Note 8 — Chapter II · Heat.
Reading edition
The Sixth Council of Constantinople (an. 680), by its sixty-fifth canon, forbids these fires in the following terms:—‘Those bonefires that are kindled by certain people before their shops and houses, over which also they use ridiculously to leap, by a certain ancient custom, we command them from henceforth to cease. Whoever, therefore, shall do any such thing, if he be a clergyman, let him be deposed; if he be a layman, let him be excommunicated. For in the Fourth Book of the Kings it is thus written: And Manasseh built an altar to all the host of heaven, in the two courts of the Lord’s house, and made his children to pass through the fire.’ There is a charming naïveté in this denunciation. It is no longer doubtful that this ‘bonefire’ over which people leaped came from the same source as that Gehenna from which the Church derived the orthodox theory of hell, as we have already seen. When Shakespeare speaks (Macbeth) of ‘the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,’8 he is, with his wonted felicity, assigning the flames of hell and the fires of Moloch and Baal their right archæological relation.