This Episode is FIRE

Hi everyone, I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald. All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hey everyone.

This has been an episode I've been looking forward to doing for a long time. And you could say it's a little love song to all the fire signs out there, speaking as a fellow fire sign. You finally got your day. And just a couple of notes here at the beginning. First is, as many of you know, this podcast is supported and funded by patrons. There is a Patreon community, patreon.com slash the Emerald Podcast.

And I depend on the contribution of patrons so that I can do this podcast full time. So if you feel like you've gotten something from the podcast, if you feel like it provides some value in your life, Please consider becoming a patron. It costs as little as $6 a month, and patrons get access to patrons-only content. There's a whole lot of it at this point that's built up over the years. and access to a twice-monthly study group in which we explore these mythic topics in more depth and detail.

And I'm excited to be launching something that I've been speaking about for a few months here on the podcast. And this is a small granting program that's a way of giving back to patrons. and supporting their projects that are designed to keep this vision of animacy alive. What that means in practice is that small grants are going to be available twice yearly to projects that are either designed to be preserving traditional animacies.

or for projects that are innovating new and different perspectives on the animate. These projects could be artistic, they could be scholarly, they could be research-based projects, they could be performance pieces, they could relate to traditional plant and medical knowledge. Really, the heart of it is about bringing some support to projects that are fostering our connection to spirit and to the animate.

world and preserving traditional animacies and hopefully helping to renew the impact that these animate traditions can have within their own communities and within the world at large. And this granting program is being made possible by the Fetzer Institute, and just want to express a lot of gratitude to the Fetzer Institute, Fetzer.org. who shares a common vision with the Emerald Podcast of finding spiritual solutions to modern-day problems, understanding that what we face right now as

Human beings is a spiritual crisis that will be met through our reconnection to the living cosmos. So if you're interested in finding out more about Fetzer and their work, it's Fetzer.org. F-E-T-Z-E-R dot O-R-G. And if you're interested in becoming a podcast patron and supporting the work of the podcast and having access to this small granting program, The place to do that is patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. And now, on with our episode. Let's take a moment.

right here at the beginning. Take a moment and journey back. Back past the last several thousand years of struggle and strife. Into the long primordial pre-dawn. Into the vast count of years that we call the Paleolithic. Go back a thousand generations. And then a thousand more. Five thousand more. And five thousand more still. Back into the very origins of what it means to be human. There, in that nascent womb of the past, there in that cave, a fire is burning.

A spark is lit. A coal, an ember, smolders. Do you see it, this primordial ember in the dark? Do you? Feel the warm glow upon the cave walls. Perhaps someone is breathing upon it, this ember there in the dark. Perhaps sparks are illuminating a near and ancient face, bringing to life ancestral eyes. How many generations of how many storytellers' eyes were sparked to life?

By the fire. How many generations of children gazed into those eyes in wonder, like sparks meeting sparks in the depth of night. Here. at the very beginning is fire. Until recently, it was said that the human relationship with fire was about 300,000 years old. which is already an unfathomably vast timeframe. But then the story went further back. Charred wood and seeds from 800,000 years ago.

in Gesher Banat Yaakov in Israel. Ash deposits, burned bones, and stone tools dating back one million years in Zhou Kodian in northern China. And then... At Wonderwork Cave in South Africa, evidence going back further still. As deep as the Cave of Ancestry goes, so... firelight flickers. And human lives, some scientists now say, have been intertwined with fire for 1.5 million years.

Fire has been with us right from the start, and human beings are constructed around fire in the deepest possible way. So deeply embedded is this relationship, this human relationship with fire, that it's difficult to imagine human beings before fire and still call them human beings. Much of what we know as human brought to us through our relationship with fire. It has shaped our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, our basic way of interacting with the cosmos. We have in a very real way

woven ourselves around a spark. The stories we tell flamed up out of ancient coal beds and they sprung to life and still they warm us gently and they flush us with vitality. And sometimes they burn. Sometimes stories burn. Sometimes stories of the seemingly unquenchable fire that burns in the hearts of human beings. Sometimes these stories.

There's a fire that burns its way through us, do you feel? And we are part of the story of a great burning. You and I are part of the story of a great burning. that started from the moment we first captured a spark in a nest of tinder and breathed it into glorious, flaming life. Do you feel... All that came with the fire There are so many mythologies of all that changed with the coming of fire

Of all human inventions, says James Fraser, the discovery of the method of kindling fire has probably been the most momentous and far-reaching. And what changed with fire? How about... everything. In many mythologies, there is no culture at all without fire. In his book Fire, Nature, and Culture, Stephen Pine quotes anthropologist Cloud Levy-Strauss, who said that, quote, fire is the chasm between culture and creatures. And he quotes Lauren Isley.

the naturalist and mystic who concluded that fire was the magic that opened the way for the supremacy of Homo sapiens, and considered humanity itself a flame. Surely,

Flame is what I am, said Nietzsche. And modern scientific findings have begun to reflect this primacy of fire in the story of humanity. The biological changes that came with cooked food alone are seismic. Control over fire changed human anatomy and physiology and became encoded in our evolving genome. So radical a change in diet encouraged a restructuring of physiology and morphology.

The outcome was the most dramatic suite of anatomical changes ever recorded among the hominins. We no longer need a massively muscular skull or a gargantuan digestive tract. Our head can become big and our gut small. We can process ideas rather than herbage. Yes, in that fire circle, in that cauldron, in that... steaming womb space. Ideas were born. Imaginings. Visions arriving through the firelight. And in those luminous spaces we began to dream of the future.

of what might one day be. The fundamental, seeking, roving nature of the imaginal human mind, so different from the animal minds around us, the mind that ideates its way forward, this was born around the fire. It's not conjecture to say that this fire of the seeking mind literally came from fire. For imagine what a mind is, an animal mind in the forest flow, drinking from streams, eating its kill on the spot, ears twitching, ever responding, ever shifting, ever now.

And imagine how it changes a body-mind to have a hearth to return to your body. A focal point around which to tell stories. Imagine what it means as far as taking human beings out of the space of the immediate flow of the animal mind and into a space where we can do things like sit and plan. We owe the cultural achievements of humanity, says Byung-Chul Han, to deep contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible.

With fire came an actual luminous focal point around which to congregate and plan, around which to kindle dreams of what could be in the golden fires of our imagining. Fire opens the door in many ways to the future, ideating the future, which is why many of the myths of fire in many many places are associated with bringing knowledge and forethought.

to human beings and a lot of what we talk about is the place of human beings within the cosmos that forethought the blessing and the curse of being taken out of the immediacy of the moment

and into the forethought of planning and looking ahead and roving forward, a lot of that comes directly from our experience with fire. For what is fire doing but... burning its way forward into the future. Fire is forward movement, and every forward movement requires a fire of some kind or other to power it. So with fire...

We have an invitation into the deep, warm glint of presence. An invitation into the type of deep, dreaming attention that culture grows from. But there's also a catch. The fire needs fuel. It needs tending. It burns through things. So, along with the depth of attention and presence, you have a constant need to be searching for things to burn. And that simple dynamic

As Matthew Stillman says in his paper, what hand dare seize the fire is what gets human beings on the tightrope of progress. Fire altered behavior. Pine says, since people now had to commit to its ceaseless tending. So do you see now how the dynamics of fire mirror exactly the somatic dynamics of human consciousness? here in the warm glow of the present, basking in story and the warmth of smiles, and yet I cannot stay for I must find fuel to burn.

