A common root-word for fire serves to connect numerous scattered insular races of the great Pacific archipelagos, through their intercourse with the Malay voyagers. Yet while the Malay word ápi may be taken as the source of many diversified forms of the insular term for fire, the Papuans, rather than the Malays, present the ethnical peculiarities predominant throughout Polynesia, and characteristic of the Maoris of New Zealand; and distinct roots in many intermediate island vocabularies prove the independent knowledge of fire. The Vitian is rich in terms for light, warmth, shining, kindling, burning, boiling, etc. Aundre, to shine or flame, becomes oundreva, to kindle, and vakaundre, to cause to burn. From yame, the tongue, is made, by a familiar analogy, yame-ni-mbuka, a flame of fire. Ilgatu, fire, begets a group of words, including ilgilaiso, charcoal, and ilgilaisongawa, hot cinders. Liva, a flash of lightning, gives lavi, to bring fire, lovo, a furnace, a native oven; and recalls one familiar source of the knowledge of fire: as the asa, the sun; atua, a deity, probably the sun-god; asu, smoke, etc., of the Rotuma dialect suggest another association of ideas common to the Old and New World.
The fire-worship of the Ghebirs is but a degraded form of that homage to visible divinity with which man worships the god of day, and bows down before the heavenly host. Among the civilised nations of the New World, accordingly, a peculiar sanctity was associated with the familiar service of fire. At the close of the great cycle of the Aztecs, when the calendar was corrected to true solar time at the end of the fifty-second year, a high religious festival was held, on the eve of which they broke in pieces their household gods, destroyed their furniture, and extinguished every fire. In the reconstruction of the ritual calendar, the intercalated days were held as though non-existent, and dedicated to no gods: on which account they were reputed unfortunate. At the end of that dreary interval of fasting and penitence, during which no hearth smoked, and no warm food could be eaten throughout the land, the ceremony of the new fire was celebrated. After sunset the priests of the great temple went forth to a neighbouring mountain, and there, at midnight, the sacred flame was rekindled, which was to light up the national fires for another cycle. The process by which it was procured, by revolving one piece of dry wood in the hollow of another, is repeatedly illustrated in the Mexican paintings of Lord Kingsborough’s work. But, true to the bloody rites of the national faith, at this sacred festival the fire was kindled on the breast of a human victim, from whence the reeking heart was immediately afterwards torn out, and cast as a bloody offering to the gods. The period from the extinction to the rekindling of the sacred flame was one of great suspense. With a superstitious feeling, in striking accordance with the customs and ideas of the northern Indians, the women remained confined to their houses, with their faces covered, under the belief that if they witnessed the ceremony they would be forthwith transformed into beasts. Meanwhile, the men gathered on the terraced roofs, and looked forth in dread suspense into the darkness. The flames on the summits of the great teocallis, which lighted up the city at all other seasons, had been extinguished; and if the priests failed to rekindle them, it was believed that the night must be eternal, and the world would come to an end. But dimly, through the darkness, a spark was seen to glimmer on the distant summit of the mountain, and from thence it was swiftly borne to the temple, towards which the worshippers turned with renewed hope. As the sacred flame again blazed on the high altar, and was distributed to the other teocallis, shouts of triumph ascended with it to the sky. Feasts, joyous processions, and oblations at the temples followed, and were prolonged through a festival of thirteen days, devoted to a national jubilee for the recovered flame, the type of a regenerated world.[[62]] The long interval which transpired between this closing rite of the great cycle was of itself sufficient to give it an impressive sanctity in the eyes of the Aztec worshipper. He who witnessed it in youth saw it only once again as life drew towards a close; whilst few indeed of all who rejoiced at the renewed gift of fire could expect to look again on the strangely significant rite. Compared with the annual miracle of the Greek Church in the crypt of the Holy Sepulchre, to which it bears some resemblance, the great festival of the Aztecs was replete with significance and solemn grandeur, though stained with the blood of their hideous sacrifices.
