BONFIRE, a large fire lit in the open air. The earliest known instance of the derivation of the word occurred as ban fyre ignis ossium in the Catholicon Anglicum (1483). Other derivations have been sought for the word. Thus some have thought it Baal-fire, passing through Bael, Baen to Bane. Others have declared it to be boon-fire, a "contribution" fire, every one in the neighbourhood contributing a portion of the material.
Whatever its origin, the word has long had several meanings— (a) a fire of bones; (b) a fire of corpses, a funeral pile; (c) a fire for immolation, such as that in which heretics and proscribed books were burnt; (d) a large fire lit in the open air, on occasions of national rejoicing, or as a signal of alarm, such as the bonfires which warned England of the approach of the Armada. Through out Europe the peasants from time immemorial have lighted bon fires on certain days of the year, and danced around or leaped over them. The earliest proof of the observance of these bonfire ceremonies in Europe is afforded by the attempts made by Christian synods in the 7th and 8th centuries to suppress them as pagan. Thus the third Council of Constantinople (68o), by its 65th canon, orders : "Those fires that are kindled by cer taine people on new moones before their shops and houses, over which also they use ridiculously and foolishly to leape, by a certaine antient custome, we command them from henceforth to cease." Leaping over the fires is mentioned among the superstitious rites used at the Palilia (the feast of Pales, the shepherds' god dess) in Ovid's Fasti (q.v.). The lighting of the bonfires in Christian festivals was significant of the compromise made with the heathen by the early church. In Cornwall bonfires are lighted on the eve of St. John the Baptist and St. Peter's Day; some times effigies are burned in these fires, and there are grounds for believing that in ancient times human sacrifices were actually made in the bonfires. Spring and midsummer are the usual times at which these bonfires are lighted, but in some countries they are made at Hallowe'en (Oct. 31) and at Christmas.
See J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. iii.