CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.
SACRED FIRE.
HE
appearance of God to mortals seems always to have been in brightness and great
glory, whether He was angry and in displeasure, or benign and kind. These appearances
are often mentioned in Scripture. When God appeared on Mount Sinai, it is said,
“The Lord descended upon it in Fire” (Exodus xix. 18). And when
Moses repeats the history of this to the children of Israel, he says, “The
Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the Fire” (Deuteronomy iv. 12).
So it was when the Angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out
of the midst of the bush:”The bush burned with Fire, and the bush was
not consumed” (Exodus iii. 3). The appearances of the Angel of God’s
presence, or that Divine Person who represented God, were always in brightness;
or, in other words, the Shechinah was always surrounded with glory. This seems
to have given occasion to those of old to imagine fire to be what God dwelt
in. “Ipse” (Darius) “solem Mithren, sacrumque et æternum
invocans IGNEM, ut illis dignam vetere gloris majoremque monumentis fortitudinem
inspirarent.”—Q. Curtius, l. iv. c. 13.
Whether it was that any fire proceeded from God, and burnt up the oblation in the first sacrifices, as some ingenious men have have conjectured, we know not. It is certain that in after ages this was the case. We are sure that a fire from the Lord consumed upon the altar the burnt-offering of Aaron (Leviticus ix. 24); and so it did the sacrifice of Gideon, “both the flesh and the unleavened cakes” (Judges vi. 21). When David “built an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt -offerings and peace-offerings, and called upon the Lord, He answered him from heaven by Fire, upon the altar of burnt-offerings” (1 Chronicles xxi. 26). The same thing happened at the dedication of Solomon’s temple: “The Fire came down from heaven, and consumed the burnt-offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the house” (2 Chronicles vii. i). And much about a hundred years afterwards, when Elijah made that extraordinary sacrifice in proof that Baal was no god, “The Fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench” (1 Kings xviii. 38). And if we go back long before the times of Moses, as early as Abraham’s days, we meet with an instance of the same sort: “It came to pass that when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp, that passed between these pieces” (Genesis xv. 17).
The first appearances of God, then, being in glory—or, which is the same thing, in light or fire—and He showing His acceptance of sacrifices in so many instances by consuming them with fire, hence it was that the Eastern people, and particularly the Persians, fell into the worship of fire itself, or rather they conceived fire to be the symbol of God’s presence, and they worshipped God in, or by, fire. From the Assyrians, or Chaldeans, or Persians, this worship was propagated southward among the Egyptians, and westward among the Greeks; and by them it was brought into Italy. The Greeks were wont to meet together to worship in their Prytamia, and there they consulted for the public good; and there was a constant fire kept upon the altar, which was dignified by the name of Vesta by some. The fire itself was properly Vesta; and so Ovid: “Nec te aliud Vestam, quam vivam intelligere flammam.”
The Prytaneia were the atria of the temples, wherein a fire was kept that was never suffered to go out. On the change in architectural forms from the pyramidal (or the horizontal) to the obeliscar (or the upright, or vertical), the flames were transferred from the altars, or cubes, to the summits of the typical uprights, or towers; or to the tops of the candles, such as we see them used now in Catholic worship, and which are called “tapers,” from their tapering or pyramidal form, and which, wherever they are seen or raised, are supposed always to indicate the divine presence or influence. This, through the symbolism that there is in the living light, which is the last exalted show of fluent or of inflamed brilliant matter, passing off beyond into the unknown and unseen world of celestial light (or occult fire), to which all the forms of things tend, and in which even idea itself passes from recognition as meaning, and evolves —spiring up, as all flame does, to escape and to wing away. Vesta, or the fire, was worshipped in circular temples, which were the images, or the miniatures, of the “temple” of the world, with its dome, or cope, of stars. It was in the atria of the temples, and in the presence of and before the above-mentioned lights, that the forms of ceremonial worship were always observed. It is certain that Vesta was worshipped at Troy; and Æneas brought her into Italy : “manibus vittas, Vestamque potentem, Æternumque adytis effert penetralibus Ignem.” Æneid, ii. 296.
Numa settled an order of Virgin Priestesses, whose business and care it was constantly to maintain the holy fire. And long before Numa’s days, we find it not only customary, but honourable, among the Albans to appoint the best-born virgins to be priestesses of Vesta, and to keep up the constant, unextinguished fire. When Virgil speaks (Æneid, iv. 200) of Iarbas, in Africa, as building a hundred temples and a hundred altars, he says “vigilemque sacraverat Ignem, Excubias Divûm seternas,”—
that he had “consecrated a fire that never went out.” And he calls these temples and these lights, or this fire, the “perpetual watches” or “watch-lights,” or proof of the presence, of the gods. By which expressions he means, that places and things were constantly protected, and solemnised where such lights burned, and that the celestials, or angel-defenders, “camped,” as it were, and were sure to be met with thickly, where these flames upon the altars, and these torches or lights about the temples, invited them and were studiously and incessantly maintained.
