When they asked me to talk about one of the four elements, I chose fire.
Why? Because although fire is fundamental to all our lives, of all the elements it is the one most likely to be forgotten about. We breathe air unceasingly, we use water every day, we constantly tread the earth, but our experience of fire runs the risk of diminishing more and more. Fire’s former functions have gradually been taken over by invisible forms of energy; we no longer associate the idea of light with that of a flame and our experience of fire is limited to gas (which we barely notice), and matches and lighters (but only for those who still smoke), and candle flames (but only for churchgoers).
For the privileged few, this leaves the hearth, and that is where I would like to begin. Back in the Seventies I bought a house in the country with a fine fireplace. For my children, then aged ten and twelve, the experience of fire—the burning logs, the flames—was an absolutely new phenomenon. And I noticed that when the fire was lit they were no longer interested in the television. The flames were more beautiful and more varied than any program, told countless stories, changed constantly, and did not follow set routines like TV shows. Among recent philosophers, the person who perhaps reflected most on the poetry, mythology, psychology, and psychoanalysis of fire was Gaston Bachelard. Given the focus of his research on the archetypal figures that have populated the human imagination since the dawn of time, he could hardly fail to come across fire.
The heat of fire evokes the heat of the sun, in its turn seen as a ball of fire. Fire is hypnotic and is therefore a prime subject and mainspring of the imagination. Fire is a reminder of the first universal prohibition (do not touch it), thus becoming the epiphany of the law. Fire is the first creature that, if it is to be born and grow, must devour the two pieces of wood that generated it. And this birth of fire has a strong sexual valence, because the seed of the flame issues from rubbing—and if we wish to take this psychoanalytic interpretation even further, we could recall Freud’s view that “the control of fire could be gained only after man had renounced the homosexually tinged pleasure of extinguishing it with urine.” Mastery of it meant foregoing our biological drives.
Fire serves as a metaphor for many drives, from burning rages to flames of amorous infatuation; fire is metaphorically present in every discourse on the passions, just as it is always metaphorically linked with life through the color it shares with blood. Fire as energy accomplishes the maceration of nutritional matter we call digestion, and like the feeding process it must be continuously fueled.
Fire is the immediate instrument of all transformation and is called for when something needs to be changed. To keep a fire from going out, it must be cared for like a newborn child. The contradictions of our life instantly emerge in fire: it is an element that gives life and also one that gives death, destruction, and suffering. It is a symbol of purity and purification but also produces filth, leaving ashes as its excrement.
Fire can be a light so dazzlingly bright that you cannot look at it directly, any more than you can look at the sun. But when properly tamed, as when it becomes candlelight, it regales us with a play of light and shade, nocturnal vigils in the course of which a solitary flame induces our fancy to wander, with its gleaming rays that fade away in the darkness, and at the same time the candle hints at a source of life and a sun that is dying. Fire is born from matter and is transformed into an ever lighter and airier substance, from the red or bluish flame at its base to the white flame at its tip, until it fades away in smoke. In this sense, fire is ascensional in nature, it reminds us of transcendence, and yet, perhaps because we have learned that it lives in the heart of the earth from where it spews out only when volcanos erupt, it is a symbol of infernal depths. It is life but it is also the experience of life’s quenching and constant fragility.
And, to sum things up with Gaston Bachelard, I would like to quote from his Psychoanalysis of Fire:
From the notched teeth of the chimney hook there hung the black cauldron. The three-legged cooking pot projected over the hot embers. Puffing up her cheeks to blow into the steel tube, my grandmother would rekindle the sleeping flames. Everything would be cooking at the same time: the potatoes for the pigs, the choice potatoes for the family. For me there would be a fresh egg cooking under the ashes. The intensity of a fire cannot be measured by the egg timer; the egg was done when a drop of water, often a drop of saliva, would evaporate on the shell. Recently I was very much surprised to read that Denis Papin used the same procedure as my grandmother in tending his cooking pot. Before getting my egg I was condemned to eat a soup of bread and butter boiled to a pulp.… But on days when I was on my good behavior, they would bring out the waffle iron. Rectangular in form, it would crush down the fire of thorns burning red as the spikes of sword lilies. And soon the gaufre or waffle would be pressed against my pinafore, warmer to the fingers than to the lips. Yes, then indeed I was eating fire, eating its gold, its odor and even its crackling while the burning gaufre was crunching under my teeth. And it is always like that, through a kind of extra pleasure—like dessert—that fire shows itself a friend of man.
