FIRE

FIRE . In early stages of civilization, humans learned to create fire by striking flint, drilling wood, and focusing solar rays. Myths attributed this wondrous, crucial acquisition to the daring of a culture hero, theft from a primordial bird or animal, burglary of heaven and obstinate gods who withheld it, emanation from the vagina of an old woman, or sometimes the outright gift of a divine being. Recognized as ambiguously creative and destructive, life-giving and life-taking, fire appeared in multiple mysteries of transmutation: of environs from cold, dark, and dangerous to warm, light, and secure; of food from raw to cooked; of substance from putrid to pure; of fields from sterile brush to fertile earth; of earth from ore to metal; of human bodies from disease to health; of spirits from profane to sacred; and of speech from babble to wisdom. Fire was identified in animals, plants, earth, air, and water. The human body contained its own fires of digestion, sexuality, and wrath, with fires in the blood, breath, semen, mind, heart, and spleen.

As the alchemist liberated secret interior fires from certain minerals, so with fire the smith accelerated nature's process by cooking and molding minerals into precious goods. Fire was appropriated by the shaman in the sweat lodge, by the yogin meditating as a fifth fire between four others, by the Australian aboriginal novice symbolically roasted and purified over a pit-fire, by the hero whose fury incinerated enemy warriors. In ancient India the hearth was said to be a womb and a householder was not born until he and his wife established sacrificial fires. Chinese esoteric alchemists spurned the smelting fire of the exoteric alchemist because a quest for immortality demanded the superior fire in the mind. Certain Native American tribes believed their ritual fires regenerated the sun and their new fires rekindled the new year. In modern Scandinavia some farmers of the old school still drilled new fire by hand to cure sick cows. Many religious traditions, ancient and contemporary, foresee a celestial or cosmic fire that will destroy the world, as it has in the past.

Fire has been adopted as a metaphor—for some, the only metaphor—of sublime, ineffable, transformative experiences in the spiritual quests of specialists of the sacred, and in works by mystics, philosophers, and writers as disparate as Richard of Saint-Victor, Dante Alighieri, and Blaise Pascal. Understanding across times and cultures responds to an early fourteenth-century voice, that of Richard Rolle de Hampole: "when settled in devotion … my soul is set on fire." Western ascetics and saints gained renown as living flames, like legendary salamanders with miraculous immunity to fire, while different traditions of Asia produced similar handlers of fire, and walkers on fire, who demonstrated superhuman status in kinship and seeming unity with the powerful element.

The cultic dimensions of fire are varied and countless. Some societies chose to center tradition on domestic hearths and community fire altars, with extensive links to sacred oral or written texts, while others held fire in supporting mythic and ritual roles. The discussion that follows must of necessity be selective and illustrative, not comprehensive.

Ancient India and Iran and Subsequent Traditions

The oldest and most coherent body of myths, rituals, and symbols of fire is found in the Vedas of ancient India and the remnant Avestan and Pahlavi texts of ancient Iran. There are parallels in both domestic and community cults of fire, and between Indic soma and Iranian haoma (Indo-Iranian *sauma ), both essential offerings to deities poured into sacrificial fires. These, along with other key names and rituals, indicate an Indo-Iranian tradition of fire maintained by nomadic pastoralists in West Asia several centuries before and after 2000 bce. Oral mythologies and ritual references collected in the Ṛgveda and Atharvaveda from around 1400 to 1000 bce include some 200 hymns addressed to the god of fire, Agni. The opening verse of the Ṛgveda addresses him as Purohita, a hearth deity who is domestic priest within every household as well as priest for all the gods. In other Vedic Saṃhitās such as the Yajurveda, there appeared elaborate ritual schedules based on the identity of fire and the householder-sacrificer. Subsequent Brāhmaṇa texts explored the nature and function of this fire cult, which remained a focus for both household and expanded cooperative ritual programs. The tenth book of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is Agni Rahasya, the "mystery of the fire altar," an esoteric text that set a precedent for philosophical speculations in the Upaniṣads.

