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Updated: June 22, 2025
She further explained that the persons who kindle a need-fire should always be two brothers or at least bear the same Christian name. In the summer of 1828 there was much sickness among the pigs and the cows of Eddesse, a village near Meinersen, in the south of Hanover.
The important thing to observe is that among the Slavs the need-fire, which is probably the original of all the ceremonial fires now under consideration, is not a sun-charm, but clearly and unmistakably nothing but a means of protecting man and beast against the attacks of maleficent creatures, whom the peasant thinks to burn or scare by the heat of the fire, just as he might burn or scare wild animals.
In this latter custom we may suspect that the fire kindled on the grave of the buried cow was originally made by the friction of wood, in other words, that it was a need-fire. Again, writing in the year 1862, Sir Arthur Mitchell tells us that "for the cure of the murrain in cattle, one of the herd is still sacrificed for the good of the whole. This is done by burying it alive.
Now it is significant that the need-fire, which may perhaps be regarded as the parent of the periodic fire-festivals, is kindled above all as a remedy for a murrain or other disease of cattle; and the circumstance suggests, what on general grounds seems probable, that the custom of kindling the need-fire goes back to a time when the ancestors of the European peoples subsisted chiefly on the products of their herds, and when agriculture as yet played a subordinate part in their lives.
M. Martin, "Description of the Western Islands of Scotland," in J. Pinkerton's General Collection of Voyages and Travels, iii. The second edition of Martin's book, which Pinkerton reprints, was published at London in 1716. For John Ramsay's account of the need-fire, see above, pp. 147 sq. J. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie,* i. 506, referring to Miss Austin as his authority.
The history of the need-fire can be traced back to early Middle Ages; for in the reign of Pippin, King of Franks, the practice of kindling need-fires was denounced as a heathen superstition by a synod of prelates and nobles held under the presidency of Boniface, Archbishop of Mainz. In Germany the need-fires would seem to have been popular down to the second half of the nineteenth century.
On the tenth day of July the magistrates issued a proclamation announcing that next morning before sunrise a need-fire would be kindled for the behoof of all the cattle of the town, and warning all the inhabitants against lighting fires in their kitchens that evening.
The curious notion that the need-fire cannot kindle if any other fire remains alight in the neighbourhood seems to imply that fire is conceived as a unity which is broken up into fractions and consequently weakened in exact proportion to the number of places where it burns; hence in order to obtain it at full strength you must light it only at a single point, for then the flame will burst out with a concentrated energy derived from the tributary fires which burned on all the extinguished hearths of the country.
The rope which produced the revolution of the bar had to be new, but it was if possible woven from threads taken from a gallows-rope, with which people had been hanged. While the need-fire was being kindled in this fashion, every other fire in the town had to be put out; search was made through the houses, and any fire discovered to be burning was extinguished.
Among Slavonic peoples it appears that the foes whom the need-fire is designed to combat are not so much living witches as vampyres and other evil spirits, and the ceremony, as we saw, aims rather at repelling these baleful beings than at actually consuming them in the flames. But for our present purpose these distinctions are immaterial.
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