Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/241

 FIRE 231 flamo of tho Learth puro and unmingled with fire taken from another house. On this matter the ancient Persians wero particularly punctilious, feeding their firea, and espe cially their sacred fires, only with certain kinds of wood, re puted to bo cleaner than all others, well dried, and well stript of tho bark. Everywhere and in all countries, it was considered a most fatal omen if tho fire died out in the hearth. The family whose firs went out had incurred the iro of the Lares, who, if not quickly appeased, would strike tho sons with impotence and imbecility. A new fire was to bo lit by the friction of two twigs, as to fetch some from a neighbour s would have been considered an adulterous union of hearths, an undue mingling of two families blood. 1 Resemblance betiveen Fire-Production and Life-Production. For a long time, throughout all tho world, the ancient naturalists who meditated on the greatest wonder of physi ology, supposed that the generation of fire by the friction of two woods, one of harder the other of softer substance, was tho exact counterpart of human generation. The heat thus evolved in the human organism was held to bo of most subtile nature, a flash of tho astral light, an intelligent substance. Primary fire impregnated primary water, and the soul was born. Life was compared to a flame, to a torch ; and no comparison is more true. Modern chemistry having proved that animal life ia a constant burning of oxygen, tho ancient myth was not far from tho truth when it said that Prometheus animated the figure of clay by putting into it a spark of fire. &quot; Know ye,&quot; said an Ojib- way prophet, &quot; that the fire in your huts and the life in your bodies are one and the same thing.&quot; A torch which was put out by throwing it violently on the ground sym- bolizod in ecclesiastical rites excommunication, or the con demnation of a soul to eternal death. In classical mytho logy, Meleager s life was bound to a log of wood ; when the one was turned to a heap of ashes, the other was to fall dead. &quot; Corpus est terra, anima est ignis&quot; that old piece of philosophy, became inseparable from poetry and language ; and now, as in the days of yore, the soul and the &quot; genius&quot; are always spoken of as if they possessed the nature of flamo, and the angels and the peris as if their substances wero pure light. According to the pristine physiology, man was likewise a fire, but a fire hidden in clay, diluted in water. If it had not been for water, the flame would have boon destroyed by its own force, it would have blazed up, coruscating violently in dazzling effulgence, and then dying out. In fact, all primitive theories attributed to gaseous water the action which our present science attributes to nitrogen, without which oxidation would go on too rapidly to allow of the formation of oxidizable matter. Hence water was thought to be as necessary as fire itself ; hence ancient law forbade tho individuals guilty of offences against the commonwealth to have fire and water given them a sentence equivalent to death. The mixture of organic fire and organic water in our bodies was compared to that in vegetable matter, which emits much smoke if burned when in green or wet condition. Nay, by pursuing the analysis of combustion in which the classical world had centred all its philosophy, the ashes or mineral detritus which fell on the hearth found their analogue in the flesh, in the bones, in tho solid parts of our organism. Thus man was thought to be an alloy of fire, earth, and water in slightly different proportions. Fire, a constituent part of the divine intelli- 1 It is interesting to note that in Bohemia the country people have still a strong prejudice against any fire being taken to or taken from the hearth. Till the babe be forty days old, the Albanians do not allow a brand, not even a coal, from the family fire-place to be given away. As long as the Japanese had castes, people of the higher ranks ate no food except what was cooked in their own home, for fear of &quot;mixing fire,&quot; evidently because they thought that fire imparted its nature to food, and by means of food to the bodily powers. gence, became a soul when it was immersed in organic water; it became the body when it was put into organic clay. Tho traditions of the Egyptian priesthood, which were current under the name of Hermes Trimegistus, teach that at the moment of death, &quot;our intelligence, one of God s subtile thoughts, escapes the body s dross, puts on its fiery tunic again, and floats henceforth in space,&quot; leaving the soul to await judgment. Men were divided into noble and ignoble, according as the material or the spiritual eido of their nature predominated. Thus a frequent distinction in the burials, which may have arisen even in prehistoric times, can bo explained. Chiefs and kings, priests and noblemen, possessed all of a divine soul, were burned, flamo going forth to flame ; but people of the common sort were sunk among the sods, clay going back to clay. 3 Cosmic Fire.ThQ opinions and beliefs which most primitive populations have entertained on the nature of firo in the hearth wero applied by them to the great cosmic fire : both were life-givers, one to tho family and tho other to tho universe ; both were parts of tho same substance or element. It was taught by Aristotle that Zeus was a name given to the fire of heaven, and by Plato and Euripides that the same Hestia burned in the humblest hut and tho highest sky. Ovid went so far as to identify that goddess with the earth itself. According to that doctrine, fire was held to bo tho very soul of nature, the essence of every thing that had a shape, and even to be the giver of that shape, for philosophers explained that of all elements none but fire having any form by itself could impart it to other things. From Jupiter to the fly, from the wandering star to the tiniest blade of grass, all beings owed existence to the fiery element. This theory, more or less distinctly expressed, obtained among the Aztecs, who invoked in their prayers &quot; fire the most ancient divinity, the father and mother of all gods.&quot; Tohil the Quiche, Quetzacoatl the Mexican, Tiermes tho Finn, Perkun the Slav, Thor tho Scandina vian, Taranis the Gaul, and many other gods, as stated above, were represented as having firestones for heads or for bodies ; one of them was said to have flashed up in lightnings as he was dragged along the rocky heavens by some powerful antagonist. Such a god, encased in a shell of flint, fell down from heaven upon earth, according to an Indian legend ; the shell broke into sixteen hundred frag ments, and each of them arose and stood up as a particular god. From such a thunderbolt or meteorite the Dacotas boasted to have originated. In the Gnostic theory the middle part of the cosmos was taken up by the starry world, emitting the astral light, inferior in sanctity to the mild effulgence of ether above it, but superior in vivifying properties to our common fires. These three conditions of the cosmic fire corresponded to the three component parts of man mind, soul, and body. Prophets and other great and pious men had minds still refulgent with ethereal rays, which were the thoughts of divinity; while the wicked had souls which had been soaked in a smoky fire, and in stupid people there glim mered but the weakest possible ray of celestial light. 2 So among Algonquins and Ottaways those only of the J* Great Hare totem,&quot; among the Nicaraguans none but the &quot;caciques,&quot; among the Caribs no others than the priestly caste, were entitled to the honour of cremation. The tribes of Tipper California were even persuaded that such as were not burned were liable to be transformed into brutes. Among certain populations (as, for instance, the Colchians of old, and the Babeens or Chimpseyans of our times) the males had the privilege of the pyre, which was denied to women. The examples illustrating the belief of the soul being a fire are so mimerous that it is difficult to choose am OIK* them. In Voigtland the souls of unchristened babes are believed to be turned into Wills-of-the-Wisp. The souls of dying men or beasts are said to burn sometimes with a heat so intense that their eyes inflame piles of wood. It is a frequent feat of divine horses in Tartar legends to make the rocks glow and melt as pitch by merely looking at them.