[1] A sort of cuirass.
FIRE (in O. Eng. _fyr_; the word is common to West German languages, cf.
Dutch _vuur_, Ger. _Feuer_; the pre-Teutonic form is seen in Sanskrit
_pu_, _pavaka_, and Gr. [Greek: pur]; the ultimate origin is usually
taken to be a root meaning to purify, cf. Lat. _purus_), the term
commonly used for the visible effect of combustion (see FLAME),
operating as a heating or lighting agency.
So general is the knowledge of fire and its uses that it is a question
whether we have any authentic instance on record of a tribe altogether
ignorant of them. A few notices indeed are to be found in the voluminous
literature of travel which would decide the question in the affirmative;
but when they are carefully investigated, their evidence is found to be
far from conclusive. The missionary Krapf was told by a slave of a tribe
in the southern part of Shoa who lived like monkeys in the bamboo
jungles, and were totally ignorant of fire; but no better authority has
been found for the statement, and the story, which seems to be current
in eastern Africa, may be nothing else than the propagation of fables
about the Pygmies whom the ancients located around the sources of the
Nile. Lieut. Charles Wilkes, commander of the United States exploring
expedition of 1838-42, says that in Fakaafo or Bowditch Island "there
was no sign of places for cooking nor any appearance of fire," and that
the natives felt evident alarm at the sparks produced by flint and steel
and the smoke emitted by those with cigars in their mouths. The presence
of the word _afi_, fire, in the Fakaafo vocabulary supplied by Hale the
ethnographer of the expedition, though it might perhaps be explained as
equivalent only to solar light and heat, undoubtedly invalidates the
supposition of Wilkes; and the Rev. George Turner, in an account of a
missionary voyage in 1859, not only repeats the word _afi_ in his list
for Fakaafo, but relates the native legend about the origin of fire, and
describes some peculiar customs connected with its use. Alvaro de
Saavedra, an old Spanish traveller, informs us that the inhabitants of
Los Jardines, an island of the Pacific, showed great fear when they saw
fire--which they did not know before. But that island has not been
identified with certainty by modern explorers. It belongs, perhaps, to
the Ladrones or Marianas Archipelago, where fire was unknown, says Padre
Gobien, "till Magellan, wroth at the pilferings of the inhabitants,
burnt one of their villages. When they saw their wooden huts ablaze,
their first thought was that fire was a beast which eats up wood. Some
of them having approached the fire too near were burnt, and the others
kept aloof, fearing to be torn or poisoned by the powerful breath of
that terrible animal." To this Freycinet objects that these Ladrone
islanders made pottery before the arrival of Europeans, that they had
words expressing the ideas of flame, fire, oven, coals, roasting and
cooking. Let us add that in their country numerous graves and ruins have
been found, which seem to be remnants of a former culture. Thus the
question remains in uncertainty: though there is nothing impossible in
the supposition of the existence of a fireless tribe, it cannot be said
that such a tribe has been discovered.
It is useless to inquire in what way man first discovered that fire was
subject to his control, and could even be called into being by
appropriate means. With the natural phenomenon and its various aspects
he must soon have become familiar. The volcano lit up the darkness of
night and sent its ashes or its lava down into the plains; the lightning
or the meteor struck the tree, and the forest was ablaze; or some less
obvious cause produced some less extensive ignition. For a time it is
possible that the grand manifestations of nature aroused no feelings
save awe and terror; but man is quite as much endowed with curiosity as
with reverence or caution, and familiarity must ere long have bred
confidence if not contempt. It is by no means necessary to suppose that
the practical discovery of fire was made only at one given spot and in
one given way; it is much more probable indeed that different tribes and
races obtained the knowledge in a variety of ways.
It has been asserted of many tribes that they would be unable to
rekindle their fires if they were allowed to die out. Travellers in
Australia and Tasmania depict the typical native woman bearing always
about with her a burning brand, which it is one of her principal duties
to protect and foster; and it has been supposed that it was only
ignorance which imposed on her the endless task. This is absurd. The
Australian methods of producing fire by the friction of two pieces of
wood are perfectly well known, and are illustrated in Howitt's _Native
Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp. 771-773. To carry a brand saves a
little trouble to the men.