In turn, by around 700 bce these Upaniṣads generated a new worldview for Vedic Hinduism. Each of the two earliest contains the same teaching on saṃsāra (transmigration). After death, one not released from rebirths returns from the moon and passes through five sacrificial fires, the fourth being a man who offers his semen into a woman; the fruit of this fifth sacrifice is a new embryo. In the same period compendia of manuals known as sūtras systematized schedules of cooperative (Śrauta) and then domestic (Gṛhya) fire sacrifices that have lasted to the present time. Also in this pivotal era various techniques of asceticism grew into prominence, including the production of inner heat (tapas) by means of various austerities. Cosmic-human bodily correspondences were explored in yet another way with these new expressions of fire and heat.

As the god Agni himself is a cosmic triad, so there should be three fires set in every household, and still in India today there are āhitāgnis, secluded maintainers of Agni in their houses as āhavanīya (offering fire), gārhapatya (preparatory fire), and dakṣināgn i (protective southern fire). The agnihotra, morning and evening offerings of hot milk, comprise the basic domestic sacrifice. These now-rare three-fire sacrificers are eligible, as in ancient Vedic practice, to advance to the sacrifice of soma and then selected other śrauta rituals. The yajamāna (sacrificer) carries a terra-cotta bowl of fire in identification with Agni and with another Vedic god, Prajāpati, as world-creator. Solemn rituals include the forty-day pauṇḍarīka, employing seventeen priests with both animal and soma offerings in a type of agnicayana fire sacrifice reintegrating time and space in a cosmic construction of Agni. Five layers of thousands of bricks shape a gigantic eagle with the ātman, the Self, at the center, indicating that the sacrificer and fire are one. A striking feature of these contemporary survivals of ancient practice is the generation of Agni by friction from araṇis (male and female wooden drilling sticks). These have a capacity to absorb all three fires into themselves for transport if the āhitāgni and patnī (wife) must travel away from the house and constant tending of fires.

Confirmation of a belief in the identity of householder and fire is found both in the Vedic cremation ritual, in which the sacrificer or his wife is burned with the three sacrificial fires, literally absorbed by them in antyeṣṭi, a "final sacrifice," and, in another direction, in the vow to become a saṃnyāsin, a renunciant ascetic. Saṃnyāsa calls for the interiorization of fires, ritual deposition of fires in the self, and therefore an end to the external sacrifices that have previously structured life. Since the saṃnyāsin' s breaths are the five cosmic fires, his agnihotra becomes the constant offering of prāṇa (breath).

Great Vedic fire sacrifices such as the agnicayana, aśvamedha (royal horse sacrifice), or rājasūya (consecration of a king) have not been a prominent feature of Hinduism since the late medieval period, and the god Agni himself has been reduced to minor status since the emergence of the Sanskrit epics and Purāṇas. But the role of fire in Hinduism has never diminished. Life-cycle rites (saṃskāras) are an array of ceremonies from conception and birth to cremation, the last still defined by the final offering of the body to Agni Kravyād, consumer of the deceased, on the funeral pyre. Saṃskāras depend on ritually kindled fires with domestic priests or householders themselves reciting either Vedic mantras or Sanskrit verses. As a complement to household worship, which is usually focused on images or symbols of favorite goddesses and gods assembled close to the kitchen hearth, Hindus may go to neighborhood temples and shrines for devapūjā, public worship. Inside temples housing a form of Devī, Viṣṇu, Śiva, or another deity, priests conduct on behalf of the visitor a schedule of worship, invariably including ārati, the waving of a lighted lamp or burning incense before the sacred image.

There are numerous fire festivals with bonfires, lamps, and fireworks in Hinduism. Dīvālī (Dīpāvalī) is a popular occasion for setting out multitudes of burning lights (dīpas) in October–November. In honor of pitṛs (ancestors), tiny bamboo boats carry hundreds of burning lamps down the nearest river. Torches are carried in rural communities in circumambulation around the entire village for certain festivals, and passage of all residents under arches of burning straw may be practiced at harvest time. A favorite vow in villages and towns of South India and Sri Lanka is firewalking, at times featuring hundreds of people crossing in single file a thirty-foot-long pit of glowing embers to the sounds of thunderous drums and shrill flutes. At other times a single person, possessed by a deity or the deified dead, may walk on coals, "play" with fire, dance with burning skewers, swallow burning charcoal, or hold burning camphor on the palm of the hand, all as demonstrations of divine power and grace. Devotion to a fierce goddess such as Pattini, Draupadī, Mārīamma, Poleramma, or some other manifestation of Amma (Mother) is thereby tested, and the unscathed devotee gains the goddess's protection against epidemic diseases and other misfortunes. Firewalking is performed by Fiji Island migrant Hindus in the South Pacific, by Buddhist as well as Hindu devotees of the popular god Kataragama (Skanda) in Sri Lanka, and by Shīʿī Muslims in South Asia, particularly during the annual festival of Muḥarram.

