Some villages do
not prepare it yearly as a preventive of cattle-plague, but only kindle
it when the disease has actually broken out."[694] In the Halberstadt
district the ends of the rope which was used to make the cross-piece
revolve in the sockets had to be pulled by two chaste young men.[695]
[The mode of kindling the need-fire in the Mark.]
In the Mark down to the first half of the nineteenth century the
practice was similar. We read that "in many parts of the Mark there
still prevails on certain occasions the custom of kindling a need-fire,
it happens particularly when a farmer has sick pigs. Two posts of dry
wood are planted in the earth amid solemn silence before the sun rises,
and round these posts hempen ropes are pulled to and fro till the wood
kindles; whereupon the fire is fed with dry leaves and twigs and the
sick beasts are driven through it In some places the fire is produced by
the friction of an old cart-wheel."[696]
[The mode of kindling the need-fire in Mecklenburg]
In Mecklenburg the need-fire used to be lighted by the friction of a
rope wound about an oaken pole or by rubbing two boards against each
other. Having been thus elicited, the flame was fed with wood of seven
kinds. The practice was forbidden by Gustavus Adolphus, Duke of
Mecklenburg, in 1682; but the prohibition apparently had little effect,
for down to the end of the eighteenth century the custom was so common
that the inhabitants even of large towns made no scruple of resorting to
it.
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