Earlier this year, a close friend from my Orthodox days came to visit me in St. Louis. This friend also has a background in religious studies, but his particular program had not included much in the way of South or East Asian religion beyond courses in Zen Buddhism, and so a destination which he was intent on seeing was the Hindu Temple of St. Louis, which is one of our city’s more impressive religious landmarks (right up the road, too, from one of the more beautiful mosques in town). I had been once before and the protocol, as I understood it, was fairly relaxed: the temple is open most days of the week, for most of the daytime, and visitors are welcome to simply come, stop by, observe, pray, or whatever respect for sanctity and safety permits, a form of hospitality conditioned by Hinduism’s penchant for pluralism. Little did we know, though, that we had elected to go the week of Maha Khumbabishekam, a five day festival of temple renewal that happens but once every twelve years. Food, dances, educational audiences, and more surround the heart of the action, which is the cleanout of the Temple, the renovation of the sanctuaries, the repair or replacement of murtis (if damaged somehow), and, at last, the performance of yajna, sacrifices, in sacrificial fire pits while the Vedas and other sacred texts are chanted.
It was this last event that was most engrossing for us as observers (and, to be clear, we were merely observers; our own Christian bhakti, we both agreed, would not permit anything more, even if we approved at the level of jnana). Many people have seen or visited Hindu temples or attended Hindu festivals; relatively few Westerners see the primary form of religion outlined in the holiest Vedic texts, and some never encounter a religion with fire sacrifice as a living practice. At least at the level of religious literacy, this is a shame, not least since the major texts, traditions, and histories of the Abrahamic traditions closer to home in the West are unintelligible without some kind of grasp on the materiality and logic of sacrifice (though some, like Samaritans and Muslims, still have such sacrifices, namely the Pesach and the qurban on Eid al-Adha, respectively). More than literacy, there is something missing in our ability to understand a religion until we can encounter it with all of our senses. I have read a large number of Hindu texts since my time in college, and continue to interact with Hindu thinkers, like Dr. Anantanand Rambachan. But until one sees the colors and iconography and vestiture and sacred architecture, feels the heat of the sacrificial fires, smells the aromatic mosaic in the air, hears the tabla and other instrumentation, one does not, and cannot, really understand; texts alone will not give it to one anymore than they will a living sense of what it means to be a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, or anything else.
Fire is especially important in this sensory encounter, and it has been for Vedic religion and its direct successors in classical, medieval, and modern Hinduism for the better part of the last three millennia. Fire is the deva Agni (whose name in Sanskrit literally means “Fire”). Patron of the southeast (and therefore to be found in the southeastern corner of Hindu mandirs), and of the sacrificial hearth where all yajna is done, Agni is the second most important god after Indra in the Vedas, appearing in roughly a third of the hymns. Reflecting the unsystematic nature of this compilation, Agni’s origins and functions shift according to the hymn. Rgveda opens: “I pray to Agni, the household priest who is the god of the sacrifice, the one who chants and invokes and brings most treasure” (Rgveda 1.1.1);1 Agni is the one who “shines upon darkness” and is “king over sacrifices” (1.1.7-8). ““When we offer sacrifice to this god or that god, in the full line of order,” the priest chants, “it is to you alone that the oblation is offered” (1.26.6). In Katha Upanishad, the god of Death, Yama, explains the sacrificial fire that enables transmission to svargaloka to the young brahmin Nachiketas, after whom the fire is subsequently named and the ritual protocol for obtaining its boon is clarified (Katha 1.1.12-19).2 But then, as Nachiketas goes on to inquire, the real issue is what becomes of people at death, and what, therefore, is the true nature of the Self (atman); at worst, sacrificial fires and their boons, whether this worldly or otherworldly, are distractions and, at best, mere pedagogy for the attainment of “the changeless” (1.2.10; 1.3.2). From this perspective, Agni is better understood as a metaphor for brahman (2.1.8). “As the sun,” we are told, brahman “lives in the heavens, as air he lives in the atmosphere, as fire he lives on earth, as