Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/260

250 It is related by Plutarch in his life of Numa, written in the first century, that among the ordinances made for the Vestal Virgins when they were established in Rome, there was the following. If the sacred fire which it was their duty to keep continually burning should happen to go out, it was not to be lighted again from another fire, but new fire was to be made by lighting from the sun a pure and undefiled flame. "And they kindle it especially with vessels which are shaped hollow from the side of an isosceles triangle with a (vertical) right angle, and converge from the circumference to a single centre. When such an instrument is set opposite to the sun, so that the impinging rays from all sides crowd and fold together round the centre, it divides the rarefied air, and quickly kindles the lightest and driest matters applied to it, the beams acquiring by the repulsion a body and fiery stroke." Stories of Numa's ordinances will hardly be claimed as sober history, though it is possible that such a process as this may have been used, at least in late times, to rekindle the fire of Vesta. But there is in Festus another account of the way in which this was done, having in its favour every analogy from the practices of kindling the sacred fire among our Indo-European race, both in Asia and in Europe. "If the fire of Vesta were extinguished, the virgins were scourged by the priests, whose practice it was to drill into a board of auspicious wood till the fire came, which was received and carried to the temple by the virgin, in a brazen colander."

The parallel passage to that in the life of Numa is to be found in the account of the feast of Raymi, or the Sun, celebrated in ancient Peru, according to Garcilaso de la Vega, whose 'Commentaries' were first published in 1609-16, the Spanish discovery having taken place in 1527. He says this festival was celebrated at the summer solstice. "The fire for this sacrifice had to be new, given, as they said, by the hand of the sun. For which purpose they took a great bracelet,