Modern Mythology

I intentionally omit cases which are vaguely analogous to that of the Hirpi. In Icelandic sagas, in the Relations of the old Jesuit missionaries, in the Travels of Pallas and Gmelin, we hear of medicine-men and Berserks who take liberties with red-hot metal, live coals, and burning wood. Thus in the Icelandic Flatey Book (vol. i. p. 425) we read about the fighting evangelist of Iceland, a story of Thangbrandr and the foreign Berserkir. ‘The Berserkir said: “I can walk through the burning fire with my bare feet.” Then a great fire was made, which Thangbrandr hallowed, and the Berserkir went into it without fear, and burned his feet’ – the Christian spell of Thangbrandr being stronger than the heathen spell of the Berserkir. What the saga says is not evidence, and some of the other tales are merely traditional. Others may be explained, perhaps, by conjuring. The mediæval ordeal by fire may also be left on one side. In 1826 Lockhart published a translation of the Church Service for the Ordeal by Fire, a document given, he says, by Büsching in Die Vorzeit for 1817. The accused communicates before carrying the red-hot iron bar, or walking on the red-hot ploughshare. The consecrated wafer is supposed to preserve him from injury, if he be guiltless. He carries the iron for nine yards, after which his hands are sealed up in a linen cloth and examined at the end of three days. ‘If he be found clear of scorch or scar, glory to God.’ Lockhart calls the service ‘one of the most extraordinary records of the craft, the audacity, and the weakness of mankind.’ 166

The fraud is more likely to have lain in the pretended failure to find scorch or scar than in any method of substituting cold for hot iron, or of preventing the metal from injuring the subject of the ordeal. The rite did not long satisfy the theologians and jurists of the Middle Ages. It has been discussed by Lingard in his History of England, and by Dr. E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture.

For the purpose of the present inquiry I also omit all the rites of leaping sportfully, and of driving cattle through light fires. Of these cases, from the Roman Palilia, or Parilia, downwards, there is a useful collection in Brand’s Popular Antiquities under the heading ‘Midsummer Eve.’ One exception must be made for a passage from Torreblanca’s Demonologia (p. 106). People are said ‘pyras circumire et transilire in futuri mali averruncatione’ – to ‘go round about and leap over lighted pyres for the purpose of averting future evils,’ as in Mannhardt’s theory of the Hirpi. This may be connected with the Bulgarian rite, to be described later, but, as a rule, in all these instances, the fire is a light one of straw, and no sort of immunity is claimed by the people who do not walk through, but leap across it.

These kinds of analogous examples, then, it suffices merely to mention. For the others, in all affairs of this sort, the wide diffusion of a tale of miracle is easily explained. The fancy craves for miracles, and the universal mode of inventing a miracle is to deny the working, on a given occasion, of a law of Nature. Gravitation was suspended, men floated in air, inanimate bodies became agile, or fire did not burn. No less natural than the invention of the myth is the attempt to feign it by conjuring or by the use of some natural secret. But in the following modern instances the miracle of passing through the fire uninjured is apparently feigned with considerable skill, or is performed by the aid of some secret of Nature not known to modern chemistry. The evidence is decidedly good enough to prove that in Europe, India, and Polynesia the ancient rite of the Hirpi of Soracte is still a part of religious or customary ceremony.

Fijian Fire-walk

The case which originally drew my attention to this topic is that given by Mr. Basil Thomson in his South Sea Yarns (p. 195). Mr. Thomson informs me that he wrote his description on the day after he witnessed the ceremony, a precaution which left no room for illusions of memory. Of course, in describing a conjuring trick, one who is not an expert records, not what actually occurred, but what he was able to see, and the chances are that he did not see, and therefore omits, an essential circumstance, while he misstates other circumstances. I am informed by Mrs. Steel, the author of The Potter’s Thumb and other stories of Indian life, that, in watching an Indian conjurer, she generally, or frequently, detects his method. She says that the conjurer often begins by whirling rapidly before the eyes of the spectators a small polished skull of a monkey, and she is inclined to think that the spectators who look at this are, in some way, more easily deluded. These facts are mentioned that I may not seem unaware of what can be said to impugn the accuracy of the descriptions of the Fire Rite, as given by Mr. Thomson and other witnesses.