The lover in me requires it. The artist in me requires it. The hunter in me requires it. The fire tender in me requires that I find more fuel to burn. Ever felt the blessing and the curse of, I must find more fuel to burn? There's a fire burning in your consciousness right now. Do you feel it? a fire that burns in both cosmos and consciousness alike. Our earliest ancestors realized this deep congruency between physical fire,

and the workings of the great cosmos all around. Our ancestors understood that this is a world of fire. To early humans, says Wolf Dieter Stoll, the heat generated by the campfire... or the sexual act, by the effort of hunt or battle, by dance or hard work, was the expression of one and the same source, the cosmic fire. So...

Deep in our understanding is the knowledge that there is a fire that burns within us, and that there is a great fire to this universe. The cosmic fire that is not just theoretically burning, but is actually burning. The cosmos is actually burning. As Pine says, quote, Life created fire. Life sustains fire. and life has progressively absorbed fire within its ecological webs. Fire takes apart what photosynthesis puts together. It performs this task within a biological matrix.

It has evolved hand in glove with the living world. When oxidation occurs within a cell, it's called respiration. When it occurs in the wider world, it's called fire. For as the Agni Purana says, quote, fire is that which gives life, sustains creation, and in the end consumes everything. Every process that we label as life, The breath process, the digestive process, the elimination process. This is all the activity of heat, of fire. The body heats itself to live.

The infant gestates in warm seawater and is born steaming hot. The flush that comes with the dance. The flush that comes with ecstatic trance. The flush that comes with focused effort. All of these are expressions of the great primal fire. You are flame, you are heat, you are shine, say the Vedic text. The cauldron in you is the same one who shines yonder.

That cauldron is the same one as the sun. The same as the sun. Where does the heat in you come from? The heat that literally powers your thoughts and your feelings and your dreams. It comes from energy. And where does that energy come from? It comes from the plants you eat. Or the plants that the animals you eat, eat. And where do plants get it?

They get it from the sun, from the great fire above. Plants hold the energy of the sun and pass it on to us. And in the passing of that sacred fire, they make the movements of all life possible. So the firing of your neurons, all the cellular processes of life, all of these are made of energy, of heat, of fire. The light that powers your dreams, the visions that come.

lucid and bright the light of perception that floods your mind all this is a great burning not metaphorically it is literally in the solar fire

It is the transfer of the heat and light of the sun into messages, perceptions, feelings. Look upon this burning world with eyes that burn, and you too are burning. All of it is... Incandescence. The water burrs on the lake in the late afternoon. The glare of the light shining on the water. Shining like a baking tray of diamonds. The light, the shine. is fire. The energy that moves the water bird's wings. This is the pulse of the cosmic fire. There's a great fire at work in the cosmos.

which is why creation story after creation story speaks of the fire that lives within all things. Tolkien spoke of this holy fire as the flame imperishable. Quote, And I will send forth into the void the flame imperishable, and it shall be at the heart of the world, and the world shall be. And in one of his letters Tolkien said,

The flame imperishable is the secret fire at the heart of the world that kindles all life and gives the creatures their free will to participate in the unfolding of the world. For... In a universe whose first truth, whose first law, is the law of transformation, how else would such a universe be formed but through a great cosmic fire? By action, friction, and striving, the earth was formed, say the Gnostic mystics. And the Vedas say, order and truth were born from heat as it blazed up.

Order and truth are big words. But let's just say that the universe is what it is, contains all of its primal forces and elements, because of heat, because of fire. The creation of the periodic table of the elements, this architecture of creation, was made possible by a primal heat, a furnace that lives in the womb space of nebulae. in the bellies of stars, inflaming itself into existence and pervading all things. And when things change into other things, they do so because of heat, friction.

Friction is the very medium of transformation. This is a world of fire. The world has its shape, its ranges, its high peaks, and its continental divides. its seismic churnings and upheavals because of Pele. Pele, she of the lightning eyes. who dances in the lava spouts, who smokes and smolders, who appears, as H. Arlo Nimmo says, as, quote, fire, lightning, lava, thunder, flames, spark.

Sulfur, steam, smoke, fumes and tidal waves. The transformative architecture of this world was forged in fire. This world, said Heraclitus, has been and will eternally be living on the rhythm of fire. Inflaming according to the measure and dying away according to the measure. This is the functioning of the eternal world.

And so, as he says, there is an exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of wares for gold and gold for wares. In this process of transformation... This great universal alchemy. There's an exchange at play. Wood becomes ash. Ash becomes soil. The heat of that smoldering ash womb cracks the seeds open that then grow into the new forest. The tree-eaters devour entire groves in their processional lava flows.

The lava cools. The seeds sprout. The lehua grows again. There's an exchange. And the medium of that exchange is fire. The cosmic fire. itself. And if this is sounding abstract, this vision of fire as the medium of transformation at play in the very heart of the cosmos itself, remember, it's not allegorical or metaphorical. It's physics. In his book, The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli describes how the latest finding of quantum physicists show that heat

and time are deeply linked. In fact, when scientists look at what actually creates a differentiation between past, present, and future on a subatomic level, all they can point to is heat. The distinction between the past and the future does not exist in the elementary equations of motion in physics. This difference emerges only in connection with heat.

Every time a difference is manifested between the past and future heat is involved. The entire structure of time is connected to the presence of heat. Without heat time does not exist. And Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine says, quote, the arrow of time is a result of the irreversibility of processes in thermodynamic systems. Let's say it more poetically.

Time is a movement of the cosmic fire. Which is why for many, many years the tantricas have named the mother goddess herself. Kalagni, the fire of time. The fire of time. Kali is the fire of destruction at the end of time, says the Kalika Purana, blazing with intense flames. Agni Rupa she is. She who is in the form of fire. She is the one with the blazing tongue, the burning incandescent wave-like tongue speech vibration at the heart of reality.

The way that the infinite vastness of deep space is teeming with vibration. So Kali's unfathomable blackness has a tongue of blazing fire. So this universe of blazing vibration, this is her, this fire in the night. Fire in the night, this is her. I saw you. You are the fire, O blazing goddess. Say the text. You are the fire.

You are this burning, birthing, burning world. The longing with which you bring forth the world, this longing itself is a great fire. When we long to catch a glimpse of you, it's a fire that drives this land. When we find the courage to stare into the sacrificial ash pit of our lives with honesty and poke among the coals. It's your fire that drives us. Fire drives all our transformations, and it drives the ritual process through which we transform. So primal is the fire to the earth.

the ritual process, the religious process, the spiritual process, that the very first line of the very first hymn of the Rig Veda says, O Agni, and Agni is related to the word. Ignite. It's the same linguistic root. So the first Vedic hymn sparks into being with an invocation of the primal fire. O Agni, says Sri Aurobindo, quote,

To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being? Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn. on the altar of the soul. Oh, fire, yours is the call and the offering. Yours, the purification and the order of the sacrifice. Yours, the brilliant illustration. You, the firebringer for the seeker of truth.

So central is fire to ritual that the very first ritual, according to some stories, was a ritual of fire. They say that Prajapati, the primal being, was lonely in the vastness. The one was lonely and longed to be many, and so Prajapati heated himself up through practice, through focus, concentrating the intensity of his own longing the way a magnifying glass concentrates sunbeams, and with that heat there in the lonely darkness.

