Asia is a region where distinct fire-worship may be peculiarly well traced through the range of lower and higher civilization. The rude Kamchadals, worshipping all things that did them harm or good, worshipped the fire, offering to it noses of foxes and other game, so that one might tell by looking at furs whether they had been taken by baptized or heathen hunters.[[672]] The Ainos of Yesso worship Abe kamui the Fire-deity as the benefactor of men, the messenger to the other gods, the purifier who heals the sick.[[673]] Turanian tribes likewise hold fire a sacred element, many Tunguz, Mongol, and Turk tribes sacrifice to Fire, and some clans will not eat meat without first throwing a morsel upon the hearth. The following passage is from a Mongol wedding-song to the personified Fire, ‘Mother Ut, Queen of Fire, thou who art made from the elm that grows on the mountain-tops of Changgai-Chan and Burchatu-Chan, thou who didst come forth when heaven and earth divided, didst come forth from the footsteps of Mother Earth, and wast formed by the King of Gods. Mother Ut, whose father is the hard steel, whose mother is the flint, whose ancestors are the elm-trees, whose shining reaches to the sky and pervades the earth. Goddess Ut, we bring thee yellow oil for offering, and a white wether with yellow head, thou who hast a manly son, a beauteous daughter-in-law, bright daughters. To thee, Mother Ut, who ever lookest upward, we bring brandy in bowls, and fat in both hands. Give prosperity to the King’s son (the bridegroom), to the King’s daughter (the bride), and to all the people!’[[674]] As an analogue to Hephaistos the Greek divine smith, may stand the Circassian Fire-god, Tleps, patron of metal-workers, and the peasants whom he has provided with plough and hoe.[[675]]
Among the most ancient cultured nations of the Old World, Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, accounts of fire-worship are absent, or so scanty and obscure that their study is more valuable in compiling the history than in elucidating the principles of religion.[[676]] For this scientific purpose, the more full and minute documents of Aryan religion can give a better answer. In various forms and under several names, the Fire-god is known. Nowhere does he carry his personality more distinctly than under his Sanskrit name of Agni, a word which keeps its quality, though not his divinity, in the Latin ‘ignis.’ The name of Agni is the first word of the first hymn of the Rig-Veda: ‘Agnim île puro-hitam yajnasya devam ritvijam!—Agni I entreat, divine appointed priest of sacrifice!’ The sacrifices which Agni receives go to the gods, he is the mouth of the gods, but he is no lowly minister, as it is said in another hymn:
‘No god indeed, no mortal is beyond the might of thee, the mighty one, with the Maruts come hither, O Agni!’
Such the mighty Agni is among the gods, yet he comes within the peasant’s cottage to be protector of the domestic hearth. His worship has survived the transformation of the ancient patriarchal Vedic religion of nature into the priest-ridden Hinduism of our own day. In India there may yet be found the so-called Fire-priests (Agnihotri) who perform according to Vedic rite the sacrifices entitling the worshippers to heavenly life. The sacred fire-drill for churning the new fire by friction of wood (arani) is used so that Agni still is new-born of the twirling fire-sticks, and receives the melted butter of the sacrifice.[[677]] Among the records of fire-worship in Asia, is the account of Jonas Hanways’s ‘Travels,’ dating from about 1740, of the everlasting fire at the burning wells near Baku, on the Caspian. At the sacred spot stood several ancient stone temples, mostly arched vaults 10 to 15 feet high. One little temple was still used for worship, near the altar of which, about three feet high, a large hollow cane conveyed the gas up from the ground, burning at the mouth with a blue flame. Here were generally forty or fifty poor devotees, come on pilgrimage from their country to make expiation for themselves and others, and subsisting on wild celery, &c. These pilgrims are described as marking their foreheads with saffron, and having great veneration for a red cow; they wore little clothing, and the holiest of them kept one arm on their heads, or continued unmoved in some other posture; they are described as Ghebers, or Gours, the usual Moslem term for Fire-worshippers.[[678]]
In general, this name of Ghebers is applied to the Zoroastrians or Parsis, whom a modern European would all but surely point to if asked to instance a modern race of Fire-worshippers. Classical accounts of the Persian religion set down fire-worship as part and parcel of it; the Magi, it is recorded, hold the gods to be Fire and Earth and Water; and again, the Persians reckon the Fire to be a god (θεοφοροῦσιν).[[679]] On the testimony of the old religious books of the Parsis themselves, Fire, as the greatest Ized, as giver of increase and health, as craving for wood and scents and fat, seems to take the distinctest divine personality. Their doctrine that Ardebehist, the presiding angel or spirit of fire, is adored, but not the material object he belongs to, is a perfect instance of the development of the idea of an elemental divinity from that of an animated fetish. When, driven by Moslem persecution from Persia, Parsi exiles landed in Gujarat, they described their religion in an official document as being the worship of Agni or Fire, thus claiming for themselves a place among recognized Hindu sects.[[680]] In modern times, though for the most part the Parsis have found toleration and prosperity in India, yet an oppressed remnant of the race still keeps up the everlasting fires at Yezd and Kirman, in their old Persian land. The modern Parsis, as in Strabo’s time, scruple to defile the fire or blow it with their breath, they abstain from smoking out of regard not to themselves but to the sacred element, and they keep up consecrated ever-burning fires before which they do worship. Nevertheless, Prof. Max Müller is able to say of the Parsis of our own day: ‘The so-called Fire-worshippers certainly do not worship the fire, and they naturally object to a name which seems to place them on a level with mere idolators. All they admit is, that in their youth they are taught to face some luminous object while worshipping God, and that they regard the fire, like other great natural phenomena, as an emblem of the Divine power. But they assure us that they never ask assistance or blessings from an unintelligent material object, nor is it even considered necessary to turn the face to any emblem whatever in praying to Ormuzd.’[[681]] Now, admitting this view of fire-worship as true of the more intelligent Parsis, and leaving aside the question how far among the more ignorant this symbolism may blend (as in such cases is usual) into actual adoration, we may ask what is the history of ceremonies which thus imitate, yet are not, fire-worship. The ethnographic answer is clear and instructive. The Parsi is the descendant of a race in this respect represented by the modern Hindu, a race who did simply and actually worship Fire. Fire-worship still forms a link historically connecting the Vedic with the Zoroastrian ritual; for the Agnishtoma or praise of Agni the Fire, where four goats are to be sacrificed and burnt, is represented by the Yajishn ceremony, where the Parsi priests are now content to put some hair of an ox in a vessel and show it to the Fire. But the development of the more philosophic Zarathustrian doctrines has led to a result common in the history of religion, that the ancient distinctly meant rite has dwindled to a symbol, to be preserved with changed sense in a new theology.
Somewhat of the same kind may have taken place among the European race who seem in some respects the closest relatives of the old Persians. Slavonic history possibly keeps up some trace of direct and absolute fire-worship, as where in Bohemia the Pagans are described as worshipping fires, groves, trees, stones. But though the Lithuanians and Old Prussians and Russians are among the nations whose especial rite it was to keep up sacred everlasting fires, yet it seems that their fire-rites were in the symbolic stage, ceremonies of their great celestial-solar religion, rather than acts of direct worship to a Fire-god.[[682]] Classical religion, on the other hand, brings prominently into view the special deities of fire. Hēphaistos, Vulcan, the divine metallurgist who had his temples on Ætna and Lipari, stands in especial connexion with the subterranean volcanic fire, and combines the nature of the Polynesian Mahuika and the Circassian Tleps. The Greek Hestia, the divine hearth, the ever-virgin venerable goddess, to whom Zeus gave fair office instead of wedlock, sits in the midst of the house, receiving fat:—
‘Τῇ δὲ πατὴρ Ζεὺς δῶκε καλὸν γέρας ἀντὶ γάμοιο,
Καί τε μέσῳ οἴκῳ κατ’ ἄρ’ ἔζετο πῖαρ ἑλοῦσα.’
In the high halls of gods and men she has her everlasting seat, and without her are no banquets among mortals, for to Hestia first and last is poured the honey-sweet wine:—
‘Ἐστίη, ἣ πάντων ἐν δώμασιν ὑψηλοῖσιν