The Crack in the Cosmic Egg

by