The Peruvian sun-worshippers preserved the harmony between their recurrent festivals and the true solar time, by a ruder process of adjustment than that which was devised by the remarkable proficiency of the Aztec priests in astronomical science. Nevertheless, they too had their secular festival of Raymi, held annually at the period of the summer solstice. For three days previous a general fast prevailed, the fire on the great altar of the sun went out, and in all the dwellings of the land no hearth was kindled. As the dawn of the fourth day approached, the Inca, surrounded by his nobles, who came from all parts of the country to join in the solemn celebration, assembled in the great square of the capital to greet the rising sun. The temple of the national deity presented its eastern portal to the earliest rays, emblazoned with his golden image, thickly set with precious stones; and as the first beams of the morning were reflected back from this emblem of the sun-god, songs of triumph mingled with the jubilant shout of his worshippers. Then after various rites of adoration, preparations were made for rekindling the sacred fire. But this, with the Peruvians, was done by a process far in advance of that retained by the Aztec priests. The rays of the sun, collected into a focus by a concave mirror of polished metal, were made to inflame a heap of dried cotton; and a llama was sacrificed as a burnt-offering to the sun. Only in the case of the sky being overcast did the priests resort to friction for rekindling the altar; but the hiding of his countenance by the god of day was regarded as little less ominous than the extinction of the sacred fire, which it became the duty of the virgins of the sun to guard throughout the year. A slaughter of the llama flocks of the sun furnished a universal banquet; and, while the god was propitiated by offerings of fruit and flowers, there appear to have been some rare occasions on which the sacrifice of a human victim—a beautiful maiden or a child,—gave to this graceful anniversary a nearer resemblance to the appalling rites of Aztec worship.
Among the northern Indian tribes some faint traces of the annual festival of fire are discernible. At the sacrifice of the white dog, the New Year’s festival of the Iroquois, the proceedings extended over six days; and such were the obligations which its rites imposed on all, that if any member of a family died during the period, the body was laid aside, and the relatives participated in the games as well as the religious ceremonies. The strangling of the white dog destined for sacrifice was the chief feature of the first day’s proceedings. On the second day the two keepers of the faith visited each house, and performed the significant ceremony of stirring the ashes on the hearth, accompanied with a thanksgiving to the Great Spirit. On the morning of the fifth day the fire was solemnly kindled by friction; and the white dog was borne in procession on a bark litter, until the officiating leaders halted, facing the rising sun, when it was laid on the flaming wood and consumed, during an address, which included a special thanksgiving to the sun, for having looked on the earth with a beneficent eye.[[63]]
There is, perhaps, no connection traceable between the various rites thus described; for it would be easy to find their parallels among ancient and modern nations. They pertained to the religious practices of the Chaldeans, to the rites of Baal, and to other early forms of idolatry. Sabaism is indeed the most natural form of false worship, commending itself by many visible tokens, as of a divine influence and power, to uninstructed man; and readily suggests the association of fire with the sun as its source. “Take ye good heed unto yourselves,” says the lawgiver of Israel to the tribes in the wilderness, “for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire; lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them.” This worship of the sun, though associated with ancient rites of Asiatic nations, is not therefore necessarily an evidence of the eastern origin either of the faith or of the nations of the New World. But, in the services to which it gave rise there, we have, at least, suggestive hints of the links that bind together its own ancient and modern tribes. Perhaps also they may supply a clew to the interpretation of some of the obscure sculptures still remaining on sites of the extinct native civilisation of America, and of rites once practised amid the sacred enclosures, and on the altar-mounds which give such peculiar interest to the river-terraces of the Mississippi valley.
Among the remarkable structures of the Mound-Builders, reviewed in a subsequent chapter, their explorers have been struck by the peculiarities of a certain class of mounds, erected on the most elevated summits of outlying hills. Concerning these “there can be no doubt that the ancient people selected prominent and elevated positions upon which to build large fires, which were kept burning for long periods, or renewed at frequent intervals. They appear to have been built generally upon heaps of stones, which are broken up and sometimes partially vitrified. In all cases they exhibit marks of intense and protracted heat.”[[64]] Such indications have been supposed to mark ancient signal-stations adapted to the telegraphic system still in use among native tribes, of sending up columns of smoke as a warning that enemies are at hand. But this “putting out fire,” as it is called among the Indians of the north-west, for the purposes of signal, is now accomplished by the simple process of setting the short-tufted buffalo grass in flame, and presents slight analogy to the traces of intense fires on the ancient hill-mounds, where the amount of scoriaceous material often covers a large space several feet deep.