Vastness, sparks started emanating from Prajapati's mouth and nostrils and ears and scalp and armpits. From all the hot places of his body, sparks poured forth. And those sparks formed themselves into a great being, a being of fire. Agni who took the form of a devouring mouth, just as fire itself is a devouring mouth. And so, the very nature of the universe was set from that moment on. From that moment on, from the moment that the oneness diversified itself through heat, it was set in motion.

that this would be a universe of fire and transformation, eternally feeding, devouring, transforming. Just as Heraclitus said, all things flaming into being and dying according to the measure. eternal dance of fire. And Prajapati looked at this great devouring mouth of fire that he himself had created out of his own body. And he felt awe and wonder and fear. For what if this mouth of fire, he thought, what if this mouth of fire is going to devour me?

And that awe and wonder and fear caused a milky white substance to exude from Prajapati's pores. And he took the milky white substance, he wiped it from his skin. He gathered it into his cupped hands and he offered it back to the fire. This was the first ritual offering that was ever made. Ritually offering to the mouth of fire. as so many traditions do to this day. For in this universe of transformation, this world of fire, what is one to do to reconnect to this primal fire of creation?

Build a fire and offer to it. For fire is the mouth of the gods, says the Agni Purana. So the offering fire burns bright in tradition after tradition after tradition. I mean, have you been to a ritual that didn't involve fire in one way or another? The offering fire is kindled and tended, and it's fed and it's sung to, and it feasts on the songs that are sung to it. There are times when all that is offered is song.

but sometimes it's offered grains, sometimes it's offered butter. The keeping of the sacred fire is so central to global ritual because it enacts the great... cosmic cycle of transformation, of offering, of feeding, of flaming to life and dying away and rising again. And so it becomes a portal, a doorway between this world, and the larger, transforming cosmos. Everything, Professor Narasimhan once told me, all the dynamics of nature, all the gods, all the great texts.

all the philosophical ruminations, all of it is in the yajna. All of it is in the fire ritual. Every dynamic at play in the cosmos can be felt, observed. witnessed, encountered through the fire. Which is why the Rigveda says that all the divine forms are present in the fire. Maybe you've seen this. Our birthing, our arising, our dancing, our dying. All of it is in the fire. The flaming forth of universes and their flaming out again. All of it is in the fire.

So ritual is alchemical. The ritual enacts locally a cosmic process of transformation. And often, quite often, it enacts it through heat or through fire. Candles through torches through brassieres of burning coals. The flaming spark, Manley Hall says, burning in the midst of the incense. is emblematic of the spiritual germ concealed in the midst of the material organism of man. This spiritual spark is an infinitesimal part of the divine flame.

fire of the universe from whose flaming heart the altar fires of all his creatures have been lit. Heat is an integral part of ritual, the repetitive friction of the dance step. builds heat. The repetitive utterance of the mantra builds heat. The shake of the rattle in that one drone monotone rhythm over hours and hours and hours and hours builds heat.

the heat of accumulation, of something building upon itself, the accumulated friction that is necessary to shed the old and birth the new, to rejuvenate and replenish. It's no accident that ritual and heat share a deep relationship. For heat is how things transform. No heat, no friction, no transformation.

In the sweat lodge, the stones are heated up until they glow orange and red like dragon's eggs. And when dried juniper is sprinkled upon those hot stones, they flash and sparkle in the steaming. dark. And by the time the prayer round comes, anything still standing between us and the place of communion, any distractions, agitations, thoughts of this or that, have been systematically burned away, and the prayer vibrates right in the hot womb of creation. Ritual is to step into the fire.

Into the steaming incubatory womb space. Journeying into this womb of heat, we emerge clear, clean. Having gone into the visionary realms, having shed... Maybe some muck that was getting in the way. Because that's another aspect of fire. Is that fire cleans. It burns off the dross. Dross, you know, the crud, the stuff we need to shed. As much as it's popular to say, I'm perfect just the way I am, who would deny that there's some crud to be burned away?

Something must be burnt. Have you ever transformed in this life without burning something away? Without shedding some ash? The mystic process is a process of burning. And this relates to a very key word in Sanskrit. The word tapas. Not the little Spanish appetizers. Not that kind of tapas. Tapas in Sanskrit means heat. The cosmic heat. The heat of longing. The heat of ardor.

The heat of the hot womb waters. The heat that is generated every time the mind wants to wander. And it's gently returned to center. Over and over and over again till some ancient awareness kindles. This is the heat that exists within the body of the practitioner, and the yogi harnesses this heat through practicing heat. The devotees of the great fire create.

Tapas by means of tapas and heat up tapas in themselves, says the Atarva Veda. So if you have a ritual practice, a repetitive friction, a repetitive drumbeat, a repetitive mantra, repetitive offering practice then that act is heat and the product is heat there's a heat generated from the ritual there's a fire that is stoked in us as we do the ritual

Many of the ascetic traditions of India center around the generation of tapas and the preservation of tapas and the circulation of tapas, of heat, keeping the sacred fire within. strong. From Walter Caber, quote, Through various ascetic constraints, the initiate heats himself, and in doing so, facilitates passage to sacred and visionary realms.

The ascetic scenario is in fact a period of incubation from which the shaman is reborn through a magical and generative heat. So the stories of the sages are brimming with heat. The heat of their practice erupts out of their eyes and their mouths. The fire of the sages swirls in their bellies. It is sealed inwards with the application of ash to the skin and the knotting of the hair.

It churns in them like the liquid fire at the center of the earth, which burns, scientists say, hotter than the surface of the sun. The primal fire of the sages leaps from Shiva's third eye and incinerates the lord of longing himself, burns him to ashes. The sage, Kapila, opens his eyes after eons of meditation. and the 60,000 sons of Sagara are burnt in an instant. The mystic generates heat through the friction of their practice.

gathers it and circulates it until they smolder like a well-tended fire, tending the fire with breath till it hums white-hot, tending it till it can melt gold. Quote, The flame in the mystic heart is love for the divine and for all creatures, Abba Isaac explains. It is the heart's burning for the sake of the entire creation.

For human beings, for birds, for animals, for demons, for every created thing. And at this recollection of this flame inside of the eyes of a merciful man, pour forth abundant tears. So, Pirsia Khan says, the mystic Masud Bach's tears were so hot that if they fell on someone's hand, it was burned. And the desert father, Arsenius, attained such intense illumination that not only did his spirit glow,

His very flesh blazed. And Muhammad Chishti needed no lamp for his nightly studies. Rather, he read by the light pouring out from under his turban. And that light... isn't just cultivated for the convenience of reading at night. It's not a show. When the Ladaki mystics above Hemiskampa invoke the goddess Tumon,

and practice until their bodies start to radiate heat. And they demonstrate this heat by sitting on frozen rivers and drying wet sheets off their backs in the middle of Himalayan winters. That heat It's not just for drying laundry. It's alchemy. Very early on the yogis realized that through the very same methods by which a physical fire is tended, we can tend to the fire within ourselves. This is the heart of alchemy. It's understanding that the crucible is within.

There are alchemic practices across the world that treat the body as cauldron, as crucible. And the practice contains some type of friction that heats the crucible. The practice is the kindling of fire, the keeping of fire, the stoking of fire, the containing of fire, the healthy circulation of fire.

So dozens of practices across traditions work with tending the inner fire. The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra encourages practitioners to focus on a fire. that rises from the feet to the crown and burns the practitioner to ash. And when there is nothing left but ashes scattered by the wind, then they rest. And another practice encourages the practitioner to meditate upon the entire world as a blazing inferno. And then when all has turned to ashes...

