had tried to blight the corn of the Tuatha De Danann, but the sons weredriven off and she died of grief, begging that a fair should always beheld in her name, and...

Ludzie pragną czasami się rozstawać, żeby móc tęsknić, czekać i cieszyć się z powrotem.

[547] These may be aetiological myths explaining the
origin of these festivals on the analogy of funeral festivals, but more
likely, since Lugnasad was a harvest festival, they are connected with
the custom of slaying a representative of the corn-spirit. The festival
would become a commemoration of all such victims, but when the custom
itself had ceased it would be associated with one particular personage,
the corn-goddess regarded as a mortal.
This would be the case where the victim was a woman, but where a male
was slain, the analogy of the slaying of the divine king or his
_succedaneum_ would lead to the festivals being regarded as
commemorative of a king, e.g. Garman. This agrees with the statement
that observance of the festival produced plenty; non-observance, dearth.
The victims were slain to obtain plenty, and the festival would also
commemorate those who had died for this good cause, while it would also
appease their ghosts should these be angry at their violent deaths.
Certain of the dead were thus commemorated at Lugnasad, a festival of
fertility. Both the corn-spirit or divinity slain in the reaping of the
corn, and the human victims, were appeased by its observance.[548] The
legend of Carman makes her hostile to the corn--a curious way of
regarding a corn-goddess. But we have already seen that gods of
fertility were sometimes thought of as causing blight, and in
folk-belief the corn-spirit is occasionally believed to be dangerous.
Such inversions occur wherever revolutions in religion take place.
The great commemoration of the dead was held on Samhain eve, a festival
intended to aid the dying powers of vegetation, whose life, however, was
still manifested in evergreen shrubs, in the mistletoe, in the sheaf of
corn from last harvest--the abode of the corn-spirit.[549] Probably,
also, human representatives of the vegetation or corn-spirit were slain,
and this may have suggested the belief in the presence of their ghosts
at this festival. Or the festival being held at the time of the death of
vegetation, the dead would naturally be commemorated then. Or, as in
Scandinavia, they may have been held to have an influence on fertility,
as an extension of the belief that certain slain persons represented
spirits of fertility, or because trees and plants growing on the barrows
of the dead were thought to be tenanted by their spirits.[550] In
Scandinavia, the dead were associated with female spirits or _fylgjur_,
identified with the _disir_, a kind of earth-goddesses, living in hollow
hills.[551] The nearest Celtic analogy to these is the _Matres_,
goddesses of fertility. Bede says that Christmas eve was called
_Modranicht_, "Mothers' Night,"[552] and as many of the rites of Samhain
were transferred to Yule, the former date of _Modranicht_ may have been
Samhain, just as the Scandinavian _Disablot_, held in November, was a
festival of the _disir_ and of the dead.[553] It has been seen that the
Celtic Earth-god was lord of the dead, and that he probably took the
place of an Earth-goddess or goddesses, to whom the _Matres_ certainly
correspond. Hence the connection of the dead with female Earth-spirits
would be explained. Mother Earth had received the dead before her place
was taken by the Celtic Dispater. Hence the time of Earth's decay was
the season when the dead, her children, would be commemorated. Whatever
be the reason, Celts, Teutons, and others have commemorated the dead at
the beginning of winter, which was the beginning of a new year, while a
similar festival of the dead at New Year is held in many other lands.
Both in Ireland and in Brittany, on November eve food is laid out for
the dead who come to visit the houses and to warm themselves at the fire
in the stillness of the night, and in Brittany a huge log burns on the