Fire: the Prometheus Myth

There was a medieval alchemist, named Paracelsus, who came to establish equality between Fire and
Life, claiming that both, in order to feed themselves, needed to consume other people's lives.

The ancient Egyptians, those who managed to create a civilization that still fascinates us millennia after it was engulfed by the quicksand of History, associated Fire with the idea of Life and Health.

Frazer, the learned author of ‘The Golden Branch’, was a true compiler of infinity of ancestral myths, which made Fire an indispensable element in all the Myths of Humanity.

For that great Romanian hermeneut, Mircea Eliade, the fact of crossing the fire, was a symbol of transcending the human condition.

In some places in Spain, such as the Soria town of San Pedro Manrique, coinciding with the summer solstice, the ancestral tradition of the passage of the fires is still preserved, without the fact that until today nobody has been able to explain clearly, why experienced pins go barefoot on the coals without suffering any damage.

Ambivalent, like Janus, the Roman god of the two faces, the legacy of Prometheus, continues to be a fascinating gift to Humanity.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.