This sketch of South Asia over four millennia may be paralleled in greater Iran, where spiritual identifications of humans with fire occur on similar levels: individual, family-household, village, and in the case of kingship rituals, state. However, by comparison with India's still enduring oral traditions and Vedic-Hindu historical continuity in ritual, evidence for ancient Iranian cults of fire is limited first by a break in oral traditions and loss of much of the early written record, then by dispersal of Zoroastrians themselves during the medieval advance of Islam. What survives, however, indicates the centrality of the household hearth (ātash dādgāh), along with extended community (ātash ādarān) and royal or primary fires (ātash bahrām) and sacrifices similar to the pattern of Vedic Indo-Aryans to the east. A cosmic five-fire worldview, again as in India, complemented this basic triad, all based on a system of correspondences between natural fire and ritual fire. Among several major differences, however, was the emergence in Iran of permanent temples, "houses of a fire" enthroned on raised pedestals, perhaps under the influence of surrounding temple-building cultures of urban West Asia. Although fireplaces have been excavated in Bactria and Margiana (northern Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan), in sites in the path of Indo-Iranian migrations from around 2500 to 1500 bce, other than traces of ephedra (possibly haoma ) there is little evidence regarding the beliefs and rituals of those who used them. It was not until the fourth century bce that Achaemenid rulers of greater Iran erected temples of perpetual fire. Barely surviving two millennia of political and religious warfare, temples with fire in metal containers still serve today as spiritual centers for remnant Zoroastrians in Iran and for Parsis in western India who maintain eight bahrām fires.

Fire emerged as the basic symbol of Zoroastrianism, the religion that developed in the first half of the first millennium bce, probably from the teachings of Zarathushtra in the Gāthās. The ancient Indo-Iranian deities were submerged into a cult of one "Wise Lord," Ahura Mazdā, although they resurfaced as his entities or qualities in a set of six Amesha Spentas (Beneficent immortals). Most prominent among them is Asha, the equivalent of Vedic ṛta (cosmic order). Asha, a quality of Ahura Mazdā—at one point recognized as an independent deity, Asha Vahishta—symbolizes truth and justice, and was represented by fire. The sun and light are visible forms of Ahura Mazdā, but above all he is fire. An ethical dualism presented a clear opposition in which the symbols of asha —fire, light, purity, and goodness—are on the side of Ahura Mazdā against druj (the lie), associated with darkness, impurity, and evil. In meditation, personal piety, and sacrifice (yasna, Avestan parallel to Vedic yajña ) a worshiper relates to fire and participates in this cosmic, but also immediately human conflict. The offering into fires of sacrificial animals, particularly their fat, and of pressed haoma juice was suppressed by Zarathushtra, but these age-old rituals resurfaced in a later period. Among Parsis today only haoma is sacrificed. A symbolic libation of fat occurs only in funerals.

Aside from permanent fire temples, other features distinguish the Iranian fire cult from its Vedic-Hindu counterpart. The sovereign Vedic god Varuṇa governs ṛta (cosmic order), while in the case of Varuṇa's Avestan complement, Ahura Mazdā, asha is itself the representation of fire. In Iran, disposal of the dead was not by cremation, as in India, but rather by exposure, as seen with the famous stone towers still used today by Parsis in India. Fire burns nearby, but birds and beasts of prey are allowed to clean flesh from bone, thus protecting sacred fire from the pollution of death. Even human breath is polluting, and mouth-veils are worn by sacrificing, fire-tending priests, the only persons who may approach the altars.

Regarding fire, yet another distinction from Indo-Aryan tradition pertains to time. Vedic sacrifices reveal a cyclic pattern, as in the Rājasūya sacrifice used to consecrate kings, in which one performance, when completed, is immediately followed by preparations for another. The Purāṇas continued this model with the pralaya principle, based on an endless repetition of dissolutions and re-creations of the cosmos, destructions being total incineration by one or another form of Agni. Zoroastrianism, on the other hand, introduced a sense of final time and divine judgment, with eschatological fire expected on the last day in a one-time cataclysm. In historic time, judgment occurs routinely, as in ordeals by fire to test veracity and loyalty, but the day of final judgment awaits the future after resolution of the conflict of asha and druj, the light of truth and darkness of the lie, in favor of Ahura Mazdā and his eternal flame.

The Ancient Mediterranean

A fire altar (bomos) in a sacred precinct (temenos) was an essential feature of ancient religious practice for Greeks. The cult depended, as in India and Iran, on sacrifice to deities with commensal sharing of victims. Hesiod and Homer speak of the fat-wrapped thighbones of an ox, cuts of meat, and wine offered on the altar fire. Open fire pits opposite a temple entrance were standard, although some older temples had interior hearths. Hestia burned perpetually in her temple at Delphi, as a flame and with no image necessary to represent her. And in every home the hearth was the sacred center, a site of offerings, and a space where none could be violated.

In Hesiod's Theogony, Prometheus deceives and angers Zeus during a sacrifice of ox bones by stealing an ember from the altar and kindling the first fire to burn on earth. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter preserves an archaic legend of Eleusinian mysteries, the goddess Demeter's attempt to deify the boy Demophoon by secretly holding him in the hearth fire at night. That ritual, interrupted by the terrified mother, Metaneira, fails and the boy remains mortal. Again, as in India and Iran, cosmic correspondences exist between fire, breath (pneuma, Latin spiritus ), and mind. The worldview of Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 540–480 bce) began with fire, an uncreated, eternal substance, essence of the universe, and medium of creation, associated with logos, mind, reason, and wisdom. The Pythagoreans, Parmenides of Elea, and Empedocles were other philosophers placing elemental fire in prominence.

The bare patch of ground on the Palatine Hill may not be "the hearth of Romulus," as claimed by today's tour guides, but ancient Rome did have its dual fire cults of domestic hearth, which received part of the meal before the family dined, and public altar (ara or altaria ) with its own adjoining hearth. Vesta, Roman parallel to Hestia, was in a uniquely round temple without an image, her eternal flame being sufficient representation on what was essentially the hearth of the city, tended—like any domestic hearth—by females, six appointed Vestal Virgins tasked with kindling a new fire by friction every New Year's Day, March 1. On April 21, Pales, goddess of herders and their animals, was honored through the staging of Parilia, a festival including the racing of men and animals through burning straw, similar to one occurring in India today. The temple of Volcanus stood outside the city walls, a reminder of other fires: the dangerously destructive one sleeping in the heights of Vesuvius and Aetna, and the summer fires of cropfields and granaries.

Two centuries after Heraclitus, Stoic philosophers, including Zeno, Cleanthes, and others, elaborated Heraclitus's belief in fire as a basic element associated with logos as universal reason and regulative principle. The doctrine of seminal logos (logos spermatikos) led to belief in individual beings as immortal sparks from a divine fiery unity, a view adopted with modifications by Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and other philosophical traditions. In the new Hellenistic culture acquainted with the wider world of Asia, several elements derived from early Upaniṣads (c. 700 bce) are evident, including the notion of the individual soul, destined eventually to rejoin that original fiery unity, departing this earth for the moon.

Ancient Israel, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

To a limited extent scriptures of the two biblical traditions and Islam consciously separated the supreme being from the natural phenomenon of fire. And yet all three employed numerous symbols, beliefs, and folklore concerning the element of fire and associated phenomena of light. Only ancient Israel had a cult of fire maintained for animal sacrifices on a temple or open-air altar in the pattern of West Asia and, to a lesser extent, Egypt. With the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 ce, sacrificial fire—along with the Temple and the altar—became eschatological symbols. Early Christian churches with wooden tables as altars for the symbolic sacrifice known as Eucharist, and Islamic mosques as houses of prayer, like synagogues, had place for discreet lamps but not open fire. The Shabbat lamp and the altar candle still serve as fire in miniature.

To a degree, all three religions were influenced by Zoroastrianism, as is particularly evident in postexilic Judaism and in a widespread belief in opposing angels and demons. Most important were apocalyptic and other eschatological imprints in the notions of a fiery last day of judgment, of hell as a place of flaming torment, and of a God who pursues the unrighteous with punishing fire. On the other hand, all three faiths produced mystics of independent and solitary vision and experience, some associated with sublime expressions of fire, heat, and love.

When Solomon prayed before the bronze altar "fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifice and the glory of the Lord filled the temple" (2 Chron. 7:1). In a striking theophany Moses saw the angel of the Lord in the midst of a burning bush that was not consumed (Exod. 3:2), and in the flight from Egypt through the wilderness the Lord led the people of Israel in a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night (Exod. 13:21–22). Believers are protected from destructive fire: "When you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God" (Isa. 43:2). Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were not harmed when thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship an image of gold (Dan. 3:1–30). "A chariot of fire and horses of fire" took Elijah "up by a whirlwind into heaven" (2 Kings 2:11). "My heart grew hot within me," says David in Psalm 39.3, "as I meditated, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue."

In the New Testament the sound of a mighty wind accompanied the arrival of the Holy Spirit that appeared to the apostles of Jesus as "tongues of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them" (Acts 2:1–4). Peter's second letter instructs that heaven and earth will be burned up on the day of the Lord (3:10), and Revelation, the Apocalypse of John, warns sinners of an end "in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death" (21.8). Early Christian desert saints of Egypt such as Abba Joseph of Panephysis, continuing the imagery of the Holy Spirit, were witnessed as flaming fires. The third-century church "father," Origen, foresaw a purification on the last day: Jesus will stand in a fiery river to baptize by fire all who enter paradise.

Fire and light play prominent roles in the extra-canonical literature of Judaism and Christianity, and in Gnostic texts, particularly in various apocalypses. Developing traditions of Jewish mysticism and collections of Jewish legend (Haggadah) were significant in this regard. In a Haggadah account of creation it is said that the preexistent Torah was written with black fire on white fire, as she (the Torah) was lying in the lap of God. The Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus as saying, "He who is near me is near the fire" (82), but also "I have come to cast upon earth fire, sword and war" (16), and the Apocalypse of Peter reveals the day of God with cataracts of fire, "a fierce fire that shall not be put out and it flows for the judgment of wrath" (4). Given the influence of Iranian traditions, it is not surprising to find parallels to cosmic conflict in the Qumran scroll "The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness" and in the Gnostic "Paraphrase of Shem," with its visions of chaotic fires.

Elijah's chariot of fire, reminiscent of both Vedic and ancient Iranian chariots of fire-sacrificers, and Daniel's vision of "a throne of fiery flames with wheels of burning fire" (7:9) became foundational images of the divine throne-chariot (merkabah) for many centuries of mystical texts and schools. Enoch's vision, similar to Daniel's, records a heavenly throne of fire in a blazing mansion, with the Lord speaking to him from streams of fire. He is also given a tour of Hell with its rivers of fire (I Enoch). The thirteenth-century Zohar, the seminal text for Qabbalah, identifies the ten sefirot, primordial numbers and emanations of light and power from the divine unity, a process later believed by qabbalists to include dissemination of sparks from that one source.

Inspirational to generations of Ḥasidim are stories of charismatic rebbes such as Baʿal Shem Tov (c. 1700–1760), known as the BeSHT. Once an overnight guest in his house, awakened at midnight in terror by a great flame rising from the hearth, fainted upon realizing it was the BeSHT. Another Hasidic rebbe, the Maggid of Mezeritch (1704–1772), sent his followers fleeing in panic by appearing suddenly as a being of fire.

The mystics of European Christianity often spoke and wrote of being consumed in ecstasy by incendium amoris, "the fire of love." Saints Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Gregory I (the Great) (c. 540–604), John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz, 1542–1591), Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), and Teresa of Ávila (d. 1582), the hermit Richard Rolle de Hampole (c. 1290–1349), and the philosopher Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) all used a language of fire and heat to convey the impact of mystical transformations or unitive states. Rolle speaks for many: "[T]he heart that truly receives the fire of the Holy Ghost is burned wholly and turns as it were into fire; and it leads it into that form that is likest to God" (Incendium amoris, ch. 17).

In some Greek villages today, devotees of Saint Constantine (the Great) and his mother Saint Helena believe they are protected by the pair when performing a firewalk after sacrificing a bull and sharing the feast of Anestanaria. Brought to the United States by immigrants, this ritual was soon swept into the 1970s New Age practice of firewalking, with its goals of self-realization and experimentation rather than ritual or worship. Today the American firewalking movement holds workshops in scores of states and some universities offer courses on firewalking.

Several times the Qurʾān recounts Moses' theophany of fire, but most references are warnings to those who reject the truth and deserve horrendous flame and molten brass on the day of judgment. Anecdotes of the Prophet preserved in popular bazaar tracts include such miracles as the moment when Muḥammad halted the sun in its course. A rich hagiographical literature, particularly in association with the Ṣūfīs, details the experiences of awliyāʿ (friends) of Allāh, saints, and mystics included in collections from the eleventh and following centuries. Examples of Ṣūfīs handling fire or using a language of fire bring to mind the mystics of Christianity. Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (642–728) caused a "fire-worshiping" Zoroastrian to convert to Islam by thrusting his own hand into a fire and leaving it there unburned. Rābiʿah al-ʾAdawīyah (d. 810), Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī (d. 874), Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273), and Najm Dāyā Rāzī (thirteenth century) all broke restraints of law, theology and proper behavior to identify Allāh and fire, and at times themselves with both. Union with fire readily lent itself to the contested notion of fānaʾ, mystical annihilation. One Ṣūfī complained that he could not sleep because of his fear of hell-fire. Rābiʿah was said to have carried a torch and a pail of water, explaining that she intended to burn Paradise and douse Hell in order to eliminate both hindrances to a pure vision of Allāh. One dark night in Basra she had several visitors. Having no lantern, she blew upon her finger, which then lighted the room until sun-up. In the famous account of his "ascension" according to the Tadhkirat al-Auliya', Abū Yazīd, founder of the "drunken" school of mystics, spoke from his dark night of the soul: "In my intoxication … I melted my body in every crucible in the fire of jealousy." And Rūmī, ecstatic poet of Persian odes and originator of the Mevlevi (Mawlawīyah) whirling dervish dance, sang to his divine beloved, Shams al-Dīn: "Face like fire, wine like fire, love afire … soul … lamenting 'Whither shall I flee?'" (136.6).

See Also

Light and Darkness.

Bibliography

On fire in general, see four works by Mircea Eliade: A History of Religious Ideas, 3 vols., translated by Willard R. Trask et al. (Chicago, 1978–1985), The Forge and the Crucible, translated by Stephen Corrin (New York, 1962), Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York, 1964), and Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, translated by J. M. Cohen (New York, 1965); also see Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, translated by Alan C. M. Ross (Boston, 1964); Carl-Martin Edsman, Ignis Divinus (Lund, Sweden, 1949); and David M. Knipe, In the Image of Fire: Vedic Experiences of Heat (Delhi, 1975).

On fire in Indo-European cosmogony and eschatology, see Bruce Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). On Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, and Eurasian steppe backgrounds to historic India and Iran, see Asko Parpola, "Pre-Proto-Iranians of Afghanistan as Initiators of Sākta Tantrism," Iranica Antiqua 37 (2002): 233–324, and his "From the Dialects of Old Indo-Aryan to Proto-Indo-Aryan and Proto-Iranian," in Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples, edited by Nicholas Sims-Williams, pp.43–102 (Oxford, 2002). Also useful are J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London, 1989) and Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, 2d ed. (Cambridge, U.K., 1954).

On the Vedic fire cult, see Frits Staal, Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, 2 vols. (Berkeley, Calif., 1983); Musashi Tachikawa, Shrikant Bahulkar, and Madhavi Kolhatkar, Indian Fire Ritual (Delhi, 2001); H. W. Bodewitz, The Daily Evening and Morning Offering (Agnihotra) (Leiden, Netherlands, 1976); and David M. Knipe, In the Image of Fire (Delhi, 1975).

On Hinduism, see Wendy Doniger [O'Flaherty], Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Śiva (London, 1973) and David G. White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago, 1996).

On ancient Iran and Zoroastrianism, compare two books by Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1975–91; vol. 3 by Mary Boyce and Frantz Grenet) and Zoroastrians: Their Beliefs and Practices (London, 1979), with two by Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Symbols and Values in Zoroastrianism: Their Survival and Renewal (New York, 1966) and Religion of Ancient Iran, translated by K. M. Jamasp Asa (Bombay, 1973). Other standard works include Stig Wikander, Feuerpriester in Kleinasien und Iran (Lund, Sweden, 1946) and Klaus Schippmann, Die iranischen Feuerheiligtumer (Berlin and New York, 1971). Still authoritative is Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees, 2d ed. (Bombay, 1937).

On fire cults in Java, Bali, Tibet, China, and Japan, see essays by C. Hooykaas, Tadeusz Skorupski, and Michel Strickmann in Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, vol. 2, edited by Frits Staal, pp. 382–455.

On the yin-yang school of ancient China, see Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, 2d ed., vol. 1, translated by Derk Bodde (Princeton, N.J., 1952) and Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge, U.K., 1956).

On ancient Greece, compare Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, translated by John Raffan (Cambridge, Mass., 1985) with Le sacrifice dans l'antiquité, edited by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Olivier Reverdin (Geneva, 1981); Marie Delcourt, Pyrrhos et Pyrrha: Recherches sur les valeurs du feu dans les légendes helléniques (Paris: 1965); Carl-Martin Edsman, Ignis Divinus (Lund, Sweden, 1949); and William D. Furley, Studies in the Use of Fire in Ancient Greek Religion (New York, 1981). On firewalking in modern Greece and the United States, see Loring M. Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton, N.J., 1989), Anna Gault-Antoniades, The Anastenaria: Thracian Fire-walking Festival (Athens, 1954), and William D. Furley, Studies in the Use of Fire in Ancient Greek Religion (New York, 1981).

On ancient Rome, see Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, translated by Philip Krapp, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1970) and Robert Schilling, Rites, cultes, dieux de Rome (Paris, 1979).

On ancient Israel and Judaism, see Menahem Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1978); two works written by Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3d rev. ed. (New York, 1954) and On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York, 1965), and one edited by him, The Zohar: The Book of Splendor (New York, 1949); Ithamar Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism (Leiden, 1980); Willis Barnstone, ed., The Other Bible (San Francisco, 1984); and Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters, translated by Marion Wiesel (New York, 1972).

On Christianity, see Carl-Martin Edsman, Le Baptême de feu (Uppsala, Sweden, 1940); Richard Rolle de Hampole, The Fire of Love, translated by Richard Misyn and edited by F. M. M. Comper, 2d ed. (London, 1920); E. Allison Peers, The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, 3 vols. (London, 1934–1935); The Letters of Saint Teresa, translated by the Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey, 4 vols. (London, 1921–1926); Jakob Boehme, Aurora, translated by John Sparrow (London, 1960); Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (1911; reprint, New York, 1955); and a book edited by Walter H. Capps and Wendy M. Wright, Silent Fire: An Invitation to Western Mysticism (San Francisco, 1978.)

On Islamic saints and mystics, see Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-Auliyaʿ ("Memorial of the Saints"), translated by A. J. Arberry (Chicago, 1966); Mystical Poems of Rūmī, translated by A. J. Arberry (Chicago, 1968); Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975); and R. C. Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (New York, 1960).

On shamanism, in addition to Eliade, Shamanism (New York, 1964), see Jean-Paul Roux, "Fonctions chamaniques et valeurs du feu chez lex peuples altaiques," Revue de l'histoire des religions 189 (1976): 67–101.

On Native Americans, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, translated by John and Doreen Weightman (New York, 1969); Lawrence E. Sullivan, Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions (New York, 1988); Åke Hultkrantz, The Religions of the American Indians, translated by Monica Setterwall (Berkeley, Calif., 1967); and Reinhilde Freise, Studie zum Feuer in Vorstellungswelt und Praktiken der Indianer des südwestlichen Nordamerika (Tübingen, Germany, 1969).

For a penetrating structural study of a fire ritual among the Ndembu of Zambia, see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, 1969).

On Australian aboriginals, see Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, The World of the First Australians: An Introduction to the Traditional Life of the Australian Aborigines (Chicago, 1964).

David M. Knipe (2005)