Mr. Thomson says that the Wesleyan missionaries have nearly made a clean sweep of all heathen ceremonial in Fiji. ‘But in one corner of Fiji, the island of Nbengga, a curious observance of mythological origin has escaped the general destruction, probably because the worthy iconoclasts had never heard of it.’ The myth tells how the ancestor of the clan received the gift of fire-walking from a god, and the existence of the myth raises a presumption in favour of the antiquity of the observance.

*****

‘Once every year the masáwe, a dracæna that grows in profusion on the grassy hillsides of the island, becomes fit to yield the sugar of which its fibrous root is full. To render it fit to eat, the roots must be baked among hot stones for four days. A great pit is dug, and filled with large stones and blazing logs, and when these have burned down, and the stones are at white heat, the oven is ready for the masáwe. It is at this stage that the clan Na Ivilankata, favoured of the gods, is called on to “leap into the oven” (rikata na lovo), and walk unharmed upon the hot stones that would scorch and wither the feet of any but the descendants of the dauntless Tui Nkualita. Twice only had Europeans been fortunate enough to see the masáwe cooked, and so marvellous had been the tales they told, and so cynical the scepticism with which they had been received, that nothing short of another performance before witnesses and the photographic camera would have satisfied the average “old hand.”

‘As we steamed up to the chiefs village of Waisoma, a cloud of blue smoke rolling up among the palms told us that the fire was newly lighted. We found a shallow pit, nineteen feet wide, dug in the sandy soil, a stone’s throw from high-water mark, in a small clearing among the cocoanuts between the beach and the dense forest. The pit was piled high with great blazing logs and round stones the size of a man’s head. Mingled with the crackling roar of the fire were loud reports as splinters flew off from the stones, warning us to guard our eyes. A number of men were dragging up more logs and rolling them into the blaze, while, above all, on the very brink of the fiery pit, stood Jonathan Dambea, directing the proceedings with an air of noble calm. As the stones would not be hot enough for four hours, there was ample time to hear the tradition that warrants the observance of the strange ceremony we were to see.

‘When we were at last summoned, the fire had been burning for more than four hours. The pit was filled with a white-hot mass shooting out little tongues of white flame, and throwing out a heat beside which the scorching sun was a pleasant relief. A number of men were engaged, with long poles to which a loop of thick vine had been attached, in noosing the pieces of unburnt wood by twisting the pole, like a horse’s twitch, until the loop was tight, and dragging the log out by main force. When the wood was all out there remained a conical pile of glowing stones in the middle of the pit. Ten men now drove the butts of green saplings into the base of the pile, and held the upper end while a stout vine was passed behind the row of saplings. A dozen men grasped each end of the vine, and with loud shouts hauled with all their might. The saplings, like the teeth of an enormous rake, tore through the pile of stones, flattening them out towards the opposite edge of the pit. The saplings were then driven in on the other side and the stones raked in the opposite direction, then sideways, until the bottom of the pit was covered with an even layer of hot stones. This process had taken fully half an hour, but any doubt as to the heat of the stones at the end was set at rest by the tongues of flame that played continually among them. The cameras were hard at work, and a large crowd of people pressed inwards towards the pit as the moment drew near. They were all excited except Jonathan, who preserved, even in the supreme moment, the air of holy calm that never leaves his face. All eyes are fixed expectant on the dense bush behind the clearing, whence the Shadrachs, Meshachs and Abednegos of the Pacific are to emerge. There is a cry of “Vutu! Vutu!” and forth from the bush, two and two, march fifteen men, dressed in garlands and fringes. They tramp straight to the brink of the pit. The leading pair show something like fear in their faces, but do not pause, perhaps because the rest would force them to move forward. They step down upon the stones and continue their march round the pit, planting their feet squarely and firmly on each stone. The cameras snap, the crowd surges forward, the bystanders fling in great bundles of green leaves. But the bundles strike the last man of the procession and cut him off from his fellows; so he stays where he is, trampling down the leaves as they are thrown to line the pit, in a dense cloud of steam from the boiling sap. The rest leap back to his assistance, shouting and trampling, and the pit turns into the mouth of an Inferno, filled with dusky frenzied fiends, half seen through the dense volume that rolls up to heaven and darkens the sunlight. After the leaves, palm-leaf baskets of the dracæna root are flung to them, more leaves, and then bystanders and every one join in shovelling earth over all till the pit is gone, and a smoking mound of fresh earth takes its place. This will keep hot for four days, and then the masáwe will be cooked.