a guest he lives in the home” (2.2.2). “Just as a single fire,” Nachiketas explains to his father, “entering the world, assumes the likeness of form after form, so the one Self within all beings assumes the likeness of form after form, yet is beyond form” (2.2.9). “[T]his fire”—the sacrificial fire—does not shine of itself (2.2.15). “From fear of” brahman, “fire”—especially the sacrificial fire—“burns” (2.3.3). “The pure fragrance in earth,” says Krishna in the Bhagavadgita, “and the brilliance in fire am I (Bhagavadgita VII.8);3 “I am the ritual, I am the sacrifice, I am the oblation, I am the healing herb; I am the sacred mantra, I am indeed the clarified butter, I am the fire, and I am the offering” (IX.16). “Among the Vasus,” he says, “I am fire; and of lofty mountains I am Meru” (X.23). Seeing Krishna’s infinite body, Arjuna declares: “A mass of light shining everywhere, I see you, so difficult to perceive all at once, With the brilliance of the sun and blazing fires, which is immeasurable!” (XI.17). “Having no beginning, middle, or end, of unlimited prowess, Of unlimited arms, with the moon and sun as your eyes—I behold you, whose mouths are of blazing fire, Burning this entire universe with your own splendor” (XI.19). Beyond sacrificial fire and the fire of brahman, fire is also an essential and pluriform image to yoga and tantra. Exemplorum gratia: “The fire of yoga quickly consumes the entire cage [created by one’s] sins” (Isvaragita 11.2); “The person who has been cooked in the fire of yoga is alert and free from sorrow” (Yogabija 35); “Those who contract the goddess and kindle the fire by pressing the [root] support (adhara) [and] awaken Kundalini…delight in defective knowledge [and] for them the innate state is far off” (Siddhasiddhantapaddhati 6.86); “Day and night, contemplate the mystery of the fire of Brahman” (Gorakh, Sabdis 31); “[After] the gross and [other] elements have arisen in series, thebody composed of its seven constituents is slowly burnt by the fire of yoga” (Yogabija 51); etc.4
Siddharta Gautama, Śakyamuni Buddha, was subversive then when he opened the Addittapariyaya Sutta, the famous “Fire Sermon,” with Sabbam bhikkave ādittam: “Monks, everything is burning” (SN 35.28). That is to say, internal and external sensation, sensory consciousness (viññana), sensory contact (samphassa), and the sensuality of pleasure, pain, or neutrality (vedayita) are all inflamed by passion (rāggaginā), aversion (dosagginā), delusion (mohagginā), and the whole cycle of samsara. The goal, therefore, is to become dispassionate, so as to achieve liberation (mokśa) by the extinction (Pali: nibbana; Sanskrit: nirvana) of the inflamed reality. This basic assemblage of fundamental principles in the Buddha’s teaching recurs piecemeal elsewhere in the Pali Canon (SN 22.61; 136; 35.29; 235). Fire is a frequent but not exclusive punishment in the narakas, too, where dukkha is all the more pronounced, from which one might hope a passing bodhisattva would see fit to put out with cool water. But fire is not an entirely negative image in Buddhism, especially in Mahayana and Vajrayana varieties. In Lotus Sutra XXIII, for instance, the bodhisattva All Beings Delight in Seeing self-immolates but thereby illuminates the universe. One who has taken the bodhisattva vow and seeks to cultivate the “awakened consciousness,” or bodhicitta, often symbolized as fire in Mahayana texts, may pray among other things, when lighting a fire for any reason, the eleventh gatha of the Chinese Avatamsaka Sutra, “May all beings cause the fire of wisdom to blaze.” For Chan and Zen Buddhists, who proceed from the observation that samsara already is nirvana, and that Buddha Nature or enlightenment is already the fundamental nature of everything, the bodhisattva ideal does not consist so much in extinguishing the fire as living in the fires of conditioned reality for the sake of others. The changed character of the metaphor may reflect the more positive signification of fire in traditional Chinese religion, Taoism, indigenous Korean practices, and Shinto, where the kami of fire, Kagu-tsuchi, is one of the primary elemental gods. Not incidentally, homa, a Buddhist form of Vedic fire ceremony, is practiced in Tibet, China, and Japan, invoking Buddhist deities (or Buddhist forms of brahmanic gods) on the grounds that the Buddha himself was the original teacher of the Vedas in previous lives. In Tibetan iconography, the liminal space between samsara and the enlightened enclosure of the mandala is often marked by fire, whose purification from ignorance and defilement one must first receive before progressing. Yogic and tantric discourses about “inner fire” also feature in more esoteric forms of Buddhism, just as they do in Hindu arcana.
