In all this ingenious reasoning, Mannhardt misses a point. What the
Hirpi did was _not_ merely to leap through light embers, as in the Roman
Palilia, and the parallel doings in Scotland, England, France, and
elsewhere, at Midsummer (St. John's Eve). The Hirpi would not be freed
from military service and all other State imposts for merely doing what
any set of peasants do yearly for nothing. Nor would Varro have found it
necessary to explain so easy and common a feat by the use of a drug with
which the feet were smeared. Mannhardt, as Mr. Max Muller says, ventured
himself little 'among red skins and black skins.' He read Dr. Tylor, and
appreciated the method of illustrating ancient rites and beliefs from the
living ways of living savages. {151c} But, in practice, he mainly
confined himself to illustrating ancient rites and beliefs by survival in
modern rural folk-lore. I therefore supplement Mannhardt's evidence from
European folk-lore by evidence from savage life, and by a folk-lore case
which Mannhardt did not know.