The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (17 page)

Numerous benefits could be gained from a successful walking: success in
business, love, health, forgiveness of sins for oneself or for another,
and oneness with the living god. Death, disfigurement, or crippling
awaited the failures, and there were enough of these to attest the
seriousness of the venture.
When the end of the long period of asceticism approached, Hindus from
all over the island began to arrive. Fire-walking was far more than
just a spectacle to these people, Feinberg noted, although he detected a
"note of malevolent sadism" in the air. The affair was a concrete symbol
of intimate identification with Kataragama, who, within his domain --
a fourteen-mile radius from his temple -- was in absolute, if whimsical
and good-natured, control.
The families nearest the fire-pit held their places for days. Among the
ordinarily fastidious islanders, sanitation became a bit slack. At the
very last, the usual European dignitaries and bumptious tourists arrived
and tried to push their way to the ringside, but were resisted firmly
by the otherwise courteous Hindus.
Sensational preliminaries began in the afternoon when native women
tried to attract the attention of the priests, and probably everyone;
by parading up and down in from of the temple gates carrying in their
bare hands iron pots filled with burning coconut husks. After dark the
pots could be seen glowing quite red. One woman, carrying her redhot
pot on her head in the conventional Ceylonese fashion, removed it for
Feinberg's inspection, and "neither her hair nor her hands showed any
signs of scorching."
The crowd was feverishly tense when the great hardwood logs were ignited,
well before midnight. The logs filled a pit twenty feet long and six feet
wide. The spectators did not know exactly when the walkers would appear,
neither did the priests nor walkers -- for that could only be when they
were "ready," seized and changed by the god. The fire burned to a bed of
deep charcoal, raked smooth by attendants with long branches. At four
o'clock in the morning, when the final moment came, Feinberg found it
difficult to breathe within ten feet of the incandescent pit, neither
could he stand that close for any time.
The drums had built up to a great crescendo when the huge temple doors
swung open and the priests and initiates came streaming out, straight
into the pit of fire without pause. Eighty people, including ten women,
most of whom held hands, walked the fire that night. One small, slim
man in a white sarong strolled slowly and serenely through the fire,
stepping gently onto the earth at the far end. Another danced gaily
into the center of the pit, turned, did a wild jig for a few minutes,
then danced madly on across the coals and out.
Of the eighty people walking that night twelve failed. Some required
lengthy hospitalization and one man was burned to death. The devout
dismiss these accidents. Those people, Feinberg was told, simply lacked
faith or proper preparation. Feinberg then related the fate of a young
English missionary who was quite upset by the ceremony and vowed to walk
fie fire next time, to show Christian faith to be as firm as Hindu. He
did walk the fire, somehow, and spent the next six months in the hospital
where doctors barely managed to save his life.
These failures stand as a kind of macabre control group that make
credible the entire incredible business. Recently in our own country
the annual spring beach frolics of the college set have been turning up
cases of severe burns suffered by LSD addicts who think they can walk
fire. Apparently there are no shortcuts to union with the gods.
Another splendid account of fire-walking appeared in the
National
Geographic Magazine
for April, 1966. It was written by the Senior
Assistant Editor, Gilbert Grosvenor and his wife, Donna. Color photographs
made the story quite vivid. The Grosvenors were visiting Ceylon and
heard by chance of a fire-walking ceremony in a nearby village.
This ceremony was held in the private courtyard of one Mohotty, who,
as a young boy, had vowed to Kataragama to walk the fire yearly if his
father could be cleared of a murder charge. Sensational preliminaries
again led up to the annual walking. The dancers all knelt to have their
cheeks, arms, and chests rubbed with sacred ash. As they stared with
glazed, half-closed eyes, Mohotty forced steel skewers through each man's
cheeks. Not a drop of blood appeared, there were no indications of pain
or feeling, and when the skewers were later removed, no sign of a wound
could be detected.