Iranian religion—closely related, scholars have recognized, to Vedic religion by shared Indo-European ancestors, languages, ritual practices, and beliefs—also centers fire in its cosmological imaginarium. Fire (ātar in Avestan, ādur in Pahlavi) is the son of Ahura Mazda, the supreme creator deity, and also identifiable with the Sun itself, whose flames are resident in every Zoroastrian fire temple. Fire is among those “pre-souls” sacrificed to for its “life-giving” and “invigorating” qualities (Yasht 13:85).5 The “tool” of creation “was something like a cinder of fire of pure light, which was fashioned from the Endless Light” (Pahlavi Rivayat 46:2). Fire provides likeness to God for the stars: “From his own selfness, from the existing light, Ohrmazd fashioned forth the form of his own creatures, in the form of fire, white, round, visible from afar” (Bundahishn 1:43). Fire’s indwelling is also suggested to be God’s own in creation: “he filled fire into each creation that he fashioned, like a housemaster who goes into the house and puts his clothes down neatly in the house” (3:10). “The soul,” other texts tell us, “which keeps the body alive, is like a fire enthroned in a fire temple” (Zādspram 29:3). “Everyday,” instructs The Book of the Advice of Zarathustra, “you should go to the house of Fires and recite the hymn to the Fire. For he who goes most frequently to the house of Fires and recites the hymn to the Fire, to him (the gods) give most wealth and righteousness (45). “Rise up before me now, O Lord (Fire)! Through humility (the earth) receive strength! By your most life-giving spirit, O All-knowing one, receive quickness by my good presentation, forceful violent power by the Order (of my ritual), creative power (?) by my good thought,” so pray the faithful to the Fire (Yasna 33:12). Iranian kings—Persians, Parthians, Sasanians all—frequently described their royal piety by their “establishment of fires” or “Victorious Fires,” sometimes (though not normally or always) at the expense of “Jews (yahud), Buddhists (shaman), Hindus (braman), Nazoreans (nāzarā) and Christians, Baptists (magdag), and Manichaeans (zandīg)” (Kerdir’s Inscription on the Ka’ba of Zardosht 11).
The periodic polemics of late antique and medieval Zoroastrians with Christians (who were most of the time a sufficiently tolerated and sometimes even benignly regarded minority in the Persian Empire) and Muslims (medieval conquerors of the region), and vice versa, might well suggest that the importance of fire to Indic and Iranian religion is missing from Abrahamic traditions, but such would be obviously false. Fire is clearly a natural theophany of YHWH in the Hebrew Bible, as well as an element in most of his more direct appearances throughout. It is probably some apparition of YHWH in Genesis 15:17, when a smoking fire pot passes between Abram’s sacrifices; fire rains from YHWH out of heaven (Gen 19:24; Exod 9:23-24); the malakh YHWH appears to Moses in a flame of fire in the bush on Sinai (Exod 3:2); YHWH travels before Israel in a pillar of fire (13:21-22; 14:24); he descends on Sinai in fire (19:18; 24:17); he indwells the Tabernacle in fire by night (40:38). Other divine beings are often described with fiery imagery in the Tanakh: as in, e.g., “he makes his ministers flames of fire” (Ps 104:4). Fire is in some ways a physical or sartorial synecdoche for divinity in biblical and related literature; tolerance for or possession by flames often signifies superhuman nature, status, and/or power. The liturgical cult of the remembered (and imagined) Tabernacle(s), as well as the First and Second Jerusalem Temples, consists largely in the preservation of sacrificial fire, offerings made to it, and the tending of the perennial fires of the menorah. In Early Judaism, particularly under Hellenic and Roman rule, Jews, like Greeks and Romans, observed an evening lamp lighting (Greek: lychnikos; Latin: lucernarium) as part of domestic religion, perhaps still distantly remembered by the rabbinic practice of lamp or candle lighting on erev Shabbat, as the last act of creation for the week before rest with God. Jesus, the apostles, and the earliest