Still more interesting, however, are those relics of yet earlier social states, which we find amongst the Anglo-Saxons themselves.  The production of fire by rubbing together two sticks is a common practice amongst all savages; and it has acquired a sacred significance which causes it to live on into more civilised stages.  Once a year the needfire was so lighted, and all the hearths of the village were rekindled from the blaze thus obtained.  Cattle were “passed through the fire” to preserve them from the attacks of fiends; and perhaps even children were sometimes treated in the same manner.  The ceremony, originally adopted, perhaps, by the English from their Celtic serfs, still lingers in remote parts of the country, as the lighting of fires on St. John’s Eve.  Tattooing the face was practised by the noble classes.  It seems probable that the early English sacrificed human victims, as the Germans certainly did to Wuotan (the High Dutch Woden); and we know that the practice of suttee existed, and that widows slew themselves on the death of their husbands, in order to accompany them to the other world.  Even more curious are the vestiges of Totemism, or primitive animal worship, common to all branches of the Aryan race, as well as to the North American Indians, the Australian black fellows, and many other savages.  Totemism consists in the belief that each family is literally descended from a particular plant or animal, whose name it bears; and members of the family generally refuse to pluck the plant or kill the animal after which they are named.  Of these beliefs we find apparently several traces in Anglo-Saxon life.  The genealogies of the kings include such names as those of the horse, the mare, the ash, and the whale.  In the very early Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, two of the characters bear the names of Wulf and Eofer (boar).  The wolf and the raven were sacred animals, and have left their memory in many places, as well as in such personal titles as AEthelwulf, the noble wolf.  The boar was also greatly reverenced; its head was used as an amulet, or as a crest for helmets, and oaths were taken upon it till late in the middle ages.  Our own boar’s head at Christmas is a relic of the old belief.  The sanctity of the horse and the ash has been already mentioned.  Now many of the Anglo-Saxon clans bore names implying their descent from such plants or animals.  Thus a charter mentions the AEscings, or sons of the ash, in Surrey; another refers to the Earnings, or sons of the eagle (earn); a third to the Heartings, or sons of the hart; a fourth to the Wylfings, or sons of the wolf; and a fifth to the Thornings, or sons of the thorn.  The oak has left traces of his descendants at Oakington, in Cambridge:  the birch, at Birchington, in Kent; the boar (Eofer) at Evringham, in Yorkshire; the hawk, at Hawkinge, in Kent; the horse, at Horsington, in Lincolnshire; the raven, at Raveningham, in Norfolk; the sun, at Sunning, in Berks; and the serpent (Wyrm), at Wormingford, Worminghall, and Wormington, in Essex, Bucks, and Gloucester, respectively.  Every one of these objects is a common and well-known totem amongst savage tribes; and the inference that at some earlier period the Anglo-Saxons had been Totemists is almost irresistible.