A modern student is struck by the cool way in which the ancient poets,
geographers, and commentators mention a startling circumstance, the Fire-
walk. The only hint of explanation is the statement that the drug or
juice of herbs preserved the Hirpi from harm. That theory may be kept in
mind, and applied if it is found useful. Virgil's theory that the
ministrants walk, pietate freti, corresponds to Mrs. Wesley's belief,
when, after praying, she 'waded the flames' to rescue her children from
the burning parsonage at Epworth. The hypothesis of Iamblichus, when he
writes about the ecstatic or 'possessed' persons who cannot be injured by
fire, is like that of modern spiritualists--the 'spirit' or 'daemon'
preserves them unharmed.
I intentionally omit cases which are vaguely analogous to that of the
Hirpi. In Icelandic sagas, in the Relations of the old Jesuit
missionaries, in the Travels of Pallas and Gmelin, we hear of medicine-
men and Berserks who take liberties with red-hot metal, live coals, and
burning wood. Thus in the Icelandic Flatey Book (vol. i. p. 425) we read
about the fighting evangelist of Iceland, a story of Thangbrandr and the
foreign Berserkir. 'The Berserkir said: "I can walk through the burning
fire with my bare feet." Then a great fire was made, which Thangbrandr
hallowed, and the Berserkir went into it without fear, and burned his
feet'--the Christian spell of Thangbrandr being stronger than the heathen
spell of the Berserkir. What the saga says is not evidence, and some of
the other tales are merely traditional. Others may be explained,
perhaps, by conjuring. The mediaeval ordeal by fire may also be left on
one side. In 1826 Lockhart published a translation of the Church Service
for the Ordeal by Fire, a document given, he says, by Busching in Die
Vorzeit for 1817. The accused communicates before carrying the red-hot
iron bar, or walking on the red-hot ploughshare. The consecrated wafer
is supposed to preserve him from injury, if he be guiltless. He carries
the iron for nine yards, after which his hands are sealed up in a linen
cloth and examined at the end of three days. 'If he be found clear of
scorch or scar, glory to God.' Lockhart calls the service 'one of the
most extraordinary records of the craft, the audacity, and the weakness
of mankind.' {153}
The fraud is more likely to have lain in the pretended failure to find
scorch or scar than in any method of substituting cold for hot iron, or
of preventing the metal from injuring the subject of the ordeal. The
rite did not long satisfy the theologians and jurists of the Middle Ages.
It has been discussed by Lingard in his History of England, and by Dr. E.
B. Tylor in Primitive Culture.
For the purpose of the present inquiry I also omit all the rites of
leaping sportfully, and of driving cattle through light fires. Of these
cases, from the Roman Palilia, or Parilia, downwards, there is a useful
collection in Brand's Popular Antiquities under the heading 'Midsummer
Eve.' One exception must be made for a passage from Torreblanca's
Demonologia (p. 106). People are said 'pyras circumire et transilire in
futuri mali averruncatione'--to 'go round about and leap over lighted
pyres for the purpose of averting future evils,' as in Mannhardt's theory
of the Hirpi. This may be connected with the Bulgarian rite, to be
described later, but, as a rule, in all these instances, the fire is a
light one of straw, and no sort of immunity is claimed by the people who
do not walk through, but leap across it.
These kinds of analogous examples, then, it suffices merely to mention.
For the others, in all affairs of this sort, the wide diffusion of a tale
of miracle is easily explained. The fancy craves for miracles, and the
universal mode of inventing a miracle is to deny the working, on a given
occasion, of a law of Nature. Gravitation was suspended, men floated in
air, inanimate bodies became agile, or fire did not burn. No less
natural than the invention of the myth is the attempt to feign it by
conjuring or by the use of some natural secret. But in the following
modern instances the miracle of passing through the fire uninjured is
apparently feigned with considerable skill, or is performed by the aid of
some secret of Nature not known to modern chemistry. The evidence is
decidedly good enough to prove that in Europe, India, and Polynesia the
ancient rite of the Hirpi of Soracte is still a part of religious or
customary ceremony.