Note (return) — Chapter IV

This last account leaves no doubt as to the significance of the need-fire in the minds of Slavonian peasantry. They regard it simply as a barrier interposed between their cattle and the evil spirit, which prowls, like a hungry wolf, round the fold and can, like a wolf, be kept at bay by fire. The same interpretation of the need-fire comes out, hardly less clearly, in the account which another writer gives of a ceremony witnessed by him at the village of Setonje, at the foot of the Homolje mountains in the great forest of Servia. An epidemic was raging among the children, and the need-fire was resorted to as a means of staying the plague. It was produced by an old man and an old woman in the first of the ways described above; that is, they made it in the dark by rubbing two sticks of lime wood against each other. Before the healing virtue of the fire was applied to the inhabitants of the village, two old women performed the following ceremony. Both bore the name of Stana, from the verb stati, "to remain standing"; for the ceremony could not be successfully performed by persons of any other name. One of them carried a copper kettle full of water, the other an old house-lock with the key. Thus equipped they repaired to a spot outside of the village, and there the old dame with the kettle asked the old dame with the lock, "Whither away?" and the other answered her, "I came to shut the village against ill-luck." With that she locked the lock and threw it with the key into the kettle of water. Then they marched thrice round the village, repeating the ceremony of the lock and key at each round. Meantime all the villagers, arrayed in their best clothes, were assembled in an open place. All the fires in the houses had been previously extinguished. Two sturdy yokels now dug a tunnel through a mound beside an oak tree; the tunnel was just high enough to let a man creep through it on all fours. Two fires, lit by the need-fire, were now laid, one at each end of the tunnel; and the old woman with the kettle took her stand at the entrance of the tunnel, while the one with the lock posted herself at the exit. Facing the latter stood another woman with a great pot of milk before her, and on the other side was set a pot full of melted swine's fat. All was now ready. The villagers thereupon crawled through the tunnel on hands and knees, one behind the other. Each, as he emerged from the tunnel, received a spoonful of milk from the woman and looked at his face reflected in the pot of melted swine's fat. Then another woman made a cross with a piece of charcoal on his back. When all the inhabitants had thus crept through the tunnel and been doctored at the other end, each took some glowing embers home with him in a pot wherewith to rekindle the fire on the domestic hearth. Lastly they put some of the charcoal in a vessel of water and drank the mixture in order to be thereby magically protected against the epidemic.716