The friendly fire

Nothing is more appealing than watching a campfire in the open air on a dark night: it is difficult to tear your eyes away from the dazzling dance of the flames. Together with its incomparable usefulness, this fascination confirms why fire has always been considered a gift from the gods. And the fact is that its “discovery” was the most significant advance in human history.

Fire is at the origin of civilizations and mythologies all over the world. In the Indian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures, as well as in the tribes of Africa and New Zealand, this element was venerated and generally kept in temples. The Greek myth of Prometheus is the most known in the West: the titan stole the fire from the gods to give it to men, and Zeus punished him by tying him to a rock to be devoured every day and until the end of time by an eagle.

When man learned to domesticate and make fire his own -evidently, it already existed in nature in craters and natural fires caused by lightning-, the most significant advance in the evolution of humankind was achieved. The real discovery began when they decided to keep it close to their places of settlement: they had to keep it lit at all costs to stay warm in the cold season, to cook and preserve what they hunted, and to be able to defend themselves from animals. Thanks to it, hunting was not limited to daylight hours; they could also move to extend their territories and look for other types of food.

It is hard to imagine how at the beginning of time, men were able to produce this magic of heat and light by rubbing two stones or two dry pieces of wood together. Today it does not take us a second to light a match, a luminous invention of the English chemist John Walker in 1826.

This transforming force of matter is compared to uncontrollable anger, devouring passion, lust, and pain, and to the flame of the spirit and purification: everything is cleansed in its path. It is involved in almost all human industries (in fields such as metallurgy or agriculture). The so-called arts of fire use it as the main element, whether in ceramics, iron forging, the casting of bronze sculptures, in the enameling of glass pieces, mosaics, stained glass, blown glass, and goldsmithing.

This year, under extraordinary conditions and without the public present, a torch will burn again at the Olympic Games in Tokyo.  Hand to hand will have traveled through cities and landscapes as a symbol of the union of nations since the first held in modern times in Amsterdam in 1928 and thus commemorate the games of ancient Greece, where it was considered a bad omen that the flames were extinguished. Therefore the ancestral fire is still preserved in Olympia, Greece. This flame has traveled in Concord aircraft, gone into space, and climbed Mount Everest.

We will always remain grateful to Prometheus as the protector of Humanity, but let us stay calm: we know that Hercules, with his arrows, managed to free him from his torment sometime later.   

To conclude, a quote from the scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881-1955):

“The day will come when after harnessing space, winds, tides, and gravity, we will harness the energy of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.”