‘As the procession had filed up to the pit, by a preconcerted arrangement with the noble Jonathan, a large stone had been hooked out of the pit to the feet of one of the party, who poised a pocket-handkerchief over it, and dropped it lightly upon the stone when the first man leapt into the oven, and snatched what remained of it up as the last left the stones. During the fifteen or twenty seconds it lay there every fold that touched the stone was charred, and the rest of it scorched yellow. So the stones were not cool. We caught four or five of the performers as they came out, and closely examined their feet. They were cool, and showed no trace of scorching, nor were their anklets of dried tree-fern leaf burnt. This, Jonathan explained, is part of the miracle; for dried tree-fern is as combustible as tinder, and there were flames shooting out among the stones. Sceptics had affirmed that the skin of a Fijian’s foot being a quarter of an inch thick, he would not feel a burn. Whether this be true or not of the ball and heel, the instep is covered with skin no thicker than our own, and we saw the men plant their insteps fairly on the stone.’

*****

Mr. Thomson’s friend, Jonathan, said that young men had been selected because they would look better in a photograph, and, being inexperienced, they were afraid. A stranger would share the gift if he went in with one of the tribe. Some years ago a man fell and burned his shoulders. ‘Any trick?’ ‘Here Jonathan’s ample face shrunk smaller, and a shadow passed over his candid eye.’ Mr. Thomson concludes: ‘Perhaps the Na Ivilankata clan have no secret, and there is nothing wonderful in their performance; but, miracle or not, I am very glad I saw it.’ The handkerchief dropped on the stone is ‘alive to testify to it.’ Mr. Thomson’s photograph of the scene is ill-developed, and the fumes of steam somewhat interfere with the effect. A rough copy is published in Folk-Lore for September, 1895, but the piece could only be reproduced by a delicate drawing with the brush.

The parallel to the rite of the Hirpi is complete, except that red-hot stones, not the pyre of pine-embers, is used in Fiji. Mr. Thomson has heard of a similar ceremony in the Cook group of islands. As in ancient Italy, so in Fiji, a certain clan have the privilege of fire-walking. It is far enough from Fiji to Southern India, as it is far enough from Mount Soracte to Fiji. But in Southern India the Klings practise the rite of the Hirpi and the Na Ivilankata. I give my informant’s letter exactly as it reached me, though it has been published before in Longman’s Magazine:

Kling Fire-walk

‘Dear Sir, – Observing from your note in Longman’s Magazine that you have mislaid my notes re fire-walking, I herewith repeat them. I have more than once seen it done by the “Klings,” as the low-caste Tamil-speaking Hindus from Malabar are called, in the Straits Settlements. On one occasion I was present at a “fire-walking” held in a large tapioca plantation in Province Wellesley, before many hundreds of spectators, all the Hindu coolies from the surrounding estates being mustered. A trench had been dug about twenty yards long by six feet wide and two deep. This was piled with faggots and small wood four or five feet high. This was lighted at midday, and by four p.m. the trench was a bed of red-hot ashes, the heat from which was so intense that the men who raked and levelled it with long poles could not stand it for more than a minute at a time. A few yards from the end of the trench a large hole had been dug and filled with water. When all was ready, six men, ordinary coolies, dressed only in their “dholis,” or loin-cloths, stepped out of the crowd, and, amidst tremendous excitement and a horrible noise of conches and drums, passed over the burning trench from end to end, in single file, at a quick walk, plunging one after the other into the water. Not one of them showed the least sign of injury. They had undergone some course of preparation by their priest, not a Brahman, but some kind of devil-doctor or medicine-man, and, as I understood it, they took on themselves and expiated the sins of the Kling community for the past year (a big job, if thieving and lying count; probably not). They are not, however, always so lucky, for I heard that on the next occasion one of the men fell and was terribly burnt, thus destroying the whole effect of the ceremony. I do not think this to be any part of the Brahmanical religion, though the ordeal by fire as a test of guilt is, or was, in use all over India. The fact is that the races of Southern India, where the Aryan element is very small, have kept all their savage customs and devil-worship under the form of Brahmanism.