The heart itself is a sacrificial fire pit, the Tantras say. What else can be said about this heart than it is a sacrifice fire? Deep, smoldering red. like the color of a banana flower, flaming its way through this life, offering with every incandescent breath, offering with every drop of sweat. What we do with this body is our oblation, our offering in the sacrifice fire, say the Shiva Sutras. It's our offering in the great cosmic fire of the universe. This lifetime.

what we see and what we say, who we hold and how we hold them, what we honor and what we bow before. This is our offering in the sacrificial fire of time. And this too shall burn away. These visions too shall burn away. And in this great burning world, what shall we cry to the great fire of creation? Shall we cry as Mirabai cried? Oh, beloved, let me become a pyre of sandalwood. Light it with your hands. And when it burns me to a heap of ashes,

Apply the ashes to your holy body. Can you relate? Oh powers, take these thoughts, these agitations, these neuroses, these patterns, these hang-ups. Take these hang-ups and... burn them to ash, dissolve them into ash, and then take that ash and anoint the universe with it. And perhaps this very world shall hum with the ash residue of our burnt obsessions.

The world shall hum with the residue of the leaving behind of what we are no longer called to carry. The world, this discarded snakeskin forever afire. Take all this, beloved mother. and make a bonfire of it all. For it is not mine. This offering, this thing I'm carrying that I place before you now, it is not mine. Idam Namama chant the rishis as they offer to the fire. I offer this to the fire. It is not mine. I offer this to the fire.

What would you offer to the fire that is not yours to carry? The fire shows us that none of this is ours. Whatever it is, it is here within the auspices of the great fire, and to the great fire it owes its existence. Even that thing that we call us, what is that? What is that? transitory flickering flame of identity that we are so certain is us. By inquiring, who am I? encouraged Ramana Maharshi.

The thought, who am I, will burn away, will destroy all other thoughts. Until, like the stick that is used to stir the burning pyre, it will itself in the end. be destroyed too. So we find the place of the universal offering fire, the hearth of creation, where past, present, future melt away in the fire. The discursive, roving mind melts away in the fire. The questions melt away in the fire. Even the asker of questions dissolves in the fire.

Ramana says. Ramana who sat luminous and silent in a cave there upon the mountain of fire. And if you go there, perhaps you'll find that the fire of his knowing still lingers, still reverberates. For knowing itself is a kind of burning. To know, says the Yajna Valkya, one must burn. Knowledge carries with it its own incandescence. Which is why knowledge has been called illumination.

and in artworks across traditions, from the canvases of Renaissance Europe to the basalt columns of the Jemes, the heads of knowing beings blaze with halos of radiant fire. For literally hundreds of cultural mythologies, fire is synonymous with knowledge. The fire bringer is the one who brings forethought and insight and knowledge. and therefore culture itself. The firebringer, the forward thinker. Perhaps you've heard of him. Prometheus. Prometheus' very name means...

Forethought. The gift of fire is the gift of forward thinking. Just as fire burns its way forward through things, so our interaction with fire transforms us into beings who... burn our way through the world by thinking and acting and planning forward. Prometheus, in whose heart, says Manley Hall, quote,

was a great love for struggling humanity. Prometheus determined to bring to mankind the divine fire which would make the human race immortal. So he flew to the home of the sun god, and lighting a... tiny reed with the solar fire. He carried it to the children of the earth, warning them that the fire should always be used for the glorification of the gods and the unselfish service of each other.

But human beings were thoughtless and unkind. They took the divine fire brought to them by Prometheus and used it to destroy one another. They burned the homes of their enemies and with the age of heat. They tempered steel and armor. They grew more selfish and more arrogant, defying the gods. But they could not be destroyed, for they possessed the sacred fire. It turns out that...

Metheus' gift, the gift of fire, is a blessing and a curse. With the gift of fire comes so much warmth. So much potentiality for ideation and innovation. The foundation of all technological advancement, some say. All the golden fruits of planning and forward thinking. And the fire to make those plans happen. The fire of instigation and actualization.

The fire of making one's mark on the world and burning a trail across the sky. My, my, hey, hey, it's better to burn out than fade away. We love that fire. But then... That fire has consequences. And what are the consequences of forward thinking? It takes us out of the cycle. Out of the immediacy of connection. So it's no accident that when Prometheus is finally punished, the forward thinker is finally punished, he's punished by being chained to a rock.

He's punished by being returned to the cycle of nature. He's chained to a rock, and a great bird comes and eats his liver every day. And then he regenerates, and then the bird returns. To be eternally bound to the cycle. That's his punishment. Because fire gives us the ability to move beyond the cycle. Or at least to believe for a brief, bright moment. that we are beyond the cycle, before we are inevitably returned, humbly, rudely, once again, to this stone, this earth, this rock.

How many flaming rockets pointed towards distant red planets far away? How much money wasted and energy spent and fossil fuels burned in the fire before we realize that we are of this rock? chained to this rock and that the punishment of being chained here, chained to this living emerald, this green jewel in space, is in fact the greatest blessing there is.

So yeah, fire takes us out of the cycle. The exposure to fire over time, says Matthew Stillman, changed our hormone and endocrine systems. Fire functionally extended daylight. Early humans impacted by fire as a tool of extending daylight now had children in times of the year when food might not be abundant. This is no small matter.

This simple hormonal shift suddenly put humans in opposition to nature in a deeply fundamental way. Fire compelled us to learn to store foods and eat foods that we might never have considered otherwise. And suddenly we need fire all year long, and that fire must be fed again and again, which sent early humans continuing on their search for fuel for their fires so they might have fuel for their bodies and brains.

and the bodies and brains of their children. Fire brings us this relentless forward search for fuel, and from the harnessing of that one tiny spark, everything... Everything changed. Quote, in the most revolutionary event since flame appeared in the Devonian, a creature acquired the capacity to manipulate fire directly. How it happened is not known, nor is when exactly it occurred, or in what ways the capture of fire affected landscapes beyond impermanent torches and hearths. But once started...

Humanity, like fire, propagated like a flame that would eventually burn over and remake the whole of the planet. Yes, once fire is loosed upon the world. things are never the same again. So here we get deeper into the mischievous spark at the heart of the fire. In many, many myths across many parts of the world, it's trickster. who brings the gift of fire. And the gift of fire is decidedly two-sided. For who but a trickster would bring the gift that unleashed all this?

This story of the trickster who steals fire from its rightful place and hands it over to human beings, this story is present in one way or another on six continents. It's not... all people who have this story, but it is everywhere that human beings have lived. And it is in dozens upon dozens upon dozens of cultures. It's probably the closest example. of a universal myth that exists. Who the trickster is varies. Sometimes it's a coyote who steals fire. Sometimes a rabbit. Sometimes a bird.

Sometimes it's Raven stumbling in the dark upon a box so small that all it could possibly contain is all the light in the universe. But regardless of who it is, There's always a trick, a theft, a little overstep of some kind, and the unleashing of something that maybe ultimately wasn't meant for us. For the indigenous South African hunter-gatherers, it's Ikagan the mantis, who steals fire from an ostrich, who kept the fire beneath its wings. In Algonquin myth,

Rabbit steals fire from an old man and his two daughters. In Cherokee myth, after possum and buzzard had failed, Grandmother Spider used her web to sneak into the land of light. She stole fire. hiding it in her silk nets. According to a Mazatec legend, it was the possum who spread fire to humanity. Fire fell from a star, and an old woman kept it for herself.

The possum took fire from the old woman and carried the flame on its tail, which is still bald to this day after being singed in the fire. According to some, rabbit stole fire from the weasels. According to others, Crow stole fire from a volcano in the middle of the water. In Polynesian myth, Maui claims fire from underneath his grandmother's fingernails.