Then Mohotty's own cheeks were pierced by attendants who next drove
needles into his arms from shoulder to wrist, sank little arrowheads
into his chest and stomach, lashed spiked wooden clogs securely to his
bare feet, and finally, with real effort, drove fearsome hooks into
Mohotty's lower back. The hooks had ropes attached and by this strange
method Mohotty pulled an enormous sledge, a kind of sedan chair, about
the courtyard, the several hooks pulling the flesh quite taut. Removing
the hooks left no signs of blood or wounds of any sort.
When Mr. Grosvenor asked Mohotty his "secret," the Hindu answered,
"Faith total faith in my gods."
The fire in the pit, which was of the standard twenty by six dimensions,
though shallow, smoldered until long after midnight while the chanting
dancers, gleaming with perspiration, circled the red-hot embers. One
man fainted, and was dragged away. At 4 a.m. Ed Lark, a member of the
Geographic team, measured the coals with an optical pyremeter from the
Ceylon Institute of Scientific and Industrial research. The pyremeter
registered 1328° Fahrenheit. The photographs show the onlookers quite
close to the coals, however, and there were no fatalities or even minor
failures; it appears that most of the dancers were yearly repeats, old
hands at the game, and that the fire was not the intense deep pit such
as that prepared by the priests of the temple itself.
The crowds grew still as the first young man danced across the carpet
of coals, twisting his body, shuffling his eet, digging into the fire.
Another followed, scooping up handfuls of embers and throwing them over
his shoulders. Nearly twenty people, men, women, boys, and girls, walked
the fire. Some walked it several times. Mohotty crossed four times twice
with his own young son on his shoulders.
Mohotty quite willingly allowed his feet to be examined and photographed
afterward. They showed no signs of any blisters or burns. The Grosvenors
got back to their room long after dawn, exhausted but unable to sleep.
They said they just could not digest the incredible sights they had
witnessed. "What we saw was real," they wrote, "as real as the faith upon
which these believers base their immunity from pain of steel or flame."
Dr. Arnold Krechmal, Fulbright Professor teaching in Greece, wrote an
article on Greek fire-walking, published in
Travel
Magazine. The
New
York Times
also gave an account from Ayia Heleni, where fire-walking
activities have been happily seized upon by the Greek National Tourist
Organization. Frowned upon by the church as a carry-over from pagan times,
the ceremonies are only practiced in the remote mountain villages where
the priests are sympathetic.
The ceremonies are held in honor of Saint Constantine and his mother,
Helen; and these two, in return, protect the dancers from all hurt.
Intensive preparations last for several days. Prayers, meditations,
constant sprinkling of holy water, drums, and so on, prepare the dancers
for seizure. They, too, must walt until "ready," which according to
accounts is a bit more dramatic -- even if their bonfires are less
extreme than their Asian counterparts. Seized, they shout, gesticulate,
roll their eyes, and sigh heavily as they move onto the coals. No drink
or drug is used, and doctors' examinations detect no signs of either
protection or injury.
A gentleman in California traveled the world studying fire-walking,
convinced that great cosmic secrets were hidden there. He set up his
own publishing house for the numerous books and tracts concerning these
mysteries, but I found my heart hard against his cult. I was interested
to read that in Indonesia stones are heated for days for a walking and
that wads of paper thrown into the pit will burst into flame before
touching. As with all the firewalkers, the long togas they wear are not
even scorched, unless the walker's faith snaps, whereupon the toga bursts
into flame. Admission to the priesthood hinged on a successful walking
over the stones, and attendants stood by with long wooden hooks to try
to rake failures off before cooked.
Enough for examples. By now the brass-tack realist may have abandoned me in
disgust. I recall being so pleased with the
Geographic
article since I knew
Grosvenor to be quite reputable, the recipient of many scientific honors
and so on, that I showed the article to a colleague who was particularly
scathing in his attitudes to superstitious nonsense. Indeed, he dismissed
the
Geographic
article as either a cheap trick to bolster circulation,
or indicative of how the best of us could be duped and led astray. I was
reminded of the farmer who, taken for his first zoo visit, saw a giraffe,
spat, and snorted that there was no such animal.
One of the tenets of science is of a basic uniform causality operating as
a unifying force throughout all the universe. Dr. Weaver speaks of this
as a kind of statistical necessity, but points out that this can never
be proved to
have
to apply to any particular specific. No individual
event
has
to follow the pattern, but among all events, the pattern is
the case. Jesus differentiated between the
broad way
, which leads to
destruction, and a
narrow way
, which few find, but which leads to life.
For centuries a certain locality in India chose a sacrificial victim for
each spring's planting. The victim was properly initiated by the priests,
anointed as a temporary god, enthroned in the temple with pomp, and then,
on the fatal day, with all the tribes in attendance, amid great praying
and commotion, two large eye-hooks, big enough to hang a side of beef
on, were run through the victim's back. Ropes, run through the eyes of
the big hooks, were tied to a tall pole carried as a boom on an ox-cart,
and, as propitiation to the fertility gods, the victim was swung out in
great arcs over the various fields being planted.
Some two thousand years ago a victim survived this ordeal, without
pain or injury. Perhaps he was intensely religious, seeing himself in a
Messianic light, rejoicing that the salvation of the crops rested with
him. When he was anointed and made a temporary god, perhaps he was seized
in ecstasy and became, in effect, that which was claimed. At any rate,
from that point on --
once it was known to be possible
-- the yearly
victim went unscathed. The position grew highly exalted, the subject
honored for the entire year, and elected by all the tribes. It is still
practiced today, in spite of government disapproval. Photographs in the
Scientific American
show the elation of the subject, who sheds no blood
and shows no signs of a wound, literally no puncture signs in the flesh
itself, when the huge hooks are removed.
Life moves by historical accident, and random incident. Under Manasseh
(697-643 B.C.), who followed Hezekiah as the ruler of the Hebrews,
Assyrian religious forms were instituted from the cult of Moloch, an
Ammonite deity closely associated with astral divination. Among these
cult-forms was the practice of compelling one's firstborn child to pass
through or into a furnace of fire. The practice had come from the orient,
was widespread, and had many variations down through the centuries.
The ordeal of judgment was one such variation. The accused was thrown into
a pit of fire. If he could survive, the gods were obviously with him, and
his innocence was established. (The European practice of freeing a suspect
if he could pick coins from the bottom of a pot of boiling oil had a roughly
similar sadistic origin.) Somewhere back in the dim past someone believed,
in that final gruesome moment, not only in his innocence, but that the gods
were with him. Doubtless carried into ecstatic trance, he then walked
the fire unscathed and elated. From that point on,
once the notion
that it could really be done
was implanted in experience, it became a
part of our reality-potential, and the practice grew.
Now here we get back to my first chapter's "clearing in the forest"
metaphor. God did not build such a possibility into the universe and sit
back waiting for man to have the fun of discovery. Neither in all the
ramifications of "nature" is such a cause-effect bypass hidden. Man's
discovery of the idea was the phenomenon's creation -- this is the
way, or a way, by which God
creates
things. The notion arises from
experience. Painted into a corner, caught in a cul-de-sac, out on that
final last-chance limb, life scrabbles around, searching for a way out. If
there is no logical way out, reason is impaled and must be abandoned.
Fire burns; without this as a fact there could not be the kind of reality
we have. Man sees fire not burning himself as a possibility through an
alliance with God that which is beyond one's control, an outer limit,
as Bruner called fate. Fire-walking is an
autistic
venture.
It would seem that fire-walking could never prove amenable to laboratory
testing, but at Surrey, England, in 1935-36, the English Society for
Psychical Research ran a series of tests on two Indian fakirs imported
expressly for the purpose. The tests were graded by physicians, chemists,
physicists, and psychologists of Oxford. The Indians walked the fire
under control conditions, under the skeptical and probing eyes of science
itself. The emotive-religious buildups reported by observers in Ceylon
and Greece were not reported here. The Indians had their 'metanoia' well
in hand. No chemicals were used, no preparations made, they repeated the
performances under a variety of conditions and over a period of several
weeks, on demand. Surface temperatures were between 450-500° Centigrade,
the interior temperatures 1400° C. There was no trickery or hallucination.