generations of his followers, as Early Jews themselves, shared this biblical inheritance and the orientation toward fire that it shaped. True: fire could be used as a metaphor for divine judgment on occasion in the Prophets—the fire of siege and city-sack and burnt corpses, mind, rather than strictly “hellfire”—and had for that and other reasons acquired infernal associations for some Early Jews, such as the author of the Book of the Watchers (especially 1 En. 22) and the Parables of Enoch. Jesus seems to have been one of them, invoking the image of the fires of Gehenna in his preaching as the threat of divine punishment in the swift-coming eschaton, especially as directed against the rich and the powerful. But the imagery of fire, light, and celestial bodies (thought by ancients to be fiery and phosphorous, for obvious reasons) also have a good deal of positive connotation in the New Testament, as for example at the Transfiguration (Matt 17:1-8; Mk 9:1-8; Lk 9:28-36) and in some of the Christophanies and angelophanies of the Johannine Apocalypse. The Early Christian vesperal service, constellated around the lamp lighting prayers of Early Jews, Greeks, and Romans, is as much a reception of that divine and hieratic fire as the Shabbat candles or the synagogue’s menorah (which also found its way into Eastern Christian liturgical furniture, as lampadas and candles did generally in the West). The divine fire, the holy fire, housed in Jerusalem’s Temple did not disappear; in the conflagration of that house it simply took flight to the holy places of Jewish and Christian exile.
Why all this attention to fire? It has been with us a long time as a human species: fire use was discovered originally by Homo erectus at least around one million years ago, meaning that the sacred pit actually precedes Homo sapiens. With fire, early humans were able to cook their food, including and especially the meat from animals they hunted, which caused it to yield more nutrition and fuel the evolution of our complex neurology and biocultures (including our relationship with symbiotic animals like Pleistocene wolves). Fire kept us warm through the Ice Age, and provided some of our most fundamental early experiences of community. Our cultural associations between fire, stars, and divinity, long preexisting our scientific knack for astronomy, also perhaps suggests that our early ancestors made close connections between what would have been the most profound nightly spectacle (the unimpeded night sky) with that which provided them with warmth, food, and relationship with one another. They surely would have intuited, long before they had discrete lexemes for the notion, that heat signifies life, while cold stillness bespeaks death. Could their fires also have served sacred purposes? Perhaps; but to say as much also implies that there was for them anything not charged with the energy of divinity, or else that they already inhabited a dualistic vision of reality which we have better reason to suspect they did not. Animism or panpsychism is the universal religion in large part because early humans seem to have had no concept of a mindless, soulless, meaningless reality: even the death and disease whose pollution they instinctively abhorred was a divine reality, so how much more the hearth of their universe?
We have come a long way, but not necessarily to a better place. For someone like me to have wood-burning fireplaces, an outdoor fire pit, and to be a staunch charcoal purist when I barbecue all bespeaks some degree of luxury in our culture: for countless generations such things would have been essential to survival in many places. We have the vestiges of a fire-dependent culture in our imaginations still: in a capitalist and consumerist context, Santa only gives coal to naughty children, where Ebenezer Scrooge might have gifted it as a show of generosity; bonfire songs and ghost stories are still popular pastimes, but they are now their own form of commodified, commercialized American kitsch. Many people need never see a fire: electricity more cleanly and efficiently powers their stoves, lights their homes, and can even heat their candle wax.