Fire is therefore too many things and—as well as being a physical phenomenon—it becomes a symbol, and like all symbols it is ambiguous, polysemic, and evokes different meanings according to the situation. So I will not attempt a psychoanalysis of fire here, but a rough and ready semiotics, trying to seek out the various meanings it has acquired for all of us who warm ourselves with it and sometimes die from it.
Since our first experience of fire is indirect, through sunlight, and direct, through lightning bolts and uncontrollable blazes, fire clearly had to be associated with divinity from the beginning, and in all primitive religions we find some kind of fire cult, from the greeting extended to the rising sun to tending the sacred fire that must never go out in the penetralia of the temple.
In the Bible fire is always the epiphanic image of the divinity: Elijah was carried off on a chariot of fire, and the just will rejoice amid the splendor of fire (Judges 5:31: So perish all thine enemies, O Lord, but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in all his might; Daniel 12:3: And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever; Wisdom 3:7: In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks among the stubble). The Fathers of the Church refer to Christ as lampas, lucifer, lumen, lux, oriens, sol iustitiae, sol novus, and stella.
The first, philosophers thought of fire as a cosmic principle. According to Aristotle, Heraclitus thought that fire was the archè, the origin of all things, and in some fragments it seems that Heraclitus actually supported this idea. He is believed to have said that in all eras the universe is renewed through fire, that there is a reciprocal exchange of all things with fire and vice-versa, like goods for gold and gold for goods. According to Diogenes Laertius, he also claimed that all things are formed from fire and return to fire—that all things are, by condensation or rarefaction, mutations of fire (which on condensing becomes moisture, which on consolidating becomes earth, which in its turn liquefies into water, allowing the water to produce luminous evaporation that fuels new fire). But, alas, it is well known that Heraclitus was obscure by definition, and that the lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but shows things through signs. Many believe that the references to fire were merely metaphors to express the extreme mutability of all things. In other words, panta rhei, everything flows, and not only (I might add) can we never step in the same river twice, we can never be burned twice by the same flame.
Perhaps the finest identification of fire with the divine is found in the works of Plotinus. Fire is the manifestation of divinity precisely because, paradoxically, the One from which all things emanate and of which nothing can be said does not move or consume itself in the act of creation. And it is possible to conceive of this “First” only as if it were an irradiation that spreads out from itself, like the brilliant light that encircles the sun and irradiates it in an ever-changing way, while the sun remains exactly as it was, without consuming itself (Fifth Ennead, tractate 1, section 6).
And if things are born from an irradiation, nothing on earth can be more beautiful than the very image of divine irradiation: fire. The beauty of a color, which is a simple thing, springs from a form that conquers the darkness of matter and from the presence in the color of an incorporeal light, which is its formal reason. This is why fire is more beautiful in itself than any other body, because it has the intangibility of form: it is the lightest of all bodies, to the point that it is almost intangible. It always remains pure, because it does not hold within itself the other elements that make up matter, whereas all the other elements hold fire within themselves: they, in fact, can be warmed, whereas fire cannot be cooled. Thanks to its nature, only fire has colors and all other things receive form and color from it, and when they move away from the light of the fire they are no longer beautiful.
The works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (who lived from the fifth to the sixth century), which influenced all of medieval aesthetics, are Neo-Platonic in nature. This can be seen from the Celestial Hierarchy (XV):
I think, then, the similitude of fire denotes the likeness of the Heavenly Minds to God in the highest degree; for the holy theologians frequently describe the superessential and formless essence by fire, as having many likenesses, if I may be permitted to say so, of the supremely Divine property, as in things visible. For the sensible fire is, so to speak, in everything, and passes through everything unmingled, and springs from all, and whilst all-luminous, is, as it were, hidden, unknown, in its essential nature, when there is no material lying near it upon which it may shew its proper energy. It is both uncontrollable and invisible, self-subduing all things.
Together with the concept of proportion, medieval ideas of beauty were dominated by that of claritas and light. Films and role-playing games encourage us to think of the Middle Ages as a succession of “dark” centuries, not only metaphorically but in terms of nocturnal colors and gloomy shadows. Nothing could be further from the truth. The people of the Middle Ages certainly lived in dark places, forests, castle halls, and cramped rooms feebly illuminated by firelight; but apart from the fact that they were folk who went to bed early and were more accustomed to the day rather than the night (something that the Romantics liked so much), they portrayed themselves in vivid colors.
In poetry this sense of brilliant color was ever present: grass is green, blood is red, milk is pure white, and, according to the poet Guinizelli, a beautiful woman has a “snow-white face tinged with carmine” (and, later, we find Petrarch’s “clear, fresh, sweet waters”).
Nor should we forget those visions of dazzling light in Dante’s Paradiso, whose finest portrayal we owe, oddly enough, to the nineteenth-century artist Doré, who tried (as best he could, but failed) to depict that refulgence, those swirls of flame, those flashes, those suns, the clarity that arises “as the horizon, at the rising sun, grows brighter,” those white roses, those rubicund flowers that shine out in the third part of Dante’s work, where the vision of God appears as an ecstasy of fire:
In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light
there appeared to me three circles
having three colors but the same extent,
and each one seemed reflected by the other
as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,
equally breathed forth by one and by the other.
The Middle Ages were dominated by a cosmology of light. In the ninth century, in John Scotus Eriugena’s Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy, it is said that:
This universal factory of the world is a very great lamp made up of many parts like many lights to reveal the pure species of intelligible things and to see them in the mind’s eye, filling the hearts of the wise faithful with divine grace and the aid of reason. This therefore is why the theologian calls God the Father of Lights, since all things come from Him, through which and in which He reveals himself and in the light of the lamp of his wisdom he unifies and makes them.
Between the twelfth and the thirteenth century, the cosmology of light proposed by Robert Grosseteste evolved into an image of the universe formed by a single flow of luminous energy, a source both of beauty and being, leading us to think of a kind of Big Bang. From this single light the astral spheres and the natural zones of the elements were gradually derived through rarefaction and condensation, and consequently the infinite shades of color and the volumes of things. Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio was later to say in his Commentary on the Sentences that light is the common nature found in every body, be it celestial or earthly, and is the substantial form of bodies, which, the more light they possess, the more truly and worthily they are a part of being.
But even though fire moves through the sky to reach us, it also erupts from the bowels of the Earth, sowing death and destruction, and this explains why fire has been associated with the infernal realms since earliest times.
In the Book of Job (41:1–27), from the mouth of Leviathan “go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.… His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.” In the Book of Revelation, when the seventh seal is broken, hail and fire come to devastate the earth, the bottomless pit opens, and smoke and locusts emerge from it; the four angels, released from the river Euphrates to which they were bound, lead countless armies whose soldiers wear breastplates of fire. And when the Lamb reappears and the supreme judge arrives on a white cloud, the sun burns up the survivors. And, after Armageddon, the Beast will be plunged together with the false prophet into a lake of fire and burning sulfur.
According to the Gospels, sinners are hurled into the fires of Gehenna (Matthew 13:40–42):
As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Oddly, there is less fire in Dante’s hell than one might think, because the poet does his utmost to come up with a range of diverse torments, but we can be content with heretics lying in fiery graves, men of violence plunged into a river of boiling blood, blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers pelted by fiery rain, simoniacs stuck head down in pits with their feet ablaze, and barrators submerged in boiling pitch.