‘Another curious feat I saw performed at Labuan Deli, in Sumatra, on the Chinese New Year. A Chinaman of the coolie class was squatted stark naked on the roadside, holding on his knees a brass pan the size of a wash-hand basin, piled a foot high with red-hot charcoal. The heat reached one’s face at two yards, but if it had been a tray of ices the man couldn’t have been more unconcerned. There was a crowd of Chinese round him, all eagerly asking questions, and a pile of coppers accumulating beside him. A Chinese shopkeeper told me that the man “told fortunes,” but from the circumstance of a gambling-house being close by, I concluded that his customers were getting tips on a system.

‘Hoping these notes may be of service to you,

‘I remain,

‘Yours truly,

‘STEPHEN PONDER.’

*****

In this rite the fire-pit is thrice as long (at a rough estimate) as that of the Fijians. The fire is of wooden embers, not heated stones. As in Fiji, a man who falls is burned, clearly suggesting that the feet and legs, but not the whole body, are in some way prepared to resist the fire. As we shall find to be the practice in Bulgaria, the celebrants place their feet afterwards in water. As in Bulgaria, drums are beaten to stimulate the fire-walkers. Neither here nor in Fiji are the performers said to be entranced, like the Bulgarian Nistinares. 167 On the whole, the Kling rite (which the Klings, I am informed, also practise in the islands whither they are carried as coolies) so closely resembles the Fijian and the Tongan that one would explain the likeness by transmission, were the ceremony not almost as like the rite of the Hirpi. For the Tongan fire-ritual, the source is The Polynesian Society’s Journal, vol. ii. No. 2. pp. 105-108. My attention was drawn to this by Mr. Laing, writing from New Zealand. The article is by Miss Tenira Henry, of Honolulu, a young lady of the island. The Council of the Society, not having seen the rite, ‘do not guarantee the truth of the story, but willingly publish it for the sake of the incantation.’ Miss Henry begins with a description of the ti-plant (Dracæna terminalis), which ‘requires to be well baked before being eaten.’ She proceeds thus:

‘The ti-ovens are frequently thirty feet in diameter, and the large stones, heaped upon small logs of wood, take about twenty-four hours to get properly heated. Then they are flattened down, by means of long green poles, and the trunks of a few banana-trees are stripped up and strewn over them to cause steam. The ti-roots are then thrown in whole, accompanied by short pieces of apé-root (Arum costatum), that are not quite so thick as the ti, but grow to the length of six feet and more. The oven is then covered over with large leaves and soil, and left so for about three days, when the ti and the apé are taken out well cooked, and of a rich, light-brown colour. The apé prevents the ti from getting too dry in the oven.

‘There is a strange ceremony connected with the Uum Ti (or ti-oven), that used to be practised by the heathen priests at Raiatea, but can now be performed by only two individuals (Tupua and Taero), both descendants of priests. This ceremony consisted in causing people to walk in procession through the hot oven when flattened down, before anything had been placed in it, and without any preparation whatever, bare-footed or shod, and on their emergence not even smelling of fire. The manner of doing this was told by Tupua, who heads the procession in the picture, to Monsieur Morné, Lieutenant de Vaisseau, who also took the photograph 168 of it, about two years ago, at Uturoa, Raiatea, which, being on bad paper, was copied off by Mr. Barnfield, of Honolulu. All the white residents of the place, as well as the French officers, were present to see the ceremony, which is rarely performed nowadays.

‘No one has yet been able to solve the mystery of this surprising feat, but it is to be hoped that scientists will endeavour to do so while those men who practise it still live.

Tupua’s Incantation used in Walking Over the Uum-Ti. – Translation

‘Hold the leaves of the ti-plant before picking them, and say: “O hosts of gods! awake, arise! You and I are going to the ti-oven to-morrow.”

