Introduction by Olivia E. Sears

Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and hides there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance. Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in paradise. It burns in hell.
—Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire

Writing about fire, I am haunted by what it has cost me, by memories of passions that flared and singed and were stomped out, memories of homefires suddenly doused, of the dead silence after the fire finally crackled down to nothing. I am newly wary of standing too close to the flame. Passion might destroy me—a moth with experience, with a memory—and burn the page. Worse yet, the fire, personal or creative, might never be sparked again. If I approach the flames now, what can I afford to lose? Without a hearth to hold the fire, will my passions spread out of control? If I step into the fire, will all hell break loose?

I am not alone in my ambivalence. Fire arouses feelings at their extremes—terror and ecstasy, anger and jubilation. Fire has been coveted and carefully preserved throughout the history of civilization. But its use has always been mingled with fear. Whether comforting us or killing us, the emotions are those of a frightening lack of control. Will the fire go out before more wood is found? Will we be able to extinguish the fire before it destroys all we have? The use of fire was always exhilarating before central heating and free matches at the corner bar. Even now that modern societies have captured fire, we are both drawn to it and repelled. During a power failure, we light a fire and burn candles; during a wildfire we run for our lives.

This ambivalence about fire is embedded in the surrounding mythologies: fire is stolen. A Promethean figure or a small animal (a bird, rabbit, fox, or badger) stealthily runs off with the original Flame, in the lore of most cultures. This suggests a belief that fire's guardian does not trust us to handle fire's power—or its mystique.

Fire myths also reveal fire's metaphorical significance. Take the two versions of the Greek myth of Prometheus: in one, he steals fire from Zeus's hearth—the seat of power in the universe; in another version, the demigod steals fire from the forge of Hephaestus—the source of creativity. According to Aeschylus, by delivering fire, and thus creativity, to mortals, Prometheus founded "all the arts of man." And in a sense this is true; fire gives us glass, ceramics, metals, cuisine, in addition to the comforts of heat and light in our homes. But fire is more than the sum of these arts; it fuels our passions and gives us the language to communicate them. Fire is the creative force.

The gift of fire—as a source of power or of creativity—held such importance for the Greeks that one myth credits Prometheus with creating the first man as well. (Distinct, of course, from the first woman, Pandora, who was created as man's punishment for stealing fire.) Human "mastery" of fire is an achievement largely responsible not only for our survival as a species, but also for our prosperity, and our grandeur.

But the fire of passion can be a destructive force. War is also one of the stolen arts of man—the one for which we continue to suffer. Rage, fear, and hatred can smolder for years in the soul and then spark horrific acts. And fire is one of the chief weapons used in war, whether in the form of homemade explosives or laser-guided missiles. Zeus held supremacy among the Greek gods because he commanded lightning, that is, the power to start a fire. The single word most emblematic of the fear and danger of fire is holocaust, from the Greek, meaning "whole burnt," complete consumption by fire, slaughter, or massacre.

Human beings long believed that fire would destroy a world in order to create a new and progressive one. "Fire" comes from the Anglo Saxon fyr, cognate with Greek pyr and Latin purus, cleansed as by fire, nature's dynamic of rejuvenation. But even purification has become synonymous with destruction. This century's Holocaust was the Third Reich "purifying" in such a chilling way that the contemporary human psyche has had to abandon the notion of a "world-creating" fire. The continuing practice of "ethnic cleansing" around the world, using fire to eliminate people, creates nothing but suffering and death. The human psyche is afflicted with anguish in the wake of the Holocaust; in a sense we need to purify the notion of purification.

In this affliction, something valuable has been lost. Fire used to be holy, central to enlightenment, a moral beacon. Before we could create it, we gathered it from nature, preserved it, and eventually began to use it in religious worship. From ancient Rome to Latin America to the Middle and Far East, fire has been kept in altars, guarded there for safekeeping. In Indian mythology, Agni, the priest's god of fire, presides not only at the altar but also at the hearth. The Zoroastrians believed in an incessant war between good and evil, and worshipped the source of all good, Ormuzd, through rites on mountain-tops in which they adored fire, light, and the sun. Even the timing of the Christmas holiday still relates to the sun, immediately following winter solstice, when day begins to gain upon night as if it were the victory of good over evil.