In many myths of fire's origin, says Pine, fire is stolen or captured and then loosed and lodged in the landscape. There it remains until people coax it out. So it lives all around us, this hidden latent fire. It lives in stone, in land, in plants. Do you feel how that spark?

leaps right from the mind of the gods, right from the burning incandescent fabric of reality, right from the subatomic string spaces where a trillion tiny flames burn in the heart of each atom do you feel how it leaps from the gods to the how tree to the yellow blooming water hibiscus how it leaps to bamboo How it leaps into the mullein stalk. How it leaps into certain stones. How it leaps into flint. Trickster flint. Thus, all these trees got fire.

says one Papuan fire story, and have kept it ever since, and people obtain their fire sticks from those trees. And so it is that all around us lives the very thing that could warm us. Feed us. Nourish us. Set us on the path of cultural illumination. And also, the very same thing that could burn it all to the ground.

tricks on us. For fire lights the ambitions of the people. And the people stoke the fires of their own ambition. And before you know it, that... fire can burn out of control. Like, if a person is described as fiery, that's not always a compliment, right? It often means what? That they tend towards rashness? anger, pride. Yeah, fire beings tend to be pretty hot-headed, and mythologies are full of fiery beings whose fieriness ultimately comes back to burn them in the end.

Shango, the Orisha of fire and retribution, reveled in his own firiness, in his ability to call storms and lightning. Until, according to some stories, Shango's power grew out of control, and in a moment of anger, he summoned a storm so fierce that it destroyed his own palace. And maybe you've heard of Feanor. Theanor, whose hair was raven dark. His eyes piercingly bright. He was tall and fair to face. His eyes piercingly bright. And his hair raven dark.

My all-time favorite character in Tolkien's Silmarillion. Feanor, the spirit of fire. He was a genius. An elven genius. He embodied that searching, seeking, restless, creative fire. Feanor brings the gift of letters. He brings jewel craft, artistry, this glorious creativity. But the fire of his ambition is also ultimately his undoing. The fire burned a little too hot in him, and he could not let go of that which he had created, and he grew rash and possessive.

and proud, and he died before the first rising of the sun, and so volatile was he that his body burned to ash, and the jewels that he had created, the Silmarils, were lost. but not before they went on to determine the fate of Middle-earth for ages to come. Mighty indeed was Feanor, says Tolkien. greater than all the children of Iluvatar in understanding and skill, yet also more proud and more possessive. And Feanor, consumed with pride, came to ruin and brought many others down with him.

Yet it is said that from him came some of the greatest and most beautiful things that the world has ever known, and that after shall never be again. And that's the toss-up, right? This is the delicate balance of those who are tapped into a great creative fire. It's as if there is a reverberant light at the heart of the cosmos. brimming forth with endless creative outflow. And this fire is ours to honor and to hold and to re-express through us and to heat our hearths with.

and power our rituals with, and forge our cooking vessels with, and it exists to shine through us as art and beauty in all its forms. But it isn't ours to own, to covet. to control, to obsess over. The mistake is when we confuse it for us. There was one who did this, remember? who shone so beautifully that he confused his own self-generated light for the supreme light of the cosmos. What was his name? This solitary flame.

who shone like no other, save for the divine itself. His name was Lucifer. Lucifer. The Lightbringer. the tragic son of morning, who tried to place his own throne above the flaming stars of the creator, Lucifer, a light that became, as the texts say, corrupted for the sake of its own splendor. When that sacred creative fire

confuses its own shine for the shine of the cosmos, that's when trouble begins. For fire brings trouble. The transformation that fire brings is not always in the form of gentle spiritual illuminations and warm hearth stories. Fire also burns. Pele in the Hawaiian vision is pretty fiery, right? All the fiery emotions are Pele. So she gets into scraps all the time because of her quick temper.

She engulfs her rivals in hot lava. She incinerates women who sleep with men that she covet. She gobbles up herds of pigs and belches their bones back up again. burns people alive, petrifies them, and leaves them as warnings for any others who might not respect her. All gods and goddesses have the medium through which they work. And the medium of Pele's transformative works is friction and struggle. Even, sometimes, rage, jealousy, and violence. Is that friction generative?

Sure. It generates the hala tree, and the lahua, and the nalpaka flower, and beautiful, life-giving landscape features all across the Hawaiian Islands. But that fire is not without consequence. A whole lot of people get burned along the way. Pele, says Nimmo, quote, reveals her violent side. In the epic tale of Pele and Hiiaka, she devours her sister's devotees as well as droves of hogs that were being fattened as offerings for her.

She destroys her sister's priests and all of her sister's friends and, quote, directs the death of the man who she imagines to have spurned her, Lohiau. Not content to merely kill him, She burns him slowly from his feet upwards so that he might endure greater agony. And that's the man she imagines to have spurred her, right? Because the fiery mind is always three steps ahead.

assuming and then obsessing over what it assumes and acting on its obsessive assumptions. Ready, fire, aim. As Chris Brennan is fond of saying of a certain cardinal fire sign. And all of that is a volcano goddess's prerogative, of course. But what about us people? What about really fiery people? Speaking as a formerly really fiery person...

who eventually had to do a lot of alchemy in order to temper that fire a bit. What about when volcanic, seismic feelings take us? Like these days, for example. There's a whole lot of talk about sacred rage. You know, the totally understandable rage over what's going on in the world. The rage that people feel at social injustice. The rage at the legacy of violence enacted upon the world, upon communities and ecologies, upon bodies. Is rage understandable in such times? Sure. Abso-fucking-lutely.

I feel it. But what happens to us as individuals when our totally understandable rage against the machine spills over into, I don't know, Rage against the customer service representative? Or rage against the other drivers at the four-way stop? Rage against the vacuum cleaner that just keeps getting stuck on the rug over and over again? Rage against the sheer ignorance of other people who just can't see it the way that I see it? Rage against our partners? Or our kids? Or ourselves?

What happens then? This is for everyone to navigate for themselves. I'm not going to stir the fire too much. But let's just say that if there are others in the immediate vicinity around an uncontained fire, they can get burned. And whether or not I see my rage as sacred is kind of beside the point. What matters is the effect that that rage has on those around me.

That rage still has very real effects. And that rage doesn't always burn down Babylon the way that we want it to. Sometimes Babylon stays fully intact. And we're the ones who get burned. Or our loved ones get burned. And eventually, some of those closest to us might decide that they've had enough of putting up with our sacred rage. and seek out a less tempestuous path through life. And we might find ourselves simmering in a kind of self-generated stew pot, all hot and bothered and...

alone. All of this comes back to how we work with the fire. Human beings are fire tenders and this is about how we work with the fire. How we find a good container in which it can express and find a healthy burn within its boundaries. And it's challenging these days because we live in a world in which you could say, what? The fires are burning a little hot and uncontained, in which we are inundated with inflammatory discourse and the fires of social divide are stoked regularly and on purpose.

A world in which the fiery personality, the Type A Pitta Dosha, is often rewarded for its impetuous rashness. You know, is that person a fiery, self-righteous jerk, or... Are they simply good at business? And what's the difference exactly? Tending the fire is challenging when fires are stoked deliberately, and the overarching message is more, more, more.

