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Armenian Mythology by Mardiros H. Ananikiam
CHAPTER VII
NATURE WORSHIP AND NATURE MYTHS
II. FIRE
THE worship of fire was possessed by Armenians as a venerable heirloom long before they came into contact with Zoroastrianism. It was so deeply rooted that the Christian authors do not hesitate to call the heathen Armenians ash-worshippers, a name which they apply also to the Persians with less truth. We have seen that the old word "Agni" was known to the Armenians in the name of Vahagn and that their ideas of the fire-god were closely akin to those of the Rgveda. Fire was, for them, the substance of the sun and of the lightning. Fire gave heat and also light. Like the sun, the light-giving fire had a " mother," most probably the water-born and water-fed stalk or tree out of which fire was obtained by friction or otherwise. 1 To this mother the fire returned when extinguished. Even today to put out a candle or a fire is not a simple matter, but requires some care and re spect. Fire must not be desecrated by the presence of a dead body, by human breath, by spitting into it, or burning in it such unclean things as hair and parings of the finger nail. An impure fire must be rejected and a purer one kindled in its place, usually from a flint. All this may be Zoroastrian but it is in perfect accord with the older native views.
The people swear by the hearth-fire just as also by the sun. Fire was and still is the most potent means of driving the evil spirits away. The Eastern Armenian who will bathe in the night scares away the malignant occupants of the lake or pool by casting a fire-brand into it, and the man who is harassed by an obstinate demon has no more powerful means of getting rid of him than to strike fire out of a flint. Through the sparks that the latter apparently contains, it has become, along with iron, 2 an important weapon against the powers of darkness. Not only evil spirits but also diseases, often ascribed to demoniac influences, can not endure the sight of fire, but must flee before this mighty deity. In Armenian there are two words for fire. One is hur3 and the other krak, probably derived, like the other Armenian word jragy "candle," "light," from the Persian cirag (also cirah, carag). Hur was more common in ancient Armenian, but we find also krak as far back as the Armenian literature reaches. While Vahagn is unmistakably a male deity, we find that the fire as a deity was female, like Hestia or Vesta. This was also true of the Scythian fire-god whom Herodotus calls Hestia. On the contrary the Vedic Agni and the Avestic Atar were masculine.
The worship of fire took among the Armenians a two-fold aspect. There was first the hearth-worship. This seems to have been closely associated with ancestor spirits, 4 which naturally flocked around the center and symbol of the home-life. It is the lips of this earthen and sunken fireplace which the young bride reverently kisses with the groom, as she enters her new home for the first time. And it is around it that they piously circle three times. A brand from this fire will be taken when any member of the family goes forth to found a new home. Abeghian, from whose excellent work on the popular beliefs of the Armenians we have culled some of this material, says that certain villages have also their communal hearth, that of the founder of the village, etc., which receives something like general reverence, and often, in cases of marriage and baptism, is a substitute for a church when there is none at hand. Ethnologists who hold that the development of the family is later than that of the community would naturally regard the communal fire as prior in order and impor tance.
A very marked remnant of hearth and ancestor worship is found in special ceremonies like cleaning the house thoroughly and burning candles and incense, which takes place everywhere on Saturdays.
The second aspect of fire-worship in Armenia is the public one. It is true that the Persian Atrushans (fire-temples or enclosures) found little favor in both heathen and Christian Armenia, and that fire, as such, does not seem to have attained a place in the rank of the main deities. Nevertheless, there was a public fire-worship, whether originally attached to a communal hearth or not. It went back sometimes to a Persian frobag or farnbag (Arm. hurbak) fire, and in fact we have several ref erences to a Persian or Persianized fire-altar in Bagavan, the town of the gods. 5 Moreover, there can be little doubt that Armenians joined the Persians in paying worship to the famous seven fire -springs of Baku in their old province of Phaitakaran. But usually the Armenian worship of the fire possessed a native character.
The following testimonies seem to describe some phases of this widely spread and deeply rooted national cult.
In the hagiography called the " Coming of the Rhipsimean Virgins " 6 wrongly ascribed to Moses of Chorene, we read that on the top of Mount Palat (?) there was a house of Ara- mazd and Astxik (Venus), and on a lower peak, to the south east, there was " a house of fire, of insatiable fire, the god of incessant combustion." At the foot of the mountain, moreover, there was a mighty spring. The place was called Buth. "They burnt the Sister Fire and the Brother Spring."
Elsewhere we read, in like manner: " Because they called the fire sister, and the spring brother, they did not throw the ashes away, but they wiped them with the tears of the brother." 7
Lazare of Pharpe, a writer of the fifth century, 8 speaking of an onslaught of the, Christian Armenians on the sacred fire, which the Persians were endeavoring to introduce into Armenia, says: "They took the fire and carried it into the water as into the bosom of her brother, according to the saying of the false teachers of the Persians." The latter part of his statement, however, is mistaken. So far as we know, the Persians did not cast the sacred fire into the water, but allowed the ashes to be heaped in the fire enclosure. When the floating island (sea-monster) upon which Keresaspa had unwittingly kindled a fire, sank and the fire fell into the water, this was accounted to him a great sin. The above was rather a purely Armenian rite. It would seem that it was a part of the Armenian worship of the Sister Fire to extinguish her in the bosom of her loving brother, the water, a rite which certainly hides some nature myth, like the relation of the lightning to the rain, or like the birth of the fire out of the stalk in the heavenly sea. Whatever the real meaning of this procedure was, the ashes of the sacred fire imparted to the water with which they were "wiped" healing virtue. Even now in Armenia, for example, in Agn and Diarbekir the sick are given this potent medicine to drink which consists of the flaky ashes of oak-fire mixed with water. W. Caland reports the same custom of the ancient Letts in his article on the Pre-Christian Death and Burial Rites of the Baltic People. 9 As the oak in the European world is the tree sacred to the god of the heavens and the storm, we may easily perceive what underlies the ancient custom.
But it is not clear whether the Armenians (like many Western nations) had several fire-festivals in the year. We have, however, the survival of an indubitable fire-festival which originally aimed at influencing the activity of the rain-god in the annual bonfire kindled everywhere by Armenians at Candlemas, or the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, on the 13th of February, in the courts of the churches. The fuel often consists of stalks, straw, and thistles, which are kindled from a candle of the altar. 10 The bonfire is usually repeated on the streets, in the house-yards, or on the flat roofs. The people divine the future crops through the direction of the flames and smoke. They leap over it (as a lustration?) and circle around it. Sometimes also they have music and a dance. The ashes are often carried to the fields to promote their fertility. It is perhaps not entirely without significance that this festival falls within the month of Mehekan (consecrated to Mihr), as the Armenian Mithra had distinctly become a fire-god. 11 Another fire-festival, rather locally observed, will be mentioned in the next chapter.
NOTES
1. Here it is worth while to notice how Kuhn in his exhaustive study of fire-myths, called Die Herabkunft des Feuersf Gutersloh 1886, summarizes his conclusion. He says (p. 35): "The myths which have just been compared show the same belief among the Indians, Greeks, and Italians in regard to the fact that the earthly fire has been brought to mankind as a heavenly spark in (the form of) the lightning by a semi-divine being who was originally (and) gener ally imagined as a winged being, as a bird. The people must have thought that the spark is produced in the clouds by twirling, just in the same manner as they saw the fire gotten out of the primeval instrument, through a circling friction."
2. Possibly the fear with which iron is supposed to inspire evil spirits is also due to the fact of its containing and producing sparks like the flint. A curious passage of the ist Book of Jalal ad-Dinar-Rumi's Mathnavi makes much of the fire which iron and stone contain, and which may not be extinguished by water.
3. Aspirated "p" became "h" in Armenian, as " pater," Armen. hayr. The Phrygian word for fire is said by Plato to have resembled the Greek irvp
4. In many places these ancestral spirits have become just spirits, undefined and general.
5. There were in Armenia at least three towns of the gods: Baga- yarij in Derzanes, Bagavan in Bagrevand, and Bagaron on the river Akhurean. See H. Hiibschmann, Die Altarmen. Ortsnamen, pp. 410-11.
6. Alishan, Hayaatum, p. 79.
7. "Story of the Picture of the Holy Virgin," in Moses of Chorene.
8. Lazare of Pharpe (5th cent.), p. 203.
9. ARW xvii. [1914] 479. Similar customs are reported also of the Belgians. See Frazer, GB 3 , part 7, Balder the Beautiful, London, i. 194 f.
10. Many of the German sacred fire-festivals were also taken under the patronage of the church and started from a candle (Kuhn, Die Herabkunft des Feuers 2 , p. 41 f.).
11. See Frazer, GB 3 , pt. 7, Balder the Beautiful, i. 131, for a very interesting and fuller account of the Armenian New Fires at Candlemas. In fact the whole Chapter V constitutes the richest material on new fires and the best treatment of this subject. Notice that securing fruitfulness, for the fields, trees, animals, etc., is the chief motive of the fires, but next comes the desire to prevent disease. These fires were intended to exert some favorable influence on the fire-god in general and on the lightning (rain) god in particular. The February fires in England, which were kindled on Candlemas, if productive of bad weather, heralded thereby the coming of the rainy season, i.e. the spring. For in this sense alone It is possible to understand the old English verses:
" If Candlemas be dry and fair
The half o' winter's to come and mair;
If Candlemas be wet and foul
The half o' winter's gane at Yule."
See also art. Feu in La Grande Encyclopedic; "Fire" in EB 9 ; "Candlemas" in ERE iii. 189 f.