Hellfire was certainly far more marked in Baroque texts, where descriptions of the torments of hell exceed the violence of Dante, also because they are unredeemed by artistic inspiration. As in this page from Saint Alphonsus Liguori (Apparecchio alla morte, 1758, XXVI):
The punishment that most torments the senses of the damned is hellfire.… Even in this world the pain of fire is the greatest of all; but there is a vast difference between our fire and the fire of hell, which according to Augustine makes ours seem as if painted.… The damned souls will be surrounded by fire, like logs in a furnace. They will find themselves with an abyss of fire below, an abyss above, and an abyss all around. If they touch, see or breathe; they will touch, see or breathe only fire. They will swim in fire as fish swim in water. But this fire will not merely be all around the damned, it will also penetrate their entrails whence it will torment them. Their bodies will become nothing but fire, so that their bowels will burn in their belly, their heart in their breast, their brain in their head, their blood in their veins, even the marrow in their bones: all damned souls will become a furnace of fire in themselves.
And Ercole Mattioli, in Pietà illustrata (1694), wrote:
In the opinion of the gravest of theologians, a great prodigy will be that a single fire will contain within itself the cold of ice, the sting of thorns and iron, the gall of asps, the venom of vipers, the cruelty of all wild beasts, the malevolence of all the elements and the stars.… A greater prodigy, however, et supra virtutem ignis, will be that such fire, even though a single kind, can make distinctions and hence torment most those who have sinned most; Tertullian called this fire sapiens ignis and Eusebius of Emesa named it ignis arbiter, because as it must match the greatness and diversity of the torments with the greatness and diversity of the sins … and almost as if it had reason and full knowledge to distinguish between one sinner and another, the fire will make the harshness of its rigors felt to a greater or lesser degree.
And this brings us to the revelation of the last secret of Fatima on the part of Sister Lucia, former shepherd girl:
The secret comprises three parts, of which I shall reveal two. The first was the vision of hell. Our Lady showed us a huge lake of fire, which seemed to be under the ground. Amid this fire, demons and souls in human form, blackish or bronze in color but transparent, fluttered amid the blaze where, borne up by flames that came from their own bodies together with clouds of smoke, they fell all around like the sparks that fall from great conflagrations, with neither weight nor balance, amid shrieks and groans of suffering and desperation that chilled our blood and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their horrid and revolting resemblance to terrifying unknown animals, but black and transparent.
Midway between heavenly fire and hellfire we find fire as an alchemical agent. Fire and the crucible seem to be essential to the alchemical process, the aim of which is to subject materia prima, or first matter, to a series of operations with a view to obtaining from it the philosopher’s stone, which can effect projection—that is to say, the transmutation of base metals into gold.
The manipulations of first matter involve three phases, characterized by the color that the matter gradually takes on: the black work, the white work, and the red work. The black work calls for cooking (and therefore the intervention of fire) and the decomposition of the matter; the white work is a process of sublimation or distillation; and the red work is the final stage (red is the color of the sun, which often stands for gold, or vice-versa). The essential instrument of manipulation is the hermetic furnace, the athanor, but other equipment used includes alembics, vessels, and mortars, all known by symbolic names such as the philosopher’s egg, maternal womb, bridal chamber, pelican, sphere, sepulchre, and so on. The basic substances are sulfur, mercury, and salt. But the procedures are never clear, because the language of alchemists is based on three principles:
At what point does fire come into the alchemical process? If we take alchemical fire to be analogous to the fire that governs digestion or gestation, it ought to come into play in the course of the black work—that is, when heat, acting on and against viscous, oily, radical, metallic humidity, produces nigredo. If we are to believe a text such as the Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique of Dom Pernety (1787), this is how it goes:
when heat acts on these materials, they turn first into powder and an oily, viscous water that rises vaporous to the top of the vessel and then falls back down to the base as dew or rain, where it becomes almost like a black, oily broth. That is why this process has been described as sublimation and volatilization, ascension and descension. When it has coagulated, the water becomes first like black pitch, which is why it has been called fetid, stinking earth, and also because it gives off the stench of mold, tomb, and sepulchre.
But the literature contains statements to the effect that the terms distillation, sublimation, calcination, or digestion and cooking, reverberation, dissolution, descension, and coagulation are none other than a single “Operation,” carried out in the same vessel—in other words, a cooking of the matter. So, Pernety concludes:
it is necessary to consider and hold this Operation to be one but expressed in different terms; and it will be understood that all the following expressions always mean the same thing: to distil in the alembic; to separate the soul from the body; to burn, calcinate; to unite the elements; to convert them; to turn one into the other; to corrupt; to fuse; to generate; to conceive; to bring into the world; to attain; to moisten; to wash with fire; to beat with the hammer; to blacken; to putrefy; to rubify; to dissolve; to sublimate; to crush; to reduce to powder; to pound in the mortar; to pulverize on marble—and many other similar expressions all mean merely to cook through the same regime, down to dark red. Care must be taken, therefore, not to remove the vessel and take it off the fire, for if the matter were to cool, all would be lost (Règles Générales, 202–206).
So what kind of fire are we talking about, given that different treatises speak variously of fire of Persia, fire of Egypt, fire of the Indies, elemental fire, natural fire, artificial fire, fire of ashes, fire of sand, fire of filings, fire of fusion, fire of flames, fire against nature, Algir fire, Azothic fire, celestial fire, corrosive fire, fire of matter, fire of lion, fire of putrefaction, dragon fire, manure fire, et cetera, et cetera?
Fire keeps the furnace hot at all times, from the beginning to the red work. But could not the term fire also be a metaphor for the red matter that appears during the alchemical process? Here, according to Pernety again, are some names for the red stone: red gum, red oil, ruby, vitriol, ashes of tartar, red body, fruit, red stone, red magnesium, starry stone, red salt, red sulfur, blood, poppy, red wine, red vitriol, cochineal, and, naturally, “fire, fire of nature” (Signes, 187–189).
Alchemists have always worked with fire and fire is the basis of alchemical practice, yet it is fire that constitutes one of the most impenetrable mysteries of alchemy. Since I have never produced gold, I am unable to provide an answer to this problem and so I will move on to another type of fire, another alchemy, the artistic kind, where fire becomes the instrument of a new genesis and the artist sets himself up as an imitator of the gods.
In Protagoras, Plato says:
Once upon a time, there were gods but no mortal creatures. And when the preordained time of their birth came, the gods molded them within the earth, combining earth and fire and all the compounds of earth and fire. When they were ready to lead the creatures into the light, they ordered Prometheus and Epimetheus to equip them and distribute abilities to each as was fitting. But Epimetheus begged Prometheus to let him make the allotment himself, saying, “When I’ve made the allotment, you can look it over.” Once he’d persuaded him, Epimetheus made the allotment. And in making the allotment, he gave strength without speed to some, but he decked the weaker ones out with speed. He gave weapons to some, but for the weaponless, he came up with some other capacity for their preservation. Those he’d made small, he gave wings or an underground home as an escape, while those he’d made large—that’s just how he kept them safe. He gave out everything else in the same way, ensuring a balance.… And when he had supplied them to avoid mutual destruction, he also came up with protection against the elements by covering them with thick hair and solid hides, which were up to the task of staving off winter cold and burning heat alike. And when each creature went to sleep, these same things would serve as its very own natural bedding. And under their feet, he gave some hooves and others firm, bloodless skin. Next, he provided different food for different creatures: for some, the grass of the earth, for others, the fruit of the trees, and for others still, roots. But there were others whom he gave the meat of other animals as food. These he made less fertile, while he made their prey very prolific to ensure the preservation of their kind.
As you know, Epimetheus wasn’t exactly the smartest guy around, so he didn’t realize that he had already used up all the powers on irrational creatures. He was left with the human race lacking proper arrangements and had no idea what he could do for them. So when Prometheus came to look over the allotment, he found a clueless Epimetheus and saw that the other animals were cared for and had everything, while human beings didn’t have clothes or shoes, shelter, or defense.… So Prometheus, getting nowhere with figuring out how to save humans, went and stole the technical knowledge from Hephaistos and Athena, along with fire—since you can’t get this knowledge or use it without fire—and he gave them as a gift to mankind.
