Periodic Fires.—Because the sun loses its force after noon, and after midsummer daily shortens the length of its circuit, the ancients inferred, and primitive populations still believe, that, as time goes on, the energies of fire must necessarily decline. Therefore men set about renewing the fires in the temples and on the hearth on the longest day of summer or at the beginning of the agricultural year. The ceremony was attended with much rejoicing, banqueting and many religious rites. Houses were thoroughly cleansed; people bathed, and underwent lustrations and purifications; new clothes were put on; quarrels were made up; debts were paid by the debtor or remitted by the creditor; criminals were released by the civil authorities in imitation of the heavenly judges, who were believed to grant on the same day a general remission of sins. All things were made new; each man turned over a new page in the book of his existence. Some nations, like the Etruscans in the Old World and the Peruvians and Mexicans in the New, carried these ideas to a high degree of development, and celebrated with magnificent ceremonies the renewal of the saecula, or astronomic periods, which might be shorter or longer than a century. Some details of the festival among the Aztecs have been preserved. On the last night of every period (52 years) every fire was extinguished, and men proceeded in solemn procession to some sacred spot, where, with awe and trembling, the priests strove to kindle a new fire by friction. It was as if they had a vague idea that the cosmos, with its sun, moon and stars, had been wound up like a clock for a definite period of time. And had they failed to raise the vital spark, they would have believed that it was because the great fire was being extinguished at the central hearth of the world. The Stoics and many other ancient philosophers thought that the world was doomed to final extinction by fire. The Scandinavian bards sung the end of the world, how at last the wolf Fenrir would get loose, how the cruel fire of Loki would destroy itself by destroying everything. The Essenes enlarged upon this doctrine, which is also found in the Sibylline books and appears in the Apocrypha (2 Esdras xvi. 15).
See Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes (1794); Burnout, Science des religions; Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, cap. xx. (1835); Adalbert Kuhn. Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks (1859); Steinthal, Über die ursprüngliche Form der Sage von Prometheus (1861); Albert Reville, “Le Mythe de Prométhée,” in Revue des deux mondes (August 1862); Michel Bréal, Hercule et Cacus (1863); Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind, ch. ix. (1865); Bachofen, Die Sage von Tanaquil (1870); Lord Avebury, Prehistoric Times (6th ed., 1900); Haug, Religion of the Parsis (1878).
(E. Re.)
[1] 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.”
FIRE AND FIRE EXTINCTION. Fire is considered in this article, primarily, from the point of view of the protection against fire that can be accorded by preventive measures and by the organization of fire extinguishing establishments.
History is full of accounts of devastation caused by fires in towns and cities of nearly every country in the civilized world. The following is a list of notable fires of early days:—
Great Britain and Ireland
798. London, nearly destroyed.