The Fire-walk

A modern student is struck by the cool way in which the ancient poets, geographers, and commentators mention a startling circumstance, the Fire-walk.  The only hint of explanation is the statement that the drug or juice of herbs preserved the Hirpi from harm.  That theory may be kept in mind, and applied if it is found useful.  Virgil’s theory that the ministrants walk, pietate freti, corresponds to Mrs. Wesley’s belief, when, after praying, she ‘waded the flames’ to rescue her children from the burning parsonage at Epworth.  The hypothesis of Iamblichus, when he writes about the ecstatic or ‘possessed’ persons who cannot be injured by fire, is like that of modern spiritualists—­the ‘spirit’ or ‘daemon’ preserves them unharmed.

I intentionally omit cases which are vaguely analogous to that of the Hirpi.  In Icelandic sagas, in the Relations of the old Jesuit missionaries, in the Travels of Pallas and Gmelin, we hear of medicine-men and Berserks who take liberties with red-hot metal, live coals, and burning wood.  Thus in the Icelandic Flatey Book (vol. i. p. 425) we read about the fighting evangelist of Iceland, a story of Thangbrandr and the foreign Berserkir.  ’The Berserkir said:  “I can walk through the burning fire with my bare feet.”  Then a great fire was made, which Thangbrandr hallowed, and the Berserkir went into it without fear, and burned his feet’—­the Christian spell of Thangbrandr being stronger than the heathen spell of the Berserkir.  What the saga says is not evidence, and some of the other tales are merely traditional.  Others may be explained, perhaps, by conjuring.  The mediaeval ordeal by fire may also be left on one side.  In 1826 Lockhart published a translation of the Church Service for the Ordeal by Fire, a document given, he says, by Busching in Die Vorzeit for 1817.  The accused communicates before carrying the red-hot iron bar, or walking on the red-hot ploughshare.  The consecrated wafer is supposed to preserve him from injury, if he be guiltless.  He carries the iron for nine yards, after which his hands are sealed up in a linen cloth and examined at the end of three days.  ’If he be found clear of scorch or scar, glory to God.’  Lockhart calls the service ’one of the most extraordinary records of the craft, the audacity, and the weakness of mankind.’ {153}

The fraud is more likely to have lain in the pretended failure to find scorch or scar than in any method of substituting cold for hot iron, or of preventing the metal from injuring the subject of the ordeal.  The rite did not long satisfy the theologians and jurists of the Middle Ages.  It has been discussed by Lingard in his History of England, and by Dr. E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture.