Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/224

 2i6 A. W. Moore.

new.^ It is probable, too, that the old Manx name of the Epiphany, Lail Chibbyrt Ushtey (" Feast-day of the Water Well") may record a similar attempt on the part of the Church to interfere with pagan observances on the last day of the Saturnalia, by celebrating the baptism of Christ by a ceremonial visit to the sacred wells. These attempts, however, to turn a pagan ceremonial into a Christian one have not been successful, as the very wells which in Man, as in Ireland, were named after Christian saints, and were probably visited on the festivals of these saints, have been, till quite recently, resorted to at a festival connected with pagan and not with Christian rites. This festival, which was formerly kept on the first of August, is called Laa Lhuanys, or Laa Lfmnys (" Lhuanys's Day"), and was probably originally associated with the Celtic god Lug, who, as he was said to have been brought up at the court of Manannan, the eponymous ruler of Man, was closely connected with the mythical history of that island.^ He was a divinity, corresponding partly to Hermes and partly to Apollo. In Ireland, his festival, called the Lug-Nassad, or the wedding of Lug, was " the great event of the summer half of the year, which extended from the Kalends of May to the Kalends of winter. The Celtic year was more thermometric than astronomical, and the Lug-Nassad was, so to say, its summer solstice."^ A fair, till recently held on this day both in Man and Ireland, at which games took place, is, together with the well-visiting, all that remains of this fes- tival within living memory. As regards the rites practised at the well-visiting, it is clear that the Manx Church, in the 17th and 1 8th centuries, fully recognised their pagan tendency, as it attempted, though in vain, to put an end to them.'* It is, however, probable that the alteration

^ We know that St. Patrick is said to have done this in Ireland, a country with which Man was then closely connected.

■^ Rhys, Hibbcrt Lectures, 1886, p. 397. ^ Ibid., p. 419.


 * For proof of this, see Folk-Lore of tJic hic of Man, p. 121.