The methods employed for producing fire vary considerably in detail, but
are for the most part merely modified applications of concussion or
friction. Lord Avebury has remarked that the working up of stone into
implements must have been followed sooner or later by the discovery of
fire; for in the process of chipping sparks were elicited, and in the
process of polishing heat was generated. The first or concussion method
is still familiar in the flint and steel, which has hardly passed out of
use even in the most civilized countries. Its modifications are
comparatively few and unimportant. The Alaskans and Aleutians take two
pieces of quartz, rub them well with native sulphur, strike them
together till the sulphur catches fire, and then transfer the flame to a
heap of dry grass over which a few feathers have been scattered. Instead
of two pieces of quartz the Eskimos use a piece of quartz and a piece of
iron pyrites. Mr Frederick Boyle saw fire produced by striking broken
china violently against a bamboo, and Bastian observed the same process
in Burma, and Wallace in Ternate. In Cochin China two pieces of bamboo
are considered sufficient, the silicious character of the outside layer
rendering it as good as native flint. The friction methods are more
various. One of the simplest is what E.B. Tylor calls the stick and
groove--"a blunt pointed stick being run along a groove of its own
making in a piece of wood lying on the ground." Much, of course, depends
on the quality of the woods and the expertness of the manipulator. In
Tahiti Charles Darwin saw a native produce fire in a few seconds, but
only succeeded himself after much labour. The same device was employed
in New Zealand, the Sandwich Islands, Tonga, Samoa and the Radak
Islands. Instead of rubbing the movable stick backwards and forwards
other tribes make it rotate rapidly in a round hole in the stationary
piece of wood--thus making what Tylor has happily designated a
fire-drill. This device has been observed in Australia, Kamchatka,
Sumatra and the Carolines, among the Veddahs of Ceylon, throughout a
great part of southern Africa, among the Eskimo and Indian tribes of
North America, in the West Indies, in Central America, and as far south
as the Straits of Magellan. It was also employed by the ancient
Mexicans, and Tylor gives a quaint picture of the operation from a
Mexican MS.--a man half kneeling on the ground is causing the stick to
rotate between the palms of his hands. This simple method of rotation
seems to be very generally in use; but various devices have been
resorted to for the purpose of diminishing the labour and hastening the
result. The Gaucho of the Pampas takes "an elastic stick about 18 in.
long, presses one end to his breast and the other in a hole in a piece
of wood, and then rapidly turns the curved part like a carpenter's
centre-bit." In other cases the rotation is effected by means of a cord
or thong wound round the drill and pulled alternately by this end and
that. In order to steady the drill the Eskimo and others put the upper
end in a socket of ivory or bone which they hold firmly in their mouth.
A further advance was made by the Eskimo and neighbouring tribes, who
applied the principle of the bow-drill; and the still more ingenious
pump-drill was used by the Onondaga Indians. For full descriptions of
these instruments and a rich variety of details connected with
fire-making we must refer the reader to Tylor's valuable chapter in his
_Researches_. These methods of producing fire are but rarely used in
Europe, and only in connexion with superstitious observances. We read in
Wuttke that some time ago the authorities of a Mecklenburg village
ordered a "wild fire" to be lit against a murrain amongst the cattle.
For two hours the men strove vainly to obtain a spark, but the fault was
not to be ascribed to the quality of the wood, or to the dampness of the
atmosphere, but to the stubbornness of an old lady, who, objecting to
the superstition, would not put out her night lamp; such a fire, to be
efficient, must burn alone. At last the strong-minded female was
compelled to give in; fire was obtained---but of bad quality, for it did
not stop the murrain.
It has long been known that the rays of the sun might be concentrated by
a lens or concave mirror. Aristophanes mentions the burning-lens in _The
Clouds_, and the story of Archimedes using a mirror to fire the ships at
Syracuse is familiar to every schoolboy. If Garcilasso de la Vega can be
trusted as an authority the Virgins of the Sun in Peru kindled the
sacred fire with a concave cup set in a great bracelet. In China the
burning-glass is in common use.
