Note 230.2 — Chapter XI · SACRED WELLS AND TREES.

Assuming this conjecture to be correct, we may go a step further. To anticipate again what I shall have to explain more fully hereafter, the union with the totem-god would have to be renewed at intervals. Some such intention perhaps governed the rite at Reggio Emilia, in Italy, which is now called “burying the old year.” At midnight of the last day of the year the head of the household goes into the courtyard of his house and thrusts into the ground a stake.230.2 Turning back to Wales, at Gumfreston, in Pembrokeshire, there is a holy well to which the villagers used to repair on Easter Day, when each of them would throw a crooked pin into the water. This was called “throwing Lent away.”231.1 On the same day at Bradwell, in Derbyshire, it was the practice for children to drop pins into the various wells in the town. A fairy was said to preside over each well, and to know whether a child had deposited a pin in her well, or not. On Easter Monday every child carried a bottle of sweetmeats all day long; and if a bottle were broken, it was because the child had forgotten to drop a pin into one of the wells, “the fairy of the well being the protector of the bottle.”231.2 I need hardly pause on the proof, which the comparison of these rites affords, of the absolute ritual equivalence of throwing pins into a holy well and driving a stake, or a nail, into the ground, or into a wall. Nor—even apart from the evidence of the custom at Bradwell, which is obviously much degraded—can it be necessary to insist on the improbability that anything would be thrown into a holy well with the idea of simply getting rid of it. The pins must have been intended, as elsewhere, to unite the thrower with the god. And the custom may accordingly be supposed to be a periodical renewal of union with the divinity, removed under Christian influences from the day of the pagan festival (perhaps May-day) to the nearest great feast-day of the Church. In the same way the Italian peasant in planting a stake in his courtyard—doubtless in the centre of his dwelling—would be renewing his union with his household god, and emphatically asserting once more his ownership of the house and his headship of the household.