The Fire of Knowledge – Part One

“Fire is bright and fire is clean.” (Ray Bradbury)

Newroz: Kurdish New Year. ROME – 21 March 2015

I want to go back to writing on a topic that has always fascinated me and to which I have also dedicated a short chapter of one of my books: the fire.

It was 2018, two years have passed, a lot of new reading and studies, life experiences and things I have seen.

So my view of fire has also changed over time.

What has not changed is my fascination with what remains, as I wrote, one of the most difficult subjects to photograph, but which in that difficulty also has a private aspect: continuously controlling the exposure – almost in a struggle between the body-camera and flames – becomes a metaphor of our inner struggles to dominate our own light and darkness.

Accounting for the various declinations that fire has assumed, in its meanings and symbolisms, in the history of humanity, is impossible in this context, and it is not my intention.

Of course, it's suggestive to follow the paths that fire has traced in human

beings' lives, passing from mythology to everyday life.

I try to “focus” my personal path of flames, among the multitude of myths, meanings and rituals.

As I said before, it is impractical to list the innumerable incarnations of his kaleidoscopic image: regeneration (Phoenix), purification, fertilization, mediation between human and divine, and many others, also becoming divinities in the different religions.

The studies of anthropology, in this, have shed a lot of light – by the way – as we will see later.

What has always struck me is how fire has been associated with knowledge since the dawn of time.

 

In the West, the most famous myth is that of Prometheus, the thief of fire.

Fascinating deity, whose name in Greek means “forethought”.

The myth tells that it was Prometheus who created mankind:

“With water and earth, Prometheus molded men and gave them fire which he hid in a ferrule, hidden from Zeus.” (Apollodorus)

With his act of rebellion against the supreme Zeus, from whom he steals fire to give it to humanity and making them free and capable of intellect, he has become the symbol of rebellion and progress.

His disobedient action will be punished by Zeus, chained to a cliff on the edge of the world and then forced to sink into Tartarus, the dark and gloomy underworld.

But thanks to his gesture, human beings were able to survive, no longer abandoned to themselves in the cold on the earth.

Jean-Simon Berthélemy. “Prometheus creates men”, 1802

Prometheus was much loved for his courage and sacrifice and was always adored, to the point that in Athens public festivals called “Promethea” were dedicated to him, in which the Athenians walked the streets with lighted torches just to celebrate the greatest gift ever done to humanity.

This pagan myth later became Christian also, with Saint Anthony the Abbot, who moved by compassion for human beings afflicted by the cold went with a ruse to Hell and stole some sparks in the same branch of the ferrule used by Prometheus, which he then gave to the men: the famous “fires of Sant'Antonio” which are still celebrated on 17 January.

 

For this reason the fire has taken on a very powerful symbolic value.

It is the element that has a life of its own because it burns, heats, and gives light but can also bring pain and death (in fact, very often the deities linked to fire have a double ambiguous value – “trickster” – like the Germanic god Loki), and more importantly: fire is the only element in nature that man is able to generate, which is why it has always been deeply linked to human beings.

 

The divine one, however, stolen from the gods and given to men, is the only one that originates from mortal hands.

Lighting a fire means handling the divine.

This is why it's also associated with purification, with it you burn evil, the devil in witches and sins in Purgatory.

In the Zoroastrian religion of the Parsi, that of Zarathustra, fire is sacred and their prayers are an invocation to the divine fire, Gila, to burn all human illness, guilt, and suffering.

The ancient Roman festivals called Parilia, which were celebrated on April 21, culminating in a leap through the purifying fire.

René Guénon, in his fundamental book “Symbols of sacred science”, also makes an iconographic analysis of the sun, often associated with fire, always represented as a sphere with straight or wavy lines, which should represent heat, while straight lines are its light: both complementary elements of fire, but the wavy lines also represent water, in this meaning as the rain.

Therefore, the obvious opposition between water and fire falls, which instead become complementary.

In fact, in the hermetic symbolism of alchemy, water is nothing but the glow of fire and “which they give the name of 'ablution', not to the action of washing something with water or other liquid, but to a purification which is operated through the fire.” (R. Guénon)

This is well understood by Muslims, whose daily ablution is precisely the “purification” that precedes prayer. It's not only the water that cleanses the body of dirt, but it's also the fire that purifies the soul.

“Angel scatters the fire from the censer”. Miniature (14th century) from the Apocalypse

But the story of Prometheus is mythology or literary creation.

Therefore, I wonder, how did fire become a symbol of knowledge as told by the myths written by man.

Gift stolen from the gods to make men endowed with intellect, no longer a mere amalgam of water and earth.

Because if every myth and religion attributes a single meaning, in different times and places of the world, there must be an explanation.

This is where cultural anthropology comes in handy.

 

There have been many studies on primitive populations, used as a paradigm to understand how our ancestors lived in caves, the post-Prometheus ones, so to speak.

The archaeological remains are evidence of how fire control began to be a regular practice 400,000 years ago, coinciding – indeed, more decisively, before – the acquisition of language.

Studies by Polly W. Wiessner, of the University of Utah, on the field experience of the San tribe, or Kalahari Bushmen, who still live by hunting, have shown how their day is divided into two moments: the daytime dedicated to activity to practical activities and hunting, and the night, around the fire dedicated to conversations and the solidification of interpersonal and cultural relationships. In this way, far from the practical activities of survival, these peoples – as well as our ancestors who for the first time had the fire to heat their nights, as well as to cook the hunted foods – had the opportunity to elaborate the language and religious beliefs.

It could almost be summarized, obviously simplistic but not too far from the truth, that language and religions were born from the use of fire.

 

Here everything takes on a clearer readability.

Therefore, the origin of the myth of Prometheus makes sense and all those symbologies that have narrated fire as a bearer of knowledge, a divine gift capable of “illuminating” the intelligence of men by pulling them out of caves and from the primitive state, gathering them sitting around at the bonfire to develop language, social communication, religion, and the creation of myths.

If we are what we are now is thanks to that act of rebellion of the god who loved the human beings he had created, more than his own life; or, thanks to the rubbing stones that produced the first sparks and the first flame with the wood.

From that fire was born the first word and every higher and evolutionary system.

“Offering of fire and water to the statue of the god of war Huitzilopochtli”. Engraving of the sec. XVI

Thus ends this first part, in which the fire, from the gods, descended on the earth, becoming one of the fundamental elements of myths, cultures, and religions.

In the next part we will see how through fire, men reach the divinity.

Final note: as I wrote in the book and in other articles, it remains fascinating how in photography it is very important to “put on focus”.

In light of what we have seen so far, I think this way of saying becomes even more suggestive. Because seeing commonly with the eyes is our survival, it's the ordinary thing to move around in the surrounding world, but to take a photograph you have to point your eye in the viewfinder, observe carefully and consciously what we want to photograph, and focus: we must “know” what are we looking at.

It's something different and qualitatively superior.

Let's think about it when we “focus” on our camera.

Let us remember Prometheus.

READ ALSO:

• On Focus 
• The Shadow of Light 
  

René Guénon: “Symbols of sacred science” (Adelphi, 1992)

“Encyclopedia of symbols” (Garzanti, 1991)

Italian version