To the inquiry how mankind became possessed of fire, the cosmogonies,
those records of pristine speculative thought, do not give any reply
which would not be found in the relations of travellers and historians.
They say in the Tonga Islands that the god of the earthquakes is
likewise the god of fire. At Mangaia it is told that the great Maui
went down to hell, where he surprised the secret of making fire by
rubbing two pieces of wood together. The Maoris tell the tale
differently. Maui had the fire given to him by his old blind
grandmother, Mahuika, who drew it from the nails of her hands. Wishing
to have a stronger one, he pretended that it had gone out, and so he
obtained fire from her great toe. It was so fierce that every thing
melted before the glow; even Maui and the grandmother herself were
already burning when a deluge, sent from heaven, saved the hero and
the perishing world; but before the waters extinguished all the blaze,
Mahuika shut a few sparks into some trees, and thence men draw it now.
The Maoris have also the legend that thunder is the noise of Tawhaki's
footsteps, and that lightnings flash from his armpits. At Western
Point, Victoria, the Australians say the good old man Pundyil opened
the door of the sun, whose light poured then on earth, and that
Karakorok, the good man's good daughter, seeing the earth to be full
of serpents, went everywhere destroying serpents; but before she had
killed them all, her staff snapped in two, and while it broke, a flame
burst out of it. Here the serpent-killer is a fire-bringer. In the
Persian _Shahnama_ also fire was discovered by a dragon-fighter.
Hushenk, the powerful hero, hurled at the monster a prodigious stone,
which, evaded by the snake, struck a rock and was splintered by it.
"Light shone from the dark pebble, the heart of the rock flashed out
in glory, and fire was seen for the first time in the world." The
snake escaped, but the mystery of fire had been revealed.
North American legends narrate how the great buffalo, careering
through the plains, makes sparks flit in the night, and sets the
prairie ablaze by his hoofs hitting the rocks. We meet the same idea
in the Hindu mythology, which conceives thunder to have been, among
many other things, the clatter of the solar horses on the Akmon or
hard pavement of the sky. The Dakotas claim that their ancestor
obtained fire from the sparks which a friendly panther struck with its
claws, as it scampered upon a stony hill.
Tohil, who gave the Quiches fire by shaking his sandals, was, like
the Mexican Quetzelcoatl, represented by a flint stone. Guamansuri,
the father of the Peruvians, produced the thunder and the lightning by
hurling stones with his sling. The thunderbolts are his children.
Kudai, the great god of the Altaian Tartars, disclosed "the secret of
the stone's edge and the iron's hardness." The Slavonian god of
thunder was depicted with a silex in his hand, or even protruding from
his head. The Lapp Tiermes struck with his hammer upon his own head;
the Scandinavian Thor held a mallet in one hand, a flint in the other.
Taranis, the Gaul, had upon his head a huge mace surrounded by six
little ones. Finnish poems describe how "fire, the child of the sun,
came down from heaven, where it was rocked in a tub of yellow copper,
in a large pail of gold." Ukko, the Esthonian god, sends forth
lightnings, as he strikes his stone with his steel. According to the
Kalewala, the same mighty Ukko struck his sword against his nail, and
from the nail issued the "fiery babe." He gave it to the Wind's
daughter to rock it, but the unwary maiden let it fall in the sea,
where it was swallowed by the great pike, and fire would have been
lost for ever if the child of the sun had not come to the rescue. He
dragged the great pike from the water, drew out his entrails, and
found there the heavenly spark still alive. Prometheus brought to
earth the torch he had lighted at the sun's chariot.
Human culture may be said to have begun with fire, of which the uses
increased in the same ratio as culture itself. To save the labour
expended on the initial process of procuring light, or on carrying it
about constantly, primitive men hit on the expedient of a fire which
should burn night and day in a public building. The Egyptians had one in
every temple, the Greeks, Latins and Persians in all towns and villages.
