The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps

BEL FIRE & MAY DAY IN BRITAIN 271

Chaldees, who were also, as we have seen, addicted to human sacrifice in their Lunar cult of matriarchy with its malignant demons, under their Druid priests. Thus they changed the date of this Bel-Fire festival from the Midsummer solstice to their own May Day festival of their Mother-goddess on the First of May, which began their lunar Vegetation Year. Thus we have the vestiges of this sacrificial so-called ‘“‘ Beltane”’ rite surviving in Britain on May Day with the ceremonial sacrifice of a boy victim by lot.

[This sacrificial May Day ‘ Beltane rite seems, from the numerous accounts of its wide prevalence up till a few decades ago, to have been the more common, as the Aryan element is so relatively small. After cutting a circle and lighting the bonfire and torches, a cake is made of oatmeal, eggs and milk and baked in the fire, and divided up into a portion for each boy, one of the cakes being daubed black with embers. The pieces are then put into a cap, and drawn blindfolded, and whoever draws the blackened piece is the “ devoted ’’ person or victim, who is to be sacrificed to obtain good luck for the year. This “* devoted ” victim is, of course, nowadays released or acquitted with a penalty, which is to leap three times through the flames.*]

It was possibly, I think, the eating of the body of the human victims thus sacrificed by the Druid Chaldees on May Day, as a sacrament, which forms the basis of the historical references by St. Jerome and others in the early centuries of our era to the prevalence of cannibalism amongst savage tribes in Britain.

The sacred fire for igniting the fire-offering to Bil or Bel, as the God of the Sun, was generated by the Early Aryans and Pheenicians by the laborious friction of two tinder sticks or fire drill, the oldest method of fire-production. This generation of the sacred fire by friction of two tinder sticks was also the method employed in Britain down to the Middle Ages, for preparing the ‘‘ Perpetual Fire” in shrines, and for the special ‘‘ Need-Fires”’ in cases of dire need from plague, pestilence, drought or invasion and also presumably for lighting these Bel-Fires. The repositories for these

1 For details and refs, see H.F.F., 44, etc., 336.