Minute Meditations on Combustive Transformations: Clues to the Ritual Agency of Fire and its Exegesis
Abstract
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A crucial means of improving the conditions of survival (such as nutrition, vision, and warmth), fire has remained a predominant engineering tool of the genus homo for at least 400.000 years. Seen from the vantage point of behavioural modernity, furthermore, fire also emerges as a perennial ‘tool of thought,’ not only as a focal point of ritual thought and action, but perhaps ultimately as one of the most suggestive clues to the human condition as such. To the same degree as fire is considered to be ‘tamed,’ created, recreated, transforming the environment and raw food supplies into something maneagable and digestible, etc., the ritual use (and abuse) of fire is no less associated with creation and transformation, albeit within a much more transient and ambiguous social space.
The paper attempts to show how such general considerations might bear on the understanding of a discrete ritual case: a short piece of hieratic poetry associated with the lineage of the poet Vasiṣṭha in the Rigveda (7.9), a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns from the 2nd millenium BC. This early specimen of religious poetry is selected in order to demonstrate the high degree of ingenuity and semiotic sophistication that has always already accompanied the ritual employment of fire, at least as far back in time as orally recorded poetry can bring us.