Fire has permeated our thought, within and outside of religion. That human beings would be drawn to fire, that it would become critical to our psychological make-up, was perhaps inevitable. We are made of sunlight, and the earth we inhabit is uniquely a fire planet. Earth teems with the three elements that compose fire: fuel abundant in the soil, oxygen in the atmosphere, sparks from lightning and volcanoes. Fire's power to illuminate and guide, to help organize experience, long ago left its mark on language: the original meaning of the words for fire in Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, Greek, Umbrian, Old Teutonic, and Armenian was "lighthouse, beacon." Northrup Frye concludes that fire is "a privileged phenomenon which can explain anything," because it enlightens and yet it can contradict itself. It explains beginnings and endings, and the transitions in between. As a metaphor, fire's cycle of destruction and renewal offers a way to view life—as a process that is never smooth.

Inside the attraction to fire is the desire to change. Frye writes, "If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire." The phenomenon of fire itself is described as the very rapid release of energy stored in food and fuel. Alchemists believed that fire had the potential to "open bodies" (by which they meant "things") to take possession from within. This potential can be empowering or liberating; it can also be overwhelming or oppressive. Revealing something's true nature, the energy and passions within, may have unforeseen consequences, may unleash chaos.

This notion of opening the body could be extended to the social body. The fire of revolution is the mechanism by which, historically, the people took possession of the body politic, opening and changing it from within. Revolution continues to change the world from Chiapas to Kosovo; tragically, recent struggles for liberation have seen mostly horror. Another "revolution," also fire-powered, transformed much of the modern world. The Industrial Revolution turned whole societies inside-out and led to centuries of reliance on ancient stored sunlight—coal, oil, and natural gas. Overuse has, in turn, transformed these resources (i.e., "things that rise again") into environmental disasters, like global warming. Now we need an ecological revolution.

There are instances of uncanny coincidence between natural and social conflagrations, in which natural fire seems to have revolutionary timing. For instance, the taiga forest of Russia tends to burn wildly only during political transitions. And in Spain, in the shadow of the Pyrenees (named for the Greek pyr because of massive burning chronicled in 100 BCE), the most devastating outbreaks of fire on the Iberian Peninsula during this century coincided with the collapse of two dictatorships. In the forests, in capitals, change is necessary to survival.

Fire upsets the social order but also sustains it; the same force which threatens relationships also makes them possible. And here metaphor and phenomenon meet again. Early humans assembled around a fire, reinforcing community through ceremony. Evening fires created the environment in which to tell stories and, eventually, histories. Fire's importance for history is thus not accidental; sitting around the fire, we made history. By coincidence, we have fossil evidence of early uses of fire precisely because things burned; we can study the past in fossil records because of fire's action on nature. Now we can read that same history after dark by capturing fire in a burning filament. Fire gives us the history of our planet and of ourselves.

Fire has left its mark on my own history. Growing up in the drought-stricken Los Angeles of the 1960s and 70s, fire spread wildly through the hills almost every October. Explosive eucalyptus trees and desiccated underbrush created a tinderbox in every canyon. (Given this environment, it is not surprising that some California's previous inhabitants, the Senal Indians, believed the world was once a globe of fire, until fire passed up into the trees and now comes out whenever two pieces of wood rub against one another.) Every autumn in my childhood, the world would once again become a globe of fire. The flames would rise; the sky over the entire Los Angeles Basin would fill with smoke; families would evacuate their homes; cats would disappear; and occasionally some kid at school would lose everything. The next day, my world was covered with a fine coating of ashes, like a first soft snow, and you could write your name on cars and plastic picnic tables. I used to wonder if I was looking at the ashes of somebody's algebra homework, or pages from a diary, or even a living room couch. My cousins in the East had snow days; we had fire days. There were few casualties, but there were changes. Trivial arguments were replaced with invitations to dinner, offers of new kittens, a new understanding about the fragility of our world.

Fire can seem like a living beast. It needs oxygen to survive. Feed it the fuel it needs and it consumes whatever is around it, spewing smoke. As kids, we had a sense that the wildfire in the hills was some kind of monster, a nearly unstoppable godzilla. In this case, though, the monster was not the product of nuclear radiation but of a desire
to inhabit places which, in the course of nature, would inevitably burn. Building our homes there could not disrupt the cycle. Fire can be a monster, and fire can be a friend, even a lover. Perhaps we need to continue the work of Prometheus, the fire-giver, and Hephaestus, god of fire and keeper of the creative forge. They were variously credited with laying open Zeus's head, whence Pallas Athena sprang, fully-armed—a goddess of war, a goddess of wisdom, of storms, of art.

References

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross. London: Quartet Books, 1987; Beacon Press, 1964.

Northrup Frye, Introduction. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. By Gaston Bachelard. London: Quartet Books, 1987; Beacon Press, 1964.

Stephen J. Pyne, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995.