CHAPTER XXVIII

FIRE AND THE SUN There can be no doubt, as already stated, that, of all physical phenomena, fire had the most marked effect upon the imagination of primitive man. He saw that it was utterly unlike anything else known to him, both in its properties and in its action. If of anything a divine nature could be predicated, it was fire--the standing miracle--at once destroying and life-giving-- material and immaterial--pre-eminently an agent with strange and vast powers, known and unknown. For many objects and institutions a divine origin was sought; it could not fail to be the case with fire. Even the poor Tasmanian natives felt it could not be a thing of earth, and told each other how it was thrown down like a star by two black fellows who are now in the sky, the twin stars, Castor and Pollux. A great gap separates this simple tale from the elaborate Prometheus myth, and yet the same essential features appear in both: and between the two are found a varied series of stories and legends, belonging to many climes and ages, which ring the changes on the same fundamental ideas. The whole of the ancient world believed that the origin of fire must be divine. And the various steps can be clearly traced by which the worship, originally accorded to the nature-power itself, was transferred to a spirit behind the power, and centred at last on the supreme Deity. For primitive man, as Max Müller well points out, the phenomena of fire would present a dual aspect--on the one hand as a fatal and destructive element, on the other hand, as a beneficent and even homely agency. The lightning would be seen flashing from the one end of heaven to the other, darting down at times to set ablaze the forests and prairies, at times to maim and kill both animals and men. Thus experienced, it would strike terror into the beholders, and impress them with a vivid sense of the presence of spiritual powers. As a late product of the emotions and conceptions thus stimulated, we have the fine myth of the ancient nature goddess, Athene-- sprung from the head of Zeus, the austere virgin, who was to become the personification of prudence, self-restraint, and culture, the celestial representative of the loftiest intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Greek world at its best. Hence, too, the group of conceptions which make the lightning and thunderbolts the weapons of the sky, putting them into the hands of the supreme ruler, and making them at last the symbols of law and order. "Out of the fire" (says Ezekiel) "went forth lightning." "Out of the throne" (says the seer of the Apocalypse) "went forth lightnings." In strong contrast is the beneficent aspect of fire, which, once known and "tamed," becomes almost a necessity for human life. It affords new protection against the cold, makes man peculiarly the cooking animal, and above all establishes the family hearth with all that is meant by "home." Of more distinctly utilitarian import are the uses of fire in fashioning tools and instruments, and the smelting of metals. And it is significant to note that man's use of fire almost certainly owed its origin to his emotional attitude towards it, culminating in worship. As many anthropologists have pointed out, the fire on the hearth had its unmistakable religious aspect, the result of the feeling of veneration for the "element" of fire before its production or use had been understood. And the kindling of the fire on the hearth was as much a sacrifice to the gods as a means to the cooking of food. Each house became a veritable temple of fire. Wonderfully instructive, as well as fascinating it is to trace the development of the home idea as based on the emotional experiences stimulated by the mystic influences of fire. Each house, as was just stated, was regarded as a temple of the divine element; but the common house, the tribe house, was specially singled out for this honour, and became a temple properly so-called. When bands of citizens set out to found colonies in strange lands, they took with them glowing embers from the tribal or national hearth, as AEneas brought with him to Italy the sacred fire of Troy. Until lately, we are told, the German peasant just married would take to his new home a burning log from the family hearth. The classical instance of the development of this idea is found in the cult of the Greek Hestia, the Latin Vesta, a goddess who was the personification of fire, the guardian of the household altar and of the welfare of cities and nations. She was worshipped fairly widely in Greece and Asia Minor, but principally in Rome, where a beautiful circular temple was dedicated to her service; her ministers, the Vestal virgins, were held in the greatest honour and were chosen from among the loveliest and noblest of Roman maidens. In this temple was kept ever brightly burning the sacred fire supposed to have been kindled by the rays of the sun, and to have been brought by AEneas when he founded his kingdom in the new land of Italy. The extinction of this fire would have been regarded as the gravest public calamity, foreboding disaster. Its flames were intended to represent the _purity_ of the goddess, thus emphasising the mystic aspect of another physical property of fire--its purifying power. "Our God" (said the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews) "is a consuming fire." Greece had its common hearth at Delphi. It was also supposed that at the centre of the earth there was a hearth which answered to that. In the Apocalypse we read of the altar with its sacred fire as central in heaven. Truly these concepts are persistent! And why? Because there is more than imagination in them; they are the products of ideas immanent in the material phenomena in which they are embodied, and through which they manifest themselves to the human soul. There could not fail to be fire-gods many, and a study of their respective characters, especially in the earlier stages of their development, often furnishes a key to the intuitional workings of the primitive mind as prompted by the always arresting, and often terrorising phenomena of fire and flame. Max Müller's detailed study of the development of the Hindu god, Agni, was mentioned in an earlier chapter. The name originally means the Mover, and arose, doubtless, from the running, darting, leaping movement of flame. Beginning his career as a purely physical god, he advanced through various stages of spiritualisation until he became the supreme deity. Is not the problem of motion still one of the most fascinating and profound? Bergson's "L'Evolution créatrice" is one of the latest attempts to grapple with it, and those who in early India personified fire as the Mover were his legitimate predecessors. The Greek Hephaestus personified the brightness of flame, and took shape as a god of ripe age, of muscular form, of serious countenance, but lame. Why lame? Why this physical defect as a drawback to so much physical beauty and strength? A Frenchman, Emérie, suggests--"attendu la marche inégale et vacillante de la flamme." Certainly fire, as compared with water and air, is dependent on sustenance, as Heracleitus so well realised, as also its consequent limitations in regard to free and independent movement: but the sage solved this difficulty by making the Fire-motion feed, as it were, upon itself. The god was represented as puny at birth because flame, especially as kindled artificially, so often starts from a tiny spark. His marriage to Aphrodite typifies "the association of fire with the life-giving forces of nature." So, remarks Max Müller, the Hindu Agni was the patron of marriage. How many lines of thought open out before us here, bringing us face to face, by pre-scientific modes of mental activity, with some of the deepest mysteries of human life! Vulcan, the Latin parallel of Hephaestus, suggests to us the awe-inspiring phenomena of volcanoes, which, though not of frequent occurrence, are calculated by virtue of their magnitude and grandeur to stimulate emotion and intuition to an exceptional degree. Fear would naturally predominate, but, even for the primitive mind, would be one factor only in a complex whole. Matthew Arnold has attempted to portray the soul-storm raised by the sight of the molten crater of AEtna. He makes Empedocles, the poet-philosopher, climb the summit of the mountain, gaze for the last time on the realm of nature spread around, and apostrophise the stars above and the volcanic fires beneath his feet. "And thou, fiery world, That sapp'st the vitals of this terrible mount Upon whose charred and quaking crust I stand-- Thou, too, brimmest with life." Note here again the sense of life--of kinship, so fundamental to Nature Mysticism. And so to the close. "And therefore, O ye elements! I know-- Ye know it too--it hath been granted me Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved. I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free, Is it but for a moment? --Ah, boil up, ye vapours! Leap and roar, thou sea of fire! My soul glows to meet you. Ere it flag, ere the mists Of despondency and gloom Rush over it again, Receive me, save me! [He plunges into the crater.]" Out of the ancient beliefs and myths concerning subterranean fires grew up the enormously important beliefs in Hell and Purgatory, which attained such abnormal proportions in medieval times, and which are by no means yet extinct. The most vivid picture of Hell, founded largely on ancient material, though with a Biblical basis, is found in Milton. In language which recalls the Titanomachy, the poet tells of Satan and his myrmidons hurled from heaven. "Him the almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th' aetherial sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire." Confounded for a time by his fall, he lies rolling in the fiery gulf; but at length, rolling round his baleful eyes, he sees "A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge fed With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed." What manner of intuitions are embodied here? Perchance we are beginning to treat them too lightly, as also the Hindu doctrine of Karma; for the universe, after all, is the scene of the reign of law. But however this may be, we are glad to emerge, with Dante, from the regions of punitive flames into the regions of the fires that purge--into the pure air that surrounds the Isle of Purgatory. "Sweet hue of eastern sapphire, that was spread O'er the serene aspect of the pure air, High up as the first circle, to mine eyes Unwonted joy renewed, soon as I 'scaped Forth from the atmosphere of deadly gloom That had mine eyes and bosom filled with grief." Shall we invest with like purgatorial powers the flaming swords that barred the way to Paradise? Is such the inner meaning of the appeal: "do thou my tongue inspire Who touched Isaiah's hallowed lips with fire"? The more hostile aspects of fire are most strikingly embodied in the Teutonic giant Logi (Flame) with his children, who were supposed to be the authors of every great conflagration, and who might be seen in the midst of the flames, their heads crowned with chaplets of fire. They may be taken, like the Greek giants and Titans, as personifications of the wild brute forces of nature, which strive to hinder man's work and destroy what he has made. For, as Schiller says: "the elements are hostile To the work of human hand." For such are but some out of the many forms in which man has struggled to give expression to his intuitions that there is something wrong in nature--to his deep sense of division and conflict in the cosmic process. Heracleitus, as we saw, held that conflict is an essential condition of existence. At any rate, it is true, that order is only won by severe conflict with destructive and irregular powers. An ancient expression of this experience is found in the long contest waged between Zeus and the other children of Cronos. A modern expression is found in Huxley's illustration of the fenced garden that, if untended, speedily returns to its wild condition. In the framing and moulding of this experience, the hostile aspects of fire have played no insignificant part. In this context it would be natural to treat of the Sun as the predominant manifestation of fire, of which Shelley, in his hymn to Apollo, has said: "I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself and knows itself divine." The various sun-gods would be passed in review, Ra of the Egyptians, Apollo of the Greeks, and the various forms of sun-worship, from the most primitive times down through the Persian religion, that of the Peruvians, the "children of the sun," to that of the modern Parsees--and that of the unnamed multitudes who in substance have echoed the words which Moore puts into the mouths of the Hyperboreans: "To the Sun-god all our hearts and lyres By day, by night belong; And the breath we draw from his living fires We give him back in song." But the subject is too great and is deserving of special treatment. Certain of the more essential conceptions involved will come before us in the chapter on light. Mirabeau on his death-bed would seem to have put the whole matter in the briefest space--"Si ce n'est pas là Dieu, c'est du moins son cousin-german." Turner, on his deathbed, was briefer and bolder still--"The sun is God." Knowing the man and knowing his work, we can understand what he meant. Put it the other way round, we have the same, and yet the fuller truth--"the Lord God is a Sun."