The Natchez, the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Peruvians had their "national
fires" burning upon large pyramids. Of these fires the "eternal lamps"
in the synagogues, in the Byzantine and Catholic churches, may be a
survival. The "Regia," Rome's sacred centre, supposed to be the abode of
Vesta, stood close to a fountain; it was convenient to draw from the
same spot the two great requisites, fire and water. All civil and
political interests grouped themselves around the prytaneum which was at
once a temple, a tribunal, a town-hall, and a gossiping resort: all
public business and most private affairs were transacted by the light
and in the warmth of the common fire. No wonder that its flagstones
should become sacred. Primitive communities consider as holy everything
that ensures their existence and promotes their welfare, material things
such as fire and water not less than others. Thus the prytaneum grew
into a religious institution. And if we hear a little more of fire
worship than of water worship, it is because fire, being on the whole
more difficult to obtain, was esteemed more precious. The prytaneum and
the state were convertible terms. If by chance the fire in the Roman
temple of Vesta was extinguished, all tribunals, all authority, all
public or private business had to stop immediately. The connexion
between heaven and earth had been broken, and it had to be restored in
some way or other--either by Jove sending down divine lightning on his
altars, or by the priests making a new fire by the old sacred method of
rubbing two pieces of wood together, or by catching the rays of the sun
in a concave mirror. No Greek or Roman army crossed the frontier without
carrying an altar where the fire taken from the prytaneum burned night
and day. When the Greeks sent out colonies the emigrants took with them
living coals from the altar of Hestia, and had in their new country a
fire lit as a representative of that burning in the mother country.[1]
Not before the three curiae united their fires into one could Rome
become powerful; and Athens became a shining light to the world only,
we are told, when the twelve tribes of Attica, led by Theseus, brought
each its brand to the altar of Athene Polias. All Greece confederated,
making Delphi its central hearth; and the islands congregated around
Delos, whence the new fire was fetched every year.
_Periodic Fires._--Because the sun loses its force after noon, and after
midsummer daily shortens the length of its circuit, the ancients
inferred, and primitive populations still believe, that, as time goes
on, the energies of fire must necessarily decline. Therefore men set
about renewing the fires in the temples and on the hearth on the longest
day of summer or at the beginning of the agricultural year. The ceremony
was attended with much rejoicing, banqueting and many religious rites.
Houses were thoroughly cleansed; people bathed, and underwent
lustrations and purifications; new clothes were put on; quarrels were
made up; debts were paid by the debtor or remitted by the creditor;
criminals were released by the civil authorities in imitation of the
heavenly judges, who were believed to grant on the same day a general
remission of sins. All things were made new; each man turned over a new
page in the book of his existence. Some nations, like the Etruscans in
the Old World and the Peruvians and Mexicans in the New, carried these
ideas to a high degree of development, and celebrated with magnificent
ceremonies the renewal of the _saecula_, or astronomic periods, which
might be shorter or longer than a century. Some details of the festival
among the Aztecs have been preserved. On the last night of every period
(52 years) every fire was extinguished, and men proceeded in solemn
procession to some sacred spot, where, with awe and trembling, the
priests strove to kindle a new fire by friction. It was as if they had a
vague idea that the cosmos, with its sun, moon and stars, had been wound
up like a clock for a definite period of time. And had they failed to
raise the vital spark, they would have believed that it was because the
great fire was being extinguished at the central hearth of the world.
The Stoics and many other ancient philosophers thought that the world
was doomed to final extinction by fire. The Scandinavian bards sung the
end of the world, how at last the wolf Fenrir would get loose, how the
cruel fire of Loki would destroy itself by destroying everything. The
Essenes enlarged upon this doctrine, which is also found in the
Sibylline books and appears in the Apocrypha (2 Esdras xvi. 15).
See Dupuis, _Origine de tous les cultes_ (1794); Burnout, _Science des
religions_; Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_, cap. xx. (1835); Adalbert
Kuhn. _Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Gottertranks_ (1859);
Steinthal, _Uber die ursprungliche Form der Sage von Prometheus_
(1861); Albert Reville, "Le Mythe de Promethee," in _Revue des deux
mondes_ (August 1862); Michel Breal, _Hercule et Cacus_ (1863); Tylor,
_Researches into the Early History of Mankind_, ch. ix. (1865);
Bachofen, _Die Sage von Tanaquil_ (1870); Lord Avebury, _Prehistoric
Times_ (6th ed., 1900); Haug, _Religion of the Parsis_ (1878).
(E. Re.)