Burn more, consume more, forward, forward, forward, more, more, more. And the Promethean tendency towards forward agitation, towards forward consumption. roving, raging, burning its way across the planet, has resulted in a world in which the fire is out of control. And to address this, first we've got to recognize that the fire is out of control. There is a fire imbalance on planet Earth. What do I mean when I say that the fire is out of control? In their book, Inflamed,

Raj Patel and Rupa Marya describe in great detail how individual bodies, political systems, and the planet itself are inflamed. Quote, Your body is inflamed. If you haven't felt it yet, you or someone close to you soon will. Inflammation accompanies almost every disease in the modern world. Heart disease, cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer's, depression, obesity.

diabetes, and more. Your body is part of a society inflamed. Demagogues around the world kindle distrust and hatred. From the United States to South Africa, India, Brazil, and China. People suffering oppression set tires and cars and gasoline alight on barricades. The petrochemistry of our protest reflects the materials that we have on hand. Everything we've made... We've made from fossil fuels, energy, food, medicine, and consumer goods. The world has been organized to burn.

As a consequence, the planet is inflamed. Global temperature records are being broken. Forest fires have turned from annual to perennial events. Oceans are rising and storms have become bigger and stronger. This is the epoch of endless fire. Inflammation is a biological, social, economic, and ecological pathway, all of which intersect, and whose contours were made by the modern world.

End quote. The inflammation in bodies is a direct reflection of the inflammation of the planet. The planet is inflamed because of our relentless hunger. the mouth of fire burning its way through mines and hearts and forests, burning so much that the globe itself heats up. NASA and the NOAA tell us that the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 2010. with 2016, 2019, 2020, and 2022 consistently ranking among the top hottest years globally. There's heat everywhere.

In the fire of protest and in the tools of empire to quell that protest and to conquer. War is heat. And modern warfare takes place almost exclusively through the medium of fire. through incendiary devices. One month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Life magazine was quoted as saying, modern-day Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again.

and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus. At the time, scientists seriously considered the possibility that the atomic explosion could set off a chain reaction that would ignite the Earth's atmosphere. and destroy the entire world. But we press forward with our quest for more effective tools of burning up land and people. press forward as if lit ourselves by a possessing fire. And fire-possessed leaders invoke inflammatory forces as they set the world afire.

We have unleashed a new force in the world, the energy of the atom. It is harnessed to bring fire, destruction, and untold misery to our enemies, said Truman. One of his contemporaries said this, We shall unleash the fire of retribution in such intensity that their cities will be lit by the flames. And another one said this, Let us unleash this firestorm, and the enemy shall burn in it. Now, you guess. Which one was Churchill, and which one was Hitler? Or was it, rather, the insatiable...

Fire speaking through them. Who feasts, who dines most in any war? The fire. Speaking about the firebombing of Tokyo. U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay said, we're going to burn them out. We're going to roast them and bring fire upon their cities. It's easy to forget, with all the understandable focus on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that far more people died in fire bombings in the years leading up to the atomic bomb.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Dresden, Cologne, Forzheim, Hamburg, Osaka, Yokohama. The firebombing of Tokyo remains the deadliest single day of fire in human history. Over a hundred thousand people perished in flames. perished in flames. And of the few who remember that fact, even fewer know this. for all the tonnage of incendiary weaponry that was utilized in World War II by all sides, for all that relentless global fire, the U.S. dropped more than twice that.

on the tiny nations of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A short two decades later. 7.5 million tons of incendiary bombs. Twice the tonnage that was used in all of World War II by all sides, including the atomic explosions. 388,000 tons of napalm. A rain of fire. Sometimes I wonder, are we purveyors of freedom? Or more often, are we purveyors? And now everyone wants a piece of that fire. Iran peppers Israel with missiles. We will respond with fire, Netanyahu says. That's the fire talking.

Mohammed Javad Zarif responds back for Iran. Those who set the region on fire will not be spared from the flames. That's the fire talk. Fire begets fire. Fire meets fire with fire. Leaders consumed by fire. Look at them and see, barely disguised, beings consumed by, gnawed at by fire. You see it? Take a deeper look. Look for the classic symptoms of fire elemental possession. Frozen faces and dead eyes lit by a single spark.

And whether or not you buy the whole possession by fire elementals thing, there is little doubt that the fire is having its way with us. The fire is having its way with us.

This whole world functions on controlled and uncontrolled explosions. Every time you start your car, ride a train, ride a plane, you are harnessing a controlled explosion. Plug in your laptop. That is the spark of the trickster's fire. Pick up your phone. That is the light of the possessing fire. And yes, fire is sacred. Fire is beautiful.

But do you not hear just a hint of the trickster's laugh in how possessed we are by visions of luminous fire? Apocalyptic fire. How much time we spend in inflammatory discourse on... Devices lit by fire? Internet discourse is literally a symptom of mass global inflammation. An inflamed allergen response in which the slightest hint of a pathogen or an idea that we don't agree with

sets off a bloated chain reaction of fire. Tiny sparks set off wildfires, and people get red in the ears and type frantically away. somehow convincing themselves that they are accomplishing anything other than serving the agenda of fire. And that's not a metaphor. From an animist perspective, there are actual trickster fire entities involved in all of this. Fiery emotions are, in many traditions, beings themselves. Pixar's not wrong when they show us...

feelings as animate characters, right? Jealousy, self-righteousness, rage, these smoldering and explosive fires. They're beings that are having their day. Spend one day on the internet and you will see them having their day. Jealousy, that gnawing slow burn of jealousy that loves to disguise itself as righteousness. or even as care and concern. This is a fire that is having its day. Humanity is stoking the fire as fast as we can. And we best learn if the ancient stories are to be believed.

best learn how to manage and tend the fire before the fire burns us all away. For once, it is said, there was a sage who was so consumed by the fire of vengeance that he almost destroyed the entire world. Sage Aurvas, born from a mother named Arushi, whose entire clan had been slaughtered by Haihaya warriors. Arushi, pregnant, escaped the massacre and fled to a cave in the Himalayan foothills.

And there, through the potency of her practice, she moved her unborn child to her thigh and hid him there to keep her pregnancy concealed in case the warriors found her. But they did find her. The Haihaya warriors discovered the cave and began to drag her off. But at that moment, the bulge in Arushi's thigh burst open, and a dazzling light leapt for her thigh.

And the warriors were blinded and fled, screaming. And that is how sage Auerwas was born. Auerwas, who carried with him into this life of brilliant... Fire. And as he grew, his mother stoked that fire, telling him stories of all that his ancestral people had suffered. You cannot imagine what they did to us, she would say. They didn't. even spare the children. And so the fire in sage Aurvas grew, fueled by the burning want for vengeance, that fire grew. And Aurvas fed that fire even further.

through terrible practices of heat designed to gain cosmic power. Austerity is so severe that light poured from his eyes and smoke from his body. And the very gods came down and begged him to stop, for they feared the tapas, the heat from his practice, for the searing illumination would consume the whole world. But our vas ignores the gods.

The fire inside him grows even more, and it takes shape as a white, hot, bucking, snorting stallion of flame that lives within him. Vada Vagni, the horse of fire. and Auerbas prepares to unleash this flaming force upon the world, upon those who have wronged his family. He gathers all the smoke and blaze and potency together until the reverberations of his practice are trembling.

foundations of the world. Before he unleashes the Horse of Fire, he sees the moon high above him, and the moon is stationed in the mansion of the ancestors. And as his final act before taking his vengeance at last, he calls upon his ancestors. I'm doing this for you, perhaps he says. I'm doing this for all you suffered. I'm doing this for the children who were slaughtered and for the women who were carried off and all the sacred knowledge destroyed. I'm doing this for you. And his ancestors.

respond. From far off in the spirit realm, the ancestors respond. But we don't want this, they say. But we don't want. We don't want this world of endless fire. Do you hear the ancestral voices that say we don't want this world of endless fire? Could our leaders stop for a moment to listen to the ancestors? Stop this terrible penance at once, his ancestors say, and contain this bucking horse.

Except he can't. He can't contain all that he has summoned. If he keeps it within him, if he tries to contain it inside himself, it will gnaw at him from the inside until it burns him alive.

So, much like his mother in the cave before him, he gathers the flame together with his hands, and he moves it to his thigh. And he takes Svadavagni, this flaming, snorting, bucking breathy radiance of the residue of his practice he takes this flaming horse from out of his thigh and as he holds it there he says there's only one safe place for this horse to live where it won't destroy the world. And he casts the flaming horse deep, deep, deep into the center of the ocean.

into the vast cooling waters where it lives to this day. And the waters contain the fire. And the fire stimulates the waters. And this dynamic movement keeps the world. In balance. For this is a world of fire and water. All bodies in this world body are bodies of fire and water. The churning weather, the movement of the seasons, all of it is from the balance of the flaming horse deep in the center of the ocean. All of it is this dance of fire and water.

But it's a precarious balance. For at the end of days, it is said, the horse's want will grow so deep that it will drink the very oceans dry. And that will be the beginning of the destruction. of the world. The fire burns, says the Kathupanishad, in the form of vadava beneath the waters. And at the end of time, this fire will consume.

All, just as hunger consumes the body. When the time comes, says the Agni Purana, Agni in his fiercest form will consume the entire universe, reducing all to ashes. only to be reborn again. And faced with such prophetic fire, what can we do? There are days when I feel as though there are steps I can take. things I can do to stem the tide. And then there are days where it's like, if we are really determined to burn it all down, then we'll find a way to burn it all down.

And there might not be much that I can do about that. We can do what we can, take action to address it as we can. But the hunger, the hunger runs deep. deeper than me. Some hungers are greater than us. They are global. They are cosmic even. They are beyond our means to address as individuals. which brings us back to what we can attend to with this life, with this breath, with this flame of awareness. We can work, perhaps,

to understand more deeply what it means to tend our own hearth, our own fire. For the story of the flaming horse in the center of the sea is also a story about... about these bodies, about how we tend our fire, and how we balance our hungers, and how we create a container that can let intensities pass through. without them burning us or those around us, and what to do with the fires that threaten to consume us. And sometimes that is as simple as placing that fire...

in the midst of a vast sea, and cooling down a little bit. Like, sometimes the message is, cool it down a little bit.

Sometimes we've got to balance out the fire with the cooling waters. And oh, the fiery types hate to hear that. I used to hate to hear that. But for me... At a certain point in the journey, it was very necessary, life-saving in fact, to encounter practices of what you could call cooling. Practices of letting go Practices in which we admit at last that we're not the ones in charge Practices like surrendering

Like casting ourselves upon the floor of forest moss and saying aloud to the powers, I have no answers at all. Like whispering words of gratitude to a universe of forces. far, far greater than myself. You know, practices of devotion. Like pouring water on a stone. Like placing flowers in water basins. Like reading poetry on the porch in the October rain. You know, when you're getting a little hot under the collar. Then maybe it's time to...

Follow the advice of the ancient Ayurvedic texts and take a stroll in the evening beneath the cool moonlight while wearing white and eating yogurt with a companion prone to gentleness. Sounds nice, right? For that restless, obsessive, type A, hungry, fire type, quite often, is really ultimately looking not for control. but longing to be put in its place. To find itself in a situation where it has no choice but to let go at last. Oh, those who burn.

with that hungry, hungry fire. Don't you long to let go at last. I remember a sleep I once had. I was about 17. It was right after a particularly hot sweat lodge. One of those where you go in with an agenda and you go out the other side simply thankful to be breathing. and the cool night air, and the crickets chirping, and the conversations as we ate a simple meal in the kitchen by the fire. I slept under my friend's heavy buffalo robe.

And for one night, the roving, obsessive fire stopped burning, melted away in heat and prayer. And for that one night, sleep. was what it should be. I wonder, would humanity have so much of that obsessive, fiery hunger if we'd known the warmth of a true home fire? If we hadn't lost our relationship with the hearth, with the one whom the Greeks saw as the divinity who must be honored first, who was the very first divinity in the pantheon to be honored?

Who is offered to first? Not Zeus, not Poseidon, not Hades, but their older sister, Hestia. the goddess of the hearth. Hestia, the womb fire of home. Hestia is offered to first. At every meal she is offered to.

and her flame is tended so that it never goes out. And when the womb fire of home burns warm and bright, when there is good soup and a place to gather, and there are stories and songs aplenty, and all play their part in the tending of that fire, than some of those roving, obsessive hungers, those erratic fires. melt away in favor of the steadiness of the true hearth fire. For wasn't that what we were searching for all along? A good, steady fire.

a hearth and a home. So, tending the home fire is activism. The very first foundation of activism, one could say. create a good hearth for our children to congregate around is activism. Cooking, feeding, art, craft, pottery, smithwork, all of this firework. This is activism. Fire is the very first activist human endeavor. Because, unlike all the other elements, to bring fire requires that we do something.

active that we find a way to coax a spark from the how branch or the flint rock this is activism and everything we do after

All other activisms are built on the activism of fire tending. If we want our activism to endure, then it needs a hearth to return to. A good, stable cooking fire. to return to you. And all this stuff I'm saying about fire tending, I'm not talking about tending metaphorical or theoretical fires. I'm talking about spending real time tending. Actual fires. Fires in the forest, in circles of stone. Fires crackling beneath a night shining with stars.

Fires in the misty gray of the pre-dawn light. Because when we tend actual fires, we start to understand what it is to care for that sacred thing that can warm us. feed us, nourish us, can bring us so much illumination and growth, but can also burn us. And we come to know through practice what makes for good tinder. And what makes good fuel. And when to apply breath. And when to let it be just as it is. And when to coax and encourage.

and when to sit and wait for things to burn of their own volition. When to do in this life, and when to allow. Feel any friction there? Ever felt any friction around when to let things be and when to act? Every step of the way, fire tending hones our relationship with friction. For those who have made fire the old way, know that much depends on the ability to apply steady, repetitive friction over time. There's a rhythm, a heartbeat.

the practice and it's challenging and sometimes we want to stop and if that persistence wavers for just a moment then the heat subsides or if we get swallowed up in the friction and it builds in us as the heat of frustration, then our actions become erratic and the heat dissipates too. But when we find that steady rhythmicity with...

just the right balance of effort and openness to grace. The heat builds just as it builds in ritual, just as it builds in our artistic practice. It builds from cultivating.

a rhythm over and over and over again. And then how do we respond as the heat starts to build? The practice isn't about how we are in some kind of frictionless fantasy space. Like I'm fine by myself on top of the mountain alone. The practice is about how we are with friction. Throw in some other people. That's friction. Throw in relatives. Throw in grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins and friends. That's friction. Throw in kids. Yeah.

Now things are really starting to cook. Overdue bills, screaming kids, car trouble. How am I in the friction? Throw in a couple of poorly timed stomach bugs or fevers that the kids picked up from preschool or kindergarten. A few vomit-stained sheets to go with the bills and the relatives in the car, and oh, now there's friction. Now there's friction.

