or vegetation-spirit embodied in a tree and also in a human or animal victim.  The corn-spirit was embodied in the last sheaf cut as well as in an animal or human being.[909] This human victim may have been regarded as a king, since