CHAPTER XXVI
YULE FIRES
The Peace of the Gods which our Aryan forbears knew descended at Yuletide hovers near always as we watch the Yule log, whether in the keen air under the stars, or in the tapestried shelter about the carefully fended hearth. Man loves warmth, but he worships flame, as he always has since he first saw it fall from heaven, though few of us now make our prayer to it. Its flicker in the night will draw us far; nor are we alone in this, for all the wild things of the wood come as well and toss back its flare from eyes wide with wonder. As they stand at gaze before it, unwinking, so do we, letting its wordless message touch the primal fonts of peace. Around the camp-fire, whether without or within, all men are brothers and the breaking of bread and the tasting of salt are but the more formal symbols of fellowship. Man has made God in many images besides his own, but none has found a finer symbolism than the ancient Persians, who saw in flame the most ethereal expression of beneficence and purity. The race has grown older now and we strive to outgrow what we call childish things, yet we get new strength for dwelling in our higher levels of mature thought by dropping back now and then to the primitive customs and touching with smiling reverence the ancient forms of expression. Here in America is the smelting pot of nations and we are uniting once more in one race the scattered children of the Aryan stack. Each child brings as play what was once worship-Saxon, Celtic, Greek or Latin, all uniting again in the Christmas celebration and each bringing his fagot for the lighting of the Yule log, which burns on Christmas Eve.
Nor does it matter to us now from what tree that log is cut, though once it did. The ancient Aryans who were forefathers of us all lived very near to nature and all their thought was built upon her moods. Our Christmas tree with its lighted candles and its glow of tinsel ornaments is but a tiny image of their sun tree, which began to grow with the first lengthening of the days. They imaged in this dawning light a pillar of fire like a tree trunk that grew and spread over the heavens, bringing through spring all the beneficient gifts of summer. The rays were twigs, the glowing clouds foliage, and the sun, moon and stars golden fruit that hung from these celestial branches. Out of this as the race grew came also many another romantic symbolism of cherished belief. Among the glowing sunset clouds was hung the golden fleece of the Cholchis. The golden apples of the Hesperides grew there. The very lightning flash was but a celestial mistletoe growing mysteriously upon the limbs of this flame tree as it grows on the oaks in the forests beneath which they hunted. Secure in our better beliefs, we call their worship superstition, but it is well that they had it. It was the groping expression of imagination without which we are no better than the beasts and would never find the really spiritual for which we still seek.
The most perfect descendant of this sun tree was the world-ash of the Scandinavian mythology, the "Yggsdrasil" of the Edda, in which it is described, with the many mystic rites which grew up about its worship. Hence in Western Europe the proper Yule log was the trunk of an ash tree bound with as many green hazel withes as possible, the hazel being also a sacred tree with these people. As late as thirty years ago, and I doubt not still, the Yule log was thus put to burn on Christmas Eve in many an English fireplace. There some part of it was to be kept smouldering, however low the fire might get, and the blaze of the next day was to be relighted from it for the twelve days of Christmas. Moreover, from a portion of this log should be relighted the Yule fire of the next year, that its magic might be perpetual and thus all evil spirits be warded from the house. Not a bad superstition this, the brand standing as a constant reminder of the spirit of peace and good will lighted in the Christmas fire, not to be forgotten till it is kindled anew by the relighting of the blaze on the hearth a year hence. Here in New England we come, little by little, back to these kindly old customs that mean so much when the outward observance is informed with the thought which it represents. The old fireplaces which were once ignominiously built up with bricks to give free draft to the air-tight stove in its hollow materialism are being reopened, and in them again we light our Yule fires. Nor is the spirit banished with the season. The blaze from the burning log on the open hearth is the kindliest welcome that a room can give to him who enters it. In it the rough rind of our puritanism burns away and the glow within shines forth as we sit about this primal altar of our race, fire-worshipping.
It was the olden custom for host and guests to watch the first burning of this ashen fagot, and as the hazel withes one by one burned away the severing of the bond was the signal for the passing of the flagon, the loosing of the genial hospitality pent within the breasts of all and set free with the flames. Perhaps many who took part in these rollicking ceremonials thought they cared merely for the cakes and ale, but even they were self deceived. It was the genial freeing of the spirit of Christmas good-will to all, the fellowship that touched deepest, though they may not have formulated the fact even in their thoughts. No wonder that the children, whose clear sight is unblurred by too much learning of things which are not so, knew that to this fond fire on Christmas eve must come that patron saint of gifts, Santa Claus, even though, the house being locked, he must climb down the wide chimney to reach it. We have forgotten the shoe, which in the folk tales of our earliest forbears of the North European forests was the symbol of mutually helpful deeds of love. The children of these days placed it by the Yule fire, that Santa Claus might load it with gifts. Nowadays we hang the stocking in its stead, perhaps because it holds more.
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I do not take it kindly of old Ben Franklin that he, almost an hundred years ago, with his Poor Richard wisdom taught us to economize our fuel by shutting up our fire in stoves, for what we gained in the flesh we lost in the spirit, and it is good that in the modern house, however mechanically complicated the heating apparatus, we build fireplaces once again that our souls may be warmed with the sight of the flame. The impulse to worship fire still lingers within us and though we have better creeds than that of Zoroaster and truer spiritual ideals than the Parsees we can have no more appealing symbol of the purely spiritual than flame. Phlogiston might well be another word for soul and we are unkind to the old philosophers to take them too literally. The alchemists were dreamers rather than doers after all, and though it is the fashion to laud the doers it is often the dreamers that see most clearly. As the flame leapt upward from the burning wood they saw in it a rare, pure, ethereal substance which they called Phlogiston.
Nor did they yield their theory when Lavoisier claimed to disprove it by burning phosphorus in oxygen and weighing the result, which was heavier than the phosphorus had been. Thereupon the world derided the alchemists and lauded Lavoisier whose experiments laid the foundation for the intricate science of modern chemistry. For all that, science gives us the truth only from one angle and the science of one age is often disproved by the science of the next. Modern chemists may agree on what happens when phosphorus burns, but many a theory of Lavoisier's day has been disproved in its turn. A thousand scientists have declared flying impossible to man, yet today men fly. Lavoisier was right, no doubt. Combustion is the combination of an element with oxygen. He proved that with his chemist's balance. Yet how did he prove that some imponderable
element does not leap from wood in flame? As well say that when a
man dies the spirit has not left the body because he weighs the same. Watching the falling embers of the Yule log leap into flames before they turn gray, I am apt to think that the intuition of the alchemists touched a truth that the chemical apparatus missed. You cannot measure its reaction on the mind of man or weigh the results, but they are there.