‘If they float in the air, they are gods, but if their feet touch the ground they are human beings. Then break the ti-leaves off and look towards the direction of the oven, and say: “O hosts of gods! go to-night, and to-morrow you and I shall go.” Then wrap the ti-leaves up in han (Hibiscus) leaves, and put them to sleep in the marae, where they must remain until morning, and say in leaving:

‘“Arise! awake! O hosts of gods! Let your feet take you to the ti-oven; fresh water and salt water come also. Let the dark earth-worm and the light earth-worm go to the oven. Let the redness and the shades of fire all go. You will go; you will go to-night, and to-morrow it will be you and I; we shall go to the Uum-Ti.” (This is for the night.)

‘When the ti-leaves are brought away, they must be tied up in a wand and carried straight to the oven, and opened when all are ready to pass through; then hold the wand forward and say:

‘“O men (spirits) who heated the oven! let it die out! O dark earth-worms! O light earthworms! fresh water and salt water, heat of the oven and redness of the oven, hold up the footsteps of the walkers, and fan the heat of the bed. O cold beings, let us lie in the midst of the oven! O Great-Woman-who-set-fire-to-the-skies! hold the fan, and let us go into the oven for a little while!” Then, when all are ready to walk in, we say:

“Holder of the first footstep!Holder of the second footstep!Holder of the third footstep!Holder of the fourth footstep!Holder of the fifth footstep!Holder of the sixth footstep!Holder of the seventh footstep!Holder of the eighth footstep!Holder of the ninth footstep!Holder of the tenth footstep!“O Great-Woman-who-set-fire-to-the-skies! all is covered!”

‘Then everybody walks through without hurt, into the middle and around the oven, following the leader, with the wand beating from side to side.

‘The Great-Woman-who-set-fire-to-the-skies was a high-born woman in olden times, who made herself respected by the oppressive men when they placed women under so many restrictions. She is said to have had the lightning at her command, and struck men with it when they encroached on her rights.

‘All the above is expressed in old Tahitian, and when quickly spoken is not easily understood by the modern listener. Many of the words, though found in the dictionary, are now obsolete, and the arrangement of others is changed. Oe and tana are never used now in place of the plural outou and tatou; but in old folk-lore it is the classical style of addressing the gods in the collective sense. Tahutahu means sorcery, and also to kindle a fire.’

*****

So far Miss Henry, on this occasion, and the archaic nature of the hymn, with the reference to a mythical leader of the revolt of women, deserves the attention of anthropologists, apart from the singular character of the rite described. In the third number of the Journal (vol. ii.) the following editorial note is published:

‘Miss Tenira Henry authorises us to say that her sister and her sister’s little child were some of those who joined in the Uum-Ti ceremony referred to in vol. ii. p. 108, and in the preceding note, and actually walked over the red-hot stones. The illustration of the performance given in the last number of the Journal, it appears, is actually from a photograph taken by Lieutenant Morné, the original of which Miss Henry has sent us for inspection. – EDITOR.’

Corroborative Evidence

The following corroborative account is given in the Journal, from a source vaguely described as ‘a pamphlet published in San Francisco, by Mr. Hastwell:’

‘The natives of Raiatea have some performances so entirely out of the ordinary course of events as to institute (sic) inquiry relative to a proper solution.

‘On September 20, 1885, I witnessed the wonderful, and to me inexplicable, performance of passing through the “fiery furnace.”

‘The furnace that I saw was an excavation of three or four feet in the ground, in a circular form (sloping upwards), and about thirty feet across. The excavation was filled with logs and wood, and then covered with large stones. A fire was built underneath, and kept burning for a day. When I witnessed it, on the second day, the flames were pouring up through the interstices of the rocks, which were heated to a red and white heat. When everything was in readiness, and the furnace still pouring out its intense heat, the natives marched up with bare feet to the edge of the furnace, where they halted for a moment, and after a few passes of the wand made of the branches of the ti-plant by the leader, who repeated a few words in the native language, they stepped down on the rocks and walked leisurely across to the other side, stepping from stone to stone. This was repeated five times, without any preparation whatever on their feet, and without injury or discomfort from the heated stones. There was not even the smell of fire on their garments.’