Those who do see fires do not always do so happily, either: the world is now a global sacrificial fire pit for the gods of industry, greed, and power. As the Buddha says, “everything is on fire,” but in a way he may not have predicted. What decades of climate science and public activism have warned is really true: our feral addiction to fossil fuels, our cultures of consumption and waste, and our general distaste for the common good have loaded our atmosphere with previously unimaginable levels of carbon dioxide and exponentially heightened the greenhouse effect with the result that the planet is now annually experiencing record-breaking heat each summer and a massive, devastating, abnormal number of wildfires. We are indeed the first generation in recorded or mythic history to be fully capable of destroying the world in fire, as Abrahamic and Zoroastrian eschatologies suggest (e.g., 2 Pet 3:10), and even of doing what God himself promises he will not by flooding the world again (Gen 9:11) with the water resultantly freed from the polar ice caps. We have refused to recognize fire’s divinity, thinking that like all our former gods it is now simply our tool, or even more trivially, our plaything; our disrespect for its power of life and ferocity has become its own punishment. If we will not acknowledge the god, we will be forced to, when the withering heat and heaping waves overwhelm us.
It remains possible for the time being to mitigate and, eventually, perhaps reverse the damage we have done through our defilement of fire’s sanctity, to the detriment of land and sea. The powerful heat waves being experienced around the world right now suggest that even our urgent estimates of a closing window are perhaps too generous. A restored sense of fire’s participated divinity is not sufficient to fix these problems, but as a change in cultural mindset it can certainly help make us a more elementally and ecologically consciously society. We have the prophets for the hard changes in policy and practice that we need; we simply lack the kings, or, in this case, the legislative and executive competence to come together around the pit we have made the world into and mollify the god that presently rages within it. Christians, especially, have to reckon with what it means to worship a God who is “an all-consuming fire” (Heb 12:29): whether the gentle, warm light of Paradise or the pallid, paining heat of Hades, and to observe that our relationship to fire in this world will be, like our relationship to that fire in that world, largely what we make of it. We have to take more seriously than we have our task of stewardship, our call to preserve and protect the balance of creation. Finding ways to bring down the heat of the world is now as much the priestly task of human beings as was once the Levitical chore of trimming the sacred wicks or the brahminical duty to chant the mantras into Agni’s beneficent face. It is by fire that the earthly transforms—whether into the heavenly or the hellish hangs on how careful our ritual practice is.
Here I make use of Deepak Sarma, ed., Hinduism: A Reader (London: Blackwell, 2008) for the translation. And I cannot resist a story about this text: it was my college, 300-level Hinduism textbook, which I sold for gas money and regretted being without for many years. One day in the past year I happened to be perusing the shelves of a Half-Price Books here in town and saw to my surprise not only Sarma’s text but a sticker on the front identifying its origin: Missouri State University Bookstore and BearWear. I cannot be certain that this is indeed my Hinduism textbook come home to roost, but I certainly prefer to think so. The same thing happened with Thomas B. Coburn, Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahatmya and a Study of Its Interpretation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). And I would be remiss not to mention my first and still most influential guide in Hindu studies, Dr. Jack Llewellyn, whose own edited volume Defining Hinduism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2017), boasting on the cover the lovely image of a lotus flower in bloom that hung in the foyer of MSU’s Religious Studies Department throughout my tenure there.
The translation is Vernon Katz and Thomas Egenes, The Upanishads: A New Translation (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2015).
The translation is Graham M. Schweig, Bhagavad Gita: The Beloved Lord’s Secret Love Song, A New Translation (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010).
The translation is James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, trans. and eds., Roots of Yoga (New York: Penguin, 2017).
All translations of Zoroastrian texts are from Prods Oktor Skjaervo, trans. and ed., The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
The burning bush is such a beautiful theophanic image. The all-consuming fire that does not consume.
I first read the Upanishads in high school sometime around 1972. I retained almost none of what I read. I will have to take your words as what I should remember.
That being said, it all makes sense at the end. I agree that it will take more than prophets and priests to make the needed change, and growth into a better form of leadership.