FIRE WORSHIP.--FIRE EATING AND HEAT
RESISTANCE.--IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
--AMONG THE NAVAJO INDIANS.--
FIRE-WALKERS OF JAPAN.--THE FIERY
ORDEAL OF FIJI.
Fire has always been and, seemingly, will always remain, the most terrible of the elements.To the early tribes it must also have been the most mysterious; for, while earth and air and water were always in evidence, fire came and went in a manner which must have been quite unaccountable to them.Thus it naturally followed that the custom of deifying all things which the primitive mind was unable to grasp, led in direct line to the fire-worship of later days.
That fire could be produced through friction finally came into the knowledge of man, but the early methods entailed much labor.
Consequently our ease-loving forebears cast about for a method to ``keep the home fires burning''
and hit upon the plan of appointing a person in each community who should at all times carry a burning brand.This arrangement had many faults, however, and after a while it was superseded by the expedient of a fire kept continually burning in a building erected for the purpose.
The Greeks worshiped at an altar of this kind which they called the Altar of Hestia and which the Romans called the Altar of Vesta.
The sacred fire itself was known as Vesta, and its burning was considered a proof of the presence of the goddess.The Persians had such a building in each town and village; and the Egyptians, such a fire in every temple;while the Mexicans, Natches, Peruvians and Mayas kept their ``national fires'' burning upon great pyramids.Eventually the keeping of such fires became a sacred rite, and the ``Eternal Lamps'' kept burning in synagogues and in Byzantine and Catholic churches may be a survival of these customs.
There is a theory that all architecture, public and private, sacred and profane, began with the erection of sheds to protect the sacred fire.
This naturally led men to build for their own protection as well, and thus the family hearth had its genesis.
Another theory holds that the keepers of the sacred fires were the first public servants, and that from this small beginning sprang the intricate public service of the present.
The worship of the fire itself had been a legacy from the earliest tribes; but it remained for the Rosicrucians and the fire philosophers of the Sixteenth Century under the lead of Paracelsus to establish a concrete religious belief on that basis, finding in the Scriptures what seemed to them ample proof that fire was the symbol of the actual presence of God, as in all cases where He is said to have visited this earth.He came either in a flame of fire, or surrounded with glory, which they conceived to mean the same thing.
For example: when God appeared on Mount Sinai (Exod.xix, 18) ``The Lord descended upon it in fire.'' Moses, repeating this history, said: ``The Lord spake unto you out of the midst of fire'' (Deut.iv, 12).Again, when the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses out of the flaming bush, ``the bush burned with fire and the bush was not consumed'' (Exod.
iii, 3).Fire from the Lord consumed the burnt offering of Aaron (Lev.ix, 24), the sacrifice of Gideon (Judg.vi, 21), the burnt offering of David (1 Chron.xxxi, 26), and that at the dedication of King Solomon's temple (Chron.vii, 1).And when Elijah made his sacrifice to prove that Baal was not God, ``the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust and the water that was in the trench.'' (1 Kings, xviii, 38.)Since sacrifice had from the earliest days been considered as food offered to the gods, it was quite logical to argue that when fire from Heaven fell upon the offering, God himself was present and consumed His own.Thus the Paracelsists and other fire believers sought, and as they believed found, high authority for continuing a part of the fire worship of the early tribes.
The Theosophists, according to Hargrave Jennings in ``The Rosicrucians,'' called the soul a fire taken from the eternal ocean of light, and in common with other Fire-Philosophers believed that all knowable things, both of the soul and the body, were evolved out of fire and finally resolvable into it; and that fire was the last and only-to-be-known God.
In passing I might call attention to the fact that the Devil is supposed to dwell in the same element.
Some of the secrets of heat resistance as practiced by the dime-museum and sideshow performers of our time, secrets grouped under the general title of ``Fire-eating,'' must have been known in very early times.To quote from Chambers' ``Book of Days'': ``In ancient history we find several examples of people who possessed the art of touching fire without being burned.The Priestesses of Diana, at Castabala, in Cappadocia, commanded public veneration by walking over red-hot iron.The Herpi, a people of Etruria, walked among glowing embers at an annual festival held on Mount Soracte, and thus proved their sacred character, receiving certain privileges, among others, exemption from military service, from the Roman Senate.One of the most astounding stories of antiquity is related in the `Zenda-Vesta,' to the effect that Zoroaster, to confute his calumniators, allowed fluid lead to be poured over his body, without receiving any injury.''
To me the ``astounding'' part of this story is not in the feat itself, for that is extremely easy to accomplish, but in the fact that the secret was known at such an early date, which the best authorities place at 500 to 1000 B.C.
It is said that the earliest recorded instance, in our era, of ordeal by fire was in the fourth century.Simplicius, Bishop of Autun, who had been married before his promotion, continued to live with his wife, and in order to demonstrate the Platonic purity of their intercourse placed burning coals upon their flesh without injury.
