Fire and The Fire Bringer (Continued)

3. Fire Gods and Fire Bringers

Fire gods and goddesses are deeply-rooted in all ancient cultures, and their manifestations are quite diverse, but they all seem to share the quality of being associated with a form of wisdom beyond human understanding. The Hindu god of fire, Agni, for example, is worshipped as terrestrial fire (flame), heavenly fire (lightning), and divine fire (the sun). He is also an elemental figure along with other personified deities such as Varuna, the embodiment of air, but since Agni is the one linked to the ritual fire sacrifices, he has an especially prominent place in ancient Vedic myth. Indeed, his name is the first word in the ancient Rig Veda, the seminal Vedic text.

Why is Agni so important? He is, of course, immortal, and he has power over both humans and gods. He is reborn each day (like the sun), invoked through the use of the fire drill, which causes flame by the friction of his parental element, wood. The sparks from Agni's fire are the origin of stars. But most importantly, Agni is the embodiment of transformation. It is through him that the gods communicate with humans, and it is through him that humans are able to metabolize the food they eat. Thus, on the one hand, it is Agni's burning of sacrificial meat that transforms it into a message — smoke rising to the gods in heaven; on the other hand, he is what allows humans to digest their food by "burning" calories (a process we know to be literally true).

So important is Agni that other religious traditions refer to him to establish their own power. When the Buddha emerged in the 6th Century B.C., one of his legendary deeds was to convert a group of 1,000 fire worshipping ascetics to his path; the Fire Sermon, delivered in Bodh-gaya, is one of the canonical texts of Buddhism. A well-known symbol appropriated by the Buddhists (and later by the Nazis) is the swastika, which some scholars say originally represented the fire drill associated with Agni. (The image of fire being produced from a stick is reminiscent of the Prometheus myth, in which he is said to have brought the fire in a hollow fennel stalk.)

The Hawaiian goddess of fire is Pele, also known as the "Goddess of a Thousand Names." She is associated with volcanoes, making her both a fundamentally creative and destructive figure. Volcanoes are literally the foundation for all terrestrial life in the Hawaiian Islands (one of Pele's names is "She Who Shapes the Sacred Land"), and yet their power can be terrifying and destructive to humans. Her dual nature also reveals itself in her physical appearance — she can be a beautiful young woman or an old hag, and when her anger is invoked, she becomes a flaming woman or the fire element itself. One of the legends regarding volcanoes under the protection of Pele is that bad fortune will follow anyone who removes so much as a rock from them. Each year, according to the National Park Service in Hawaii, thousands of tourists mail back volcanic rocks they had stolen from the parks, their initial skepticism apparently outweighed by Pele's curse.

Brigit, the Celtic goddess of fire, like Agni, is associated with three different and yet parallel aspects of fire: the hearth, the forge, and inspiration. She seems to combine the aspects of Hestia's hearth and Hephaestus' forge with Prometheus' connection to divine knowledge. Although she is a Pagan goddess, Brigit did not disappear when the Celts were converted to Christianity. She became St. Brigit, Jesus' foster mother.

In North America the story of the fire bringer often serves to explain the origins of other natural phenomena as well. According to the Choctaw, Grandmother Spider brought fire after the opossum, the buzzard, and the crow had failed. The story also explains why the opossum, once known for his bushy tail, has a bare one; why the buzzard, once proud of its beautiful neck feathers, has a red and blistered head; and why the crow, once pure white with the most beautiful singing voice is now black and has a hoarse caw for a call — all because they were each burned as they failed in their attempts to bring fire. Grandmother Spider also taught people how to weave and how to make pottery out of clay (which also links her indirectly to the theme of creation out of clay — see "Of Men and Mud" in the Reading Room of the Journal Archives).

In one variant of the Shasta story of how fire was stolen from the Fire Beings and brought to humans, the trickster, Coyote, disguises himself in an old blanket. He is found out by the Fire Beings when his blanket catches fire, and he runs away. The fire from the blanket is handed off from Coyote to Sparrow, to Cardinal, to Blue Jay, to Hawk, to Eagle, and then finally to Turtle, who takes the fire in his shell and submerges himself to escape the Fire Beings. Coyote chastises Turtle when he emerges from the river, telling him that water kills fire, but Turtle then produces the fire, which was safe in his shell, and he gives it to Wood so that it will be available to anyone who wants it. This story accounts for the origin of Turtle's tail as the remnant of the arrow the Fire Beings shot at him; it also explains (as in the Greek, Hindu, and Polynesian myths) why fire comes from wood.

In another variant, Coyote fools the Fire Beings who believe him merely to be a normal coyote. He steals the fire from the three Fire Beings while they are changing their watch over fire, and he hands the fire off to a series of small mammals until it eventually ends up with Frog. In this version of the story, Frog keeps the fire from the Fire Beings by giving it to Wood, from whom they do not know how to retrieve it. But Coyote, being the clever trickster that he is, knows a way to get fire back from Wood by rubbing two sticks together, and that is how humans got fire to keep them warm in winter.

In Polynesian mythology, it is the trickster figure Maui who brings fire to humans. According to W. D. Westervelt, the sun had sent a gift down to earth with his own son, Auahi-turoa, in the form of a falling comet. Auahi-turoa married Mahuika, a sister of the Dawn Maiden, and had five children with her — the Fire Children — whose names correspond to the five fingers of the hand. To get fire for humans, Maui appealed to Mahuika time and again until she relented and gave him one of the Fire Children by plucking it from her hand. Maui took it, but he destroyed it and came back to beg for another. He did this four times until Mahuika finally pulled off her last finger and hurled it at him in a fit of anger and it burst into flames that chased him. Maui called on Te Ihorangi, the Rain, to help him escape Fire, and a rainstorm came and doused the great flames. What remained of the fire escaped into the woods and found shelter in the kaikomako tree, whose wood the Maori use in their fire-making. So , for the Maori, the seed of fire is always in the sacred Fire Preserver, Hine-kaikomako.

The Maui story is particularly interesting because it includes elements of both the North American and the South Asian fire tales. On the one hand, Maui's role is nearly identical to that of Coyote in the Shasta and stories; but the detail of the Fire Children being the fingers of Mahuika recalls the origin of the Vedic fire god Agni, who "had ten mothers, who were the ten fingers of the hands." Westervelt also notes that the figure of Maui,

For bringing fire to humans, Maui must suffer the vengeance of the gods. In one of his battles, Maui fights with the ex Dawn Maid, the queen of the underworld, to gain eternal life for humans — but he loses. This recalls both the Promethian creation of humans and the fall from divine grace that the Biblical Adam and Eve suffer after they eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. They become like gods, but they also lose the possibility of eternal life when God expels them from paradise and posts a guardian with a sword of fire to keep them out.

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