Here we are, beloveds, in the friction. You and I and all of us in the friction. Here we are, seeing things this way and that way in a world of views that aren't our own. In the great cooking pot, the cosmic saucepan as it's been called. Here we are in the friction. How are we doing? How are we doing in the friction? This is fire tending. Somatic fire tending. Familial fire tending. There's a repetitive friction required to generate the spark that brings fire.

framework necessary for our creative work for our ritual practice and if we find through practice that the heat builds it accumulates and builds on itself And there arrives, through sweat and effort and just the right amount of grace, that sacred moment of birth ignition. There arrives the presence of a tiny glowing element.

in some fire-making traditions is literally called a child or a baby, then the sum total of our attention must go to how to care for that ember. How do you care for that ember? Child, in this world of unpredictable winds, how do you keep it alight in the driving rain? How do you keep it going when the wood is damp? And that's when you need the right

Tinder. The practice isn't all about generating sparks. It's about having a nest in which that spark can live. Ever put a bunch of effort and sweat and friction into something? Like a creative project, maybe? But you didn't put a lot of thought into the nest in which it would live and grow? after that initial spark of generation. Any artists out there know what I'm talking about? For me, for a good chunk of my life, I thought that being creative was all about generating.

So I sparked ember after ember after ember with no attention to the nest in which those embers would live and grow. And I exhausted myself. until I found I couldn't just force creativity out there over and over again, and expect it to grow with no attention to the container in which it would grow. These ideas... Seeds, these infant ember, creative, world-changing activist endeavors, need a nest, a tinder bundle. And what are the ingredients of a good tinder bundle?

In that bundle, an ember needs breathing space in which to grow. And it also needs containment. It needs framework. Go figure. Hold that newborn ember too tightly in our hands, and it won't have space to express and grow. Provide no boundary at all, and it will be out there exposed. All alone amid the elements with no supporting structure around it. And so it will flame out quick. Feel what I mean? Familial communal fire tending.

Individual somatic fire tending. Artistic fire tending. There are fires within us. What the Ayurvedic texts call our individual agnis. our digestive fires, our emotional fires, our deeper hungers. There are fires that need tending. The flame of our appetites needs tending. That which longs within us, which burns within us, needs tending. Tempering in order to shine over time. In order to not have it flame out quick or grow too damp and dull.

This world will try to dampen us. Just as it will seek to amplify our hungers, so will it encourage us towards hyper-consumption, towards burnout. Our work is to temper. the fire and as we temper those fires through breath and movement through repetitive ritual through time at the wheel or the loom or the forge Time in the studio. Time in the circle of ideation and discussion. Time in the communal space. Time in the ritual space. Time in the family. Time tending the hearth.

Then we start to find alchemy. Then we start to find gold. Gold, the promise of fire. There in the raw crucible of our lives, the cauldron into which we've thrown a thousand simmering ingredients. an incalculable recipe of ancestral gene expressions and familial traumas and environmental influences and what we ate for breakfast at age five and all the factoids they filled us up with at school.

and all those awkward adolescent longings and all those friends we've forgotten and friends we still have, that web of relationship both strong and precarious, we take all that into the cauldron of this life. and set a fire beneath it and cook it and stir it and breathe upon it. Cook it until it starts to steam and it starts to boil and bubble and it starts to churn.

And the fire tended with breath and attention and song and story, and offerings of fruit and flowers and grain. The fire begins to hum at last. And the coal bed changes from dull patchy red to bright sadhu orange. And then hotter still, white hot alchemic salamander fire. Fire comes into its full expression through tending, and in that tending we alchemize erratic hungers and undefined longings, and what started as appetites that threatened to consume us now become visions to guide us.

What started as appetites that threatened to consume us now become visions to guide us. Now, in the fire, the erratic, wavering flame of discursive thought, the fire of impulse, has found room. to express into its very nature its very nature as gold the light of the cosmos there's gold at the heart of the cosmos there's gold gold and the late afternoon sun shining through the pine needles. Gold. Gold as that cosmic fire kindles the white caps of the waves. Gold. The mystic burns golden.

incandescent with visions of Tejas illumination, fed and refined in the luminous fire, and sees there in the dancing flame dreams, omens, signs, the pulse of the divine. vine itself. I saw a blazing fire, says Hildegard of Bingen, incomprehensible, inextinguishable, and wholly alive, burning in a great peacefulness. and serenity. There at the heart of reality, a blazing coal bed burns peacefully. Reality itself simmers longingly.

The goddess herself shines, so many texts say, shines like a billion suns. Angela of Foligno said, quote, the divine is fire. and he takes me into himself, and I am one with his burning love, with his transforming flame. Love, the divine fire, burns bright, burns eternal, ready to be sung to. ready to be received into this skull as blazing trance nectars, ready to pervade the horizons of consciousness with its alchemic bliss. Love this great fire.

persistently blazing from the spark of the very first longing to the doom fires of universal dissolution. And if there is another universe yet to come, surely, oh surely,

It will spark forth from love, from longing. Surely it too will be made of fire. Which is probably why Pablo Neruda said, of all the fires... Love is the only inexhaustible one. First off, I want to say a big thank you to Travis Puntarelli, whose vocal stylings are on display, burning and simmering throughout this luminous episode. And you can find out more about Travis's work. He has a Patreon page, patreon.com slash balladeer. It's B-A-L-L-A-D-I-R.

Special thanks to Victor Sakshin for chanting the Vedic hymns to Agni for this episode. And you can find more of Victor's work on Instagram. It's Victor Sakshin, S-A-K-S-H-I-N. As always, this episode contains reference to many books, films, songs, etc. These include the book Fire, Nature, and Culture by Stephen J. Pine and Daniel Allen, Myths of the Origin of Fire by James George Frazier,

The essay, What the Hand Dare Sees the Fire by Matthew Stillman. Find more of Matthew's writings at stillmansays.substack.com. The text, Liber Divinorum Operum by Hildegard of Bingen. The Book Mingled Waters by Piersia Khan, One Hundred Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, Sixteen Hymns to the Mystic Fire by Sri Aurobindo, The Burnout Society by Byung-chul Han, Shiva, Wild God of Power and Ecstasy by Wolf Dieter Stoll. The book Taptamarg by Walter Kaber.

A whole hotbed of Indian texts including the Rigveda, the Lalita Sahasranama, the Kalika Purana, the Shiva Sutras, the Kali Sahasranama, the Katupanishad, the Agni Purana, the Atarva Veda, the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, the Yajna Valkya, and even with all those, I still didn't have time to tell my favorite Agni story of all, so hopefully that'll find its way into a future episode.

the book Who Am I by Ramana Maharshi, Pixar's 2015 film Inside Out, the astrology podcast with Chris Brennan, the book The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, Myths and Legends of Southern Africa by Penny Miller Myths and Legends of the Pacific Northwest by Katherine B. Judson La leyenda del tlacuache que trajo el fuego a la humanidad An article in México Desconocido, Rolling Thunder and the Bombing of North Vietnam by Mark Claude Felter in the Journal of Military History.

The Bombing of Cambodia by Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen writing for Yale University Genocide Studies. The music of Rage Against the Customer Service Representative. I mean, Rage Against the Toaster Oven. Melchizedek and the Mystery of Fire by Manly P. Hall, the book Inflamed by Rupa Maria and Raj Patel, Pele, a History by H. Arlo Nimmo, the NOAA's 2022 Global Climate Report,

the song Hey Hey My My Into the Black by Neil Young, The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien, and of course the song For Those About to Rock. by ACDC.