The conquest of fire marked the birth of the arts, at least in the Greek sense of technical skills, and hence mankind’s dominion over nature. It is a pity that Plato had not read Lévi-Strauss and had not also said that with the introduction of fire came the cooking of food, but basically cooking is an art and so it was covered by the Platonic notion of techne.
Just how much fire has to do with the arts is explained very well by Benvenuto Cellini in his Life (1567), where he tells us how he cast his Perseus, covering it with a clay tunic and then using a slow fire to draw off the wax,
which escaped through many air-vents I had made because, the more of them you make, the better the molds will be filled. And once I had finished draining the wax, I made a furnace shaped like a funnel around my Perseus with bricks laid one atop the other in such a way as to leave many spaces so that the fire might breathe better: after that I began to stoke it assiduously with logs and kept it burning constantly for two days and two nights; then, after having drained all the wax, and on seeing that the said mold had been baked perfectly, I immediately began to dig a ditch in which to bury my mold, using all the fine techniques that this beautiful art commands.… And having straightened it perfectly so that it was hanging over the center of the ditch, I gradually lowered it to the bottom of the furnace.… When I saw it was perfectly stable and that the little tubes for venting the air were in place … I turned to my furnace, which I had filled with numerous blocks of copper and pieces of bronze and set them in accordance with the rules of the art, namely one on top of the other to allow the flames of the fire to pass through and make the metal heat up and liquefy quicker. Then I called out loudly for the fire to be lit. And what with the mass of pine logs full of the oily resin that the tree produces, and because my little furnace was so well made, things worked only too well, so well that … the workshop caught fire and we feared the roof might fall in upon us; on the other hand, the heavens sent down so much wind and rain from the side toward the kitchen garden that my furnace cooled down. So, after struggling with these adverse mishaps for several hours, battling fatigue so fiercely that even my strong constitution could no longer resist, I was seized by a sudden and unimaginably high fever, and so I was obliged to take to my bed.
And so, what with accidental fires and artificial fires, after much planning the statue took shape.
While fire is a divine element, at the same time by learning to make fire mankind mastered a power that until then had been reserved for the gods, and so even the fires men lit in the temples are the effect of an act of pride. Greek civilization immediately associated the conquest of fire with this connotation of pride and it is curious how all the celebrations of Prometheus, not only in Greek tragedy, but also in the art that came after it, do not dwell so much on the gift of fire but on the punishment that came in its wake.
When artists accept and recognize with pride and hubris that they are similar to the gods, and see the work of art as a substitute for divine creation, then with the advent of the decadent sensibility comparisons between the aesthetic experience and fire and between fire and epiphany begin to make headway.
The concept (if not the term) of epiphany arose with Walter Pater and his “Conclusion” to The Renaissance (1873). It is no accident that the famous conclusion begins with a quotation from Heraclitus. Reality is a sum of forces and elements that come into being and gradually decline, and only superficial experience makes them seem solid and fixed in an importunate presence: “But when reflection begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic.” We are, then, in a world of unstable, fleeting, incoherent impressions: custom is broken, everyday life is rendered vain, and of this, beyond this, there remain only single moments that may be grasped for an instant before they instantly fade away.
Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only.…
To maintain this ecstasy is success in life …
While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.
All decadent writers describe aesthetic and sensual ecstasy as something radiant. But perhaps the first to link aesthetic ecstasy to the idea of fire was Gabriel D’Annunzio, who we are not so banal as to connect solely with the tired old idea that flame is beautiful. The idea of aesthetic ecstasy as the experience of fire appears in D’Annunzio’s novel The Flame (1900). The main character, Stelio Effrena, sees the beauty of Venice in terms of fire:
Every instant, then, pulsed through things like an unbearable flash of light. From the crosses standing on top of cupolas swollen with prayer to the fragile salt crystals hanging beneath the bridges, all things shone in a supreme exultation of light. As the lookout on the battlement’s piercing cry warns of the gathering storm below, so, wreathed in flame, the golden angel on the highest tower finally proclaimed His coming. And He came. He came sitting on a cloud as on a chariot of fire, the hem of his purple raiment trailing behind him.