Thus the custom seems to have been general from the earliest antiquity to maintain a constant fire, as conceiving the gods present there. And this was not only the opinion of the inhabitants in Judæa, but it extended all over Persia, Greece, Italy, Egypt, and most other nations of the world. Porphyry imagined that the reason why the most ancient mortals kept up a constant, ever-burning fire in honour of the immortal Gods, was because Fire was most like the Gods. He says that the ancients kept an unextinguished fire in their temples to the Gods because it was most like them. Fire was not like the Gods, but it was what they appeared in to mortals. And so the true God always appeared in brightness and glory; yet no one would say that brightness was most like the true God, but was most like the Shechinah, in which God appeared. And hence the custom arose of keeping up an unextinguished fire in the ancient temples.
Vesta is properly an Oriental word, derived from the Hebrew ca, As—“Fire.” Thence the word Astarte, in the Phoenician dialect. The signification of the term is the same as the pàr ¥sbestoj, the ignis æternus, the perpetual fire itself. They that worshipped either Vesta or Vulcan, or the masterpower of nature which is known under those names, were properly Fire-worshippers.
God, then, being wont to appear in Fire, and being conceived to dwell in Fire, the notion spread universally, and was universally admitted. First, then, it was not at all out of the way to think of engaging in friendship with God by the same means as they contracted friendship with one another. And since they to whom God appeared saw Him appear in Fire, and they acquainted others with such His appearances, He was conceived to dwell in Fire. By degrees, therefore, the world came to be over-curious in the fire that was constantly to be kept up, and in things to be sacrificed; and they proceeded from one step to another, till at length they filled up the measure of their aberration, which was in reality instigated by their zeal, and by their intense desire to mitigate the displeasure of their divinities —for religion was much more intense as a feeling in early days—by passing into dreadful ceremonies in regard to this fire, which they reverenced as the last possible physical form of divinity, not only in its grandeur and power, but also in its purity. It arose from this view that human sacrifices came to be offered to the deities in many parts of the world, particularly in Phoenicia, and in the colonies derived from thence into Africa and other places. In the intensity of their minds, children were sacrificed by their parents, as being the best and dearest oblation that could be made, and the strongest arguments that nothing ought to be withheld from God. This was expiation for that sad result, the consequence of the original curse, issuing from the fatal curiosity concerning the bitter fruit of that forbidden “Tree,” “whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden,” according to Milton. That peculiar natural sense of shame in all its forms lesser and larger, and with all the references inseparably allied to propagation in all its multitudinous cunning (so to speak), wherever the condemned material, tissues reach, puzzled the thoughtful ancients as to its meaning. This they considered the convicted “Adversary,” or Lucifer, “Lord of Light”—that is, material light— “Eldest Son of the Morning.” Morning, indeed! dawning with its light from behind that forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What is this shame, urged the philosophers, this reddening, however good and beautiful, and especially the ornament of the young and inexperienced and of children, who are newest from the real, glowing countenance of Deity, with the bloom of the first angelic world scarcely yet fading from off their cherub faces, gradually darkening and hardening in the degradation and iniquity of being here as presences in this world, although the most glorious amidst the forms of flesh? What is this shame, which is the characteristic singly of human creatures? All other creatures are sinless in this respect, and know not the feeling of that—correctly looked at—strange thing which men call “shame,” something which is not right that the sun even should see, and therefore stirring the blood, and reddening the face, and confusing the speech, and causing man to hang down his head, and to hide himself, as if guilty of something: even as our guilty first parents, having lost the unconsciousness of their childlike, innocent first state—that of sinless virginity—hid themselves and shunned their own light in the umbrage of Paradise, all at once convicted to the certainty that they must hide, because they were exposed, and that they had themselves broken that original intention regarding them.
“Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” That is, the innocent children should come up for salvation, who, though suffering under the mortal liability incurred by all flesh in that first sin (and incident in the first fall, which has empoisoned and cursed all nature), are yet free by the nature of their ungrown possibility, and from their unconsciousness of it. They know not the shame of the condition adult, and therefore they bear not the badge of men, and are not of this world really, but of another world. To recur for a moment to the theory of human sacrifices which once largely prevailed. Interwoven inseparably with the forms of architecture from the earliest times, proofs of which we see constantly in classical buildings particularly, and in the Italian modifications displayed in the cities of Europe, was the habit of exposing as talismans the members (and particularly the heads) of human sacrifices. This is observable in the innumerable masks (or heads full-faced) placed on the keystones of arches or portals. They are either deified mortals or demi-gods. Sometimes, but very rarely (because it is a sinister palladium), the head of Medusa is seen. Exposure of the heads of criminals on town-gates, over bridges, or over arches, follows the same idea, as ranging in the list of protecting, protesting, or appealing Palladia, which are supposed to possess the same objurgating or propitiating power as the wild, winged creatures— children of the air—affixed in penitential, magic brand or exposure on the doors of barns, or on the outside of rustic buildings. All this is ceremonial sacrifice, addressed to the harmful gods, and meant occultly and entreatingly for the eyes of the observant, but invisible, wandering angels, who move through the world—threading unseen the ways of men, and unwitted of by them, and most abundant and most active there where the mother of all of them is in the ascendant with her influences; or when Night is abroad, throned in her cope of stars—letters, from their first judiciary arrangement in the heavens, spelling out continually new astrological combinations. For Astrology was the mother, as she was the precursor, of Astronomy, and was once a power; into whatever mean roads the exercise of the art of her servants has strayed now, in unworthy and indign divination, and in the base proffer of supposed Gipsy arts—ministration becomes ridiculous (or made so), which was once mighty and sublime.
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