Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/74

58 given to understand, is in common secular use.

To the undevout mind the salting of the bed would seem to conduce to the success of the feat. For salt is a very glutton of heat, and will do pretty much anything to get it, however menial, from melting snow on horse-car tracks to freezing ice-cream. Cooling coals is therefore quite in character for it. This, its unappeasable appetite for caloric is not unknown to the profession. The priests nobly admitted that the salt mitigated the full rigor of the miracle.

The miracle does not, however, depend for performance upon its use; only one has to be holier to work the miracle without it. At times fire-walking is done quite fresh; preferably amid the purity of the hills, with whose freshness its own is then in keeping. But it is occasionally so performed in town.

The origin of the rite mounts back to extreme antiquity. It dates from before there were men to walk, having been instituted of the gods in the days when they alone lived in the land. Walking, indeed, is not of its essence; peripatetic proof being but a