Inspired by The Flame, which he had read and loved, here is the greatest exponent of the epiphany, James Joyce: “By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself” (Stephen Hero, 1944). In Joyce this experience always appears as a fiery experience. The word “fire” appears in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) fifty-five times, “flame” and “flaming” thirty-five times, not to mention other associated terms such as “radiance” or “splendor.” In The Flame Foscarina listens to Stelio and feels “drawn to an atmosphere as fiery as a forge.” For Stephen Dedalus aesthetic ecstasy always appears as a blazing radiance, and is expressed through solar metaphors, and it is the same for Stelio Effrena. Let’s compare only two passages.
D’Annunzio, in The Flame:
The boat veered violently. A miracle caught it. The first rays of the sun pierced the flapping sail, struck the angels on the campaniles of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore, set alight the sphere of the Fortuna and crowned with lightning flashes the five domes of the Basilica.… Glory to the Miracle! A superhuman feeling of power and liberty swelled the young man’s heart, just as the wind swelled the sail that was transfigured for him. In the deep red splendor of the sail he stood as if in the deep red splendor of his own blood.
And Joyce, in the Portrait:
His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendor that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes, for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle.
We have seen that, for Heraclitus, the universe is regenerated in all ages through fire. The person who seems to have had greater familiarity with fire was Empedocles, who, perhaps to become a god or to convince his followers that he had become one, threw himself (according to some) into Etna. This final purification, this desire for annihilation in fire, has seduced the poets of all ages. We need only consider Hölderlin’s words in The Death of Empedocles (1798):
Have you not seen? They are recurring
The lovely times of my entire life again today
And something greater still is yet to come;
Then upward, son, upward to the very peak
Of ancient holy Etna, that is where we’ll go,
For gods have greater presence on the heights.
With my own eyes this very day I shall survey
The streams and islands and the sea.
And may the sunlight, hovering golden over all
These waters, deign to bless me in departure,
The splendid youthful light of day, which in
My youth I loved. Then all about us both
Eternal stars will scintillate in silence as
The glowing magma surges from volcanic depths
And tenderly the all-impelling spirit of the ether will
Arrive and touch us. Oh, then!
Between Heraclitus and Empedocles, however, we find another aspect of fire, seen not only as a creative element but also as one that destroys and regenerates at the same time. The Stoics talked of ekpyrosis as a universal conflagration (or fire and the end of the world) in which all things, since they derive from fire, return to it at the end of their cycle of evolution. In itself the notion of ekpyrosis by no means suggests that purification through fire can be attained by man’s design or efforts. But underlying many sacrifices based on fire there certainly is an idea according to which fire purifies and regenerates things by destroying them. Hence the sacrality of the stake.
Past centuries are full of burnings at the stake, and not only of medieval heretics but also of witches in the modern world, at least until the eighteenth century. And it is only D’Annunzio’s aestheticism that had Mila de Codro say that flames are beautiful. The fires that punished so many heretics were horrible, also because they followed other tortures, and it suffices to read the description (in the History of Fra Dolcino, Heresiarch, twelfth century) of Dolcino’s torture and execution, when along with his wife Margherita he was handed over to the secular authorities. While the city bells rang the tocsin, they were placed on a cart, surrounded by their torturers and followed by the militia, which made its way clear across the town while at every corner the flesh of the offenders was torn by red hot pincers. Margherita was burned first, in front of Dolcino, whose face remained completely impassive, just as he had not cried out when the pincers tore his limbs. Then the cart continued on its way, while the torturers thrust their irons into vats of burning feces. Dolcino was subjected to other tortures, and never made a sound, except when they cut off his nose, making him shrug a little, and when they tore off his manhood, for at that point he gave a long sigh, like a groan. His last words smacked of impenitence, and he warned them that he would arise again on the third day. Then he was burned and his ashes scattered to the winds.
