his slaying the dragon Pytho; but it had another feature which encourages one to equate it with the Goidelic feast in spite of the discrepancy of date, namely, that it was considered the regular occasion for all kinds of purification in order to preserve the city from plague and pestilence. Among the peculiar rites that characterized it was the leading about of two adult persons, as it were scapegoats, excepting that at the end they were sacrificed and burnt, so that their ashes might be dispersed. With this may be compared Cormac's account of the ancient Beltaine, when he says that it was so called from two fires which the druids of Erinn used to make with great incantations; and cattle, he adds, used to be brought to those fires and driven between them as a safeguard against the diseases of the year. The regretable brevity of Cormac is made less serious by what is known of the practices connected with the First of May in Scotland; since we clearly learn from them how one man originally became a victim for his companions, and how the selection was made: they did not choose him for his ugliness, as the ancient Greeks seem to have done.[1] The parallel which has been roughly drawn here between the Celtic and the Greek calendar suggests that at one time the Greeks regarded the old year as ending with the Apaturia, and the new one beginning with the Chalceia in honour
- ↑ As to the Thargelia and Delia, see Preller, i. 209-10, and A. Mommsen, pp. 414-25; Cormac's statement will be found in the Stokes-O'Donovan edition, pp. 19, 23; but for an account of the Scotch Beltaine, see Sir John Sinclair's Statistical Account of Scotland, Vol. xi. p. 620; also Pennant's Tour in Scotland in 1769 (3rd ed., Warrington, 1774), i. 97, 186, 291; Stephens' Gododin, pp. 124-6; and an interesting monograph on the subject by Dr. Murray in the New English Dict. s. v. Beltane.