Perhaps greater importance is due to the employment of the same method of fire-making at the present day among the Indians of the north-west, as we see illustrated in ancient Aztec paintings; while the sun-worshippers of the southern continent had devised a totally distinct method, corresponding to that by which the Romans kindled the sacred fire. Mr. Paul Kane thus describes the process employed by the Chinooks on the Columbia River:—“The fire is obtained by means of a flat piece of dry cedar, in which a small hollow is cut, with a channel for the ignited charcoal to run over; on this the Indian sits to hold it steady, while he rapidly twirls a round stick of the same wood between the palms of his hands, with the point pressed into the hollow. In a very short time sparks begin to fall through the channel upon finely frayed cedar-bark placed underneath, which they soon ignite. There is a great deal of knack in doing this, but those who are used to it will light a fire in a very short time. The men usually carry these sticks about with them, as after they have been once used they produce the fire more quickly.”[[65]] I witnessed the process successfully employed under the most unfavourable circumstances, on one occasion when camping out with Chippewa guides on the Lake of Bays, in Western Canada. We had struck our tents, and were making our way down the river, when a steady rain set in, which continued throughout the day. We had to pass several long portages, involving in each case the unloading, and carrying over them, our canoes and baggage; and on one of these occasions, finding myself alone with my Indian guide at the foot of a portage where we must necessarily be detained a considerable time, I suggested to him by words and signs, whether it were possible to kindle a fire. Rain was falling in torrents, the trees were dripping, and the grass and fallen leaves resembled a soaked sponge. But Kineesè set to work in Indian fashion, hunted out a pine-knot, such as are of common occurrence in the Canadian forest, where the tree itself has rotted away and left the cores of its oldest branches like pins of iron. Having secured this, and a piece of half-burned wood from under the remains of an old camp-fire, he next stripped off the bark from the lee-side of a birch tree, and collecting a heap of the dry inner bark, thin as paper, he carefully disposed it under a cover of pine-bark, and placed over all a pile of chips cut with his axe from the centre of a pine log. All being now ready, he frayed a handful of the birch-bark into the consistency of tow, and placing this on the charred wood, he made the hard point of the pine-knot revolve in the wood by means of a cord, while his bent position, pressing the other end to his breast, protected it from the rain. In a surprisingly short time he blew the tinder into a flame, applied it to the pile he had prepared, and nursing this with chips and dry twigs, we were able to welcome our companions to a blazing log fire, kindled under circumstances which, even with the aid of flint and steel, would have seemed impossible to the European woodsman.
The knowledge of this simple process, however acquired, constitutes perhaps the oldest of all human traditions relating to the arts of life. A mode of obtaining fire nearly equivalent to that of flint and steel has already been referred to as in use both among the Fuegians and Esquimaux; but the process of friction is also resorted to by the latter, and with slight variations in the application of the principle, it appears to be the recognised Indian mode of procuring fire. Among all the Indian tribes not only was a certain superstitious sanctity attached to fire, but they looked with distrust on the novel methods employed by Europeans for its production. When, in 1811, Elksatowa, the prophet of the Wabash,—a brother of Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior,—was exhorting his tribe to resist the deadly encroachments of the white man, he concluded one of his eloquent warnings by exclaiming: “Throw away your fire-steels, and awaken the sleeping flame as your fathers did before you; fling away your wrought coverings, and put on skins won for yourselves as was their wont, if you would escape the anger of the Great Spirit.” Nor is there wanting among many Indians a conviction that the Ishkodaiwaubo, or fire-liquid, is a malignant form of the same mysterious element; an evil medicine wrought for their destruction by the white Manitou.
Various methods are thus traceable throughout the western hemisphere for calling into existence the wondrous element, so peculiarly distinctive of man. Yet even in these, common relations of a very comprehensive character are apparent; while the Peruvian, with the solar mirror, stands apart alike from the rude Indian and the cultivated native of the Mexican plateau; and far to the south of both, the Fuegian finds in the natural products of his inhospitable clime a means of fire-making analogous to that which the Shawnee prophet taught his people to regard as one of the unhallowed practices of the Whites. All alike exhibit man, even in the rudest stage, master of the same secret; and turning to many useful, and even indispensable purposes, that which no other animal can be taught to use, or scarcely even to look upon without dread.