For the inquisitors of all periods, race and religion, fire purifies not only the sins of humanity, but also those of books. There are many stories of book burnings, some out of neglect, others out of ignorance, but others again, like the Nazi bonfires, in an attempt to purify and eliminate all evidence of degenerate art.
For reasons of morality and for the sake of his sanity, Don Quixote’s zealous friends burned his collection of romances. The library in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-fé (1935) also burns in a manner reminiscent of Empedocles’s sacrifice (“when the flames finally reach him he laughs loudly, as he has never laughed in all his life”). Books condemned to disappear are also burned in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) while the library in the abbey in my own novel The Name of the Rose (1980) meets a similar fate, by chance, although the original cause was censorship.
In his Universal History of the Destruction of Books (2007), Fernando Báez asks himself why fire has been the dominant factor in the destruction of books. He answers:
Fire is salvation, and for that reason, almost all religions dedicate fires to their respective divinities. This power to conserve life is also a destructive power. When man destroys with fire, he plays God, master of the fire of life and death. And in this way he identifies with a purifying solar cult and with the great myth of destruction that almost always takes place through fire. The reason for using fire is obvious: it reduces the spirit of a work to matter.
Fire is a destroyer in every episode of war, from the fabled Greek Fire of the Byzantines (a military secret if ever there was one, and I would like to mention the fine novel dedicated to it: Luigi Malerba’s Il fuoco greco of 1990) to the chance discovery of gunpowder by the monk Berthold Schwarz, who died in a personal and punitive ekpyrosis. Fire is the punishment for those who play a double game in times of war and “Fire!” is the command given to all firing squads, as if invoking the origin of life in order to expedite its end. But perhaps the fire of war that has horrified humanity the most—I mean all of humanity, aware for the first time all over the world of what was going on in one part of it—was the explosion of the atomic bomb.
One of the pilots who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki wrote that “suddenly, the light of a thousand suns illuminated the cockpit. Even with my dark welder’s goggles, I winced and shut my eyes for a couple of seconds.” The Bhagavad-Gita says, “if the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.… I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” And this was the verse that came to Robert Oppenheimer’s mind after the explosion of the first atomic bomb.
And with this, we come close to the dramatic end of my speech and—in a more reasonable span of time, to the end of the human adventure on Earth or Earth’s adventure in the cosmos. Because never have three of the primordial elements been so threatened as they are today: the air killed by pollution and carbon dioxide, the water, which is contaminated on the one hand and getting scarcer and scarcer on the other. The only winner is fire, in the form of a heat that is parching the earth and upsetting the seasons, and which by melting the glaciers will invite the sea to invade it. All unawares, we are marching toward the first true ekpyrosis. While America and China reject the Kyoto Protocol, we are heading for death by fire. And it matters little to us if the universe will regenerate itself after our holocaust, because it will not be ours.
In his Fire Sermon, the Buddha warned:
All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire? The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire. And with what are these on fire? With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.
The ear is on fire; sounds are on fire … the nose is on fire; odors are on fire … the tongue is on fire; tastes are on fire … the mind is on fire; ideas are on fire … mind-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the mind are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the mind, that also is on fire.
Perceiving this, O priests, the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms, conceives an aversion for eye-consciousness, conceives an aversion for the impressions received by the eye; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, for that also he conceives an aversion. Conceives an aversion for the ear, conceives an aversion for sounds … conceives an aversion for the nose, conceives an aversion for odors … conceives an aversion for the tongue, conceives an aversion for tastes … conceives an aversion for the body, conceives an aversion for things tangible … conceives an aversion for the mind, conceives an aversion for ideas, conceives an aversion for mind-consciousness, conceives an aversion for the impressions received by the mind; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent.
But humankind has been unable (at least in part) to give up its attachment to its own smells, tastes, sounds, and tactile pleasures—and to making fire through friction. Perhaps we should have left its production to the gods, who would have given it to us only occasionally, in the form of lightning bolts.
[La Milanesiana, 2008]