In Pyropolitics: When the World is Ablaze, Michael Marder breaks the silence that envelops the atavistic and igneous element by proposing an original and compelling reinterpretation of the centrality of fire in our political and philosophical life. No traces of fire in these philosophical visions, not even ashes … One can think, for example, of Thomas Hobbes, who saw in the symbolic contest between the land-dwelling Behemoth and the sea-dwelling Leviathan the embodiment of the secret engine of political history or of Martin Heidegger, who, in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” rediscovered and revaluated man’s chthonic dimension as strife between world and earth or of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who understood universal history as an encounter-clash between the solid element (the earth) and the liquid one (the sea). Perhaps due to their intrinsic accessibility, earth and water remained the ground of the philosophical speculation and of the political and intellectual equipment of modern man. Yet fire has remained “unthought” as a constitutive element in modern politics and philosophy. It was, we might also remember, in his theft of glowing flames that Prometheus gifted civilization to humanity. The first sacrifice at Olympia was offered not to the king of gods, Zeus, but to the hearth-fire.Īs Fustel de Coulange affirms, the belief in the power and sacredness of fire might be even older than this, traceable to a “distant and dim epoch when there were yet no Greeks, no Italians, no Hindus,” that it was “an ancient legacy, the first religion” and “known and practiced in the common cradle of their race.” We can still find a trace of this ancient conviction in the collection of Orphic Hymns: “Render us always prosperous, always happy, O fire thou who art eternal, beautiful, ever young thou who nourishes, thou who art rich, receive favorably these our offerings, and in return give us happiness and sweet health.” Fire, perhaps, represented the oldest instrument of mediation between visible and invisible realities, past and future, life and death. Only a few woods and special trees could be used to maintain the fire in its splendor and purity, and both Greeks and Romans periodically offered sacrifices to the spirits of fire to revive their ancestral power. The sacred flames, in fact, could only be extinguished when the entire family had perished. The master of the house was obliged to keep the fire alive day and night. ACCORDING TO Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, in the house of every Greek and Roman of antiquity was an altar on which a sacred fire burned.
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