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 Mangaïa 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
- ↑ Curiously enough we see the same institution obtaining among the Damaras of South Africa, where the chiefs, who sway their people with a sort of priestly authority, commit to their daughters the care of a so-called eternal fire. From its hearth younger scions separating from the parent stock take away a burning brand to their new home. The use of a common prytaneum, of circular form, like the Roman temple of Vesta, testified to the common origin of the North American Assinais and Maichas. The Mobiles, the Chippewas, the Natchez, had each a corporation of Vestals. If the Natchez let their fire die out, they were bound to renew it from the Mobiles. The Moquis, Pueblos and Comanches had also their perpetual fires. The Redskins discussed important affairs of state at the “council fires,” around which each sachem marched three times, turning to it all the sides of his person. “It was a saying among our ancestors,” said an Iroquois chief in 1753, “that when the fire goes out at Onondaga”—the Delphi of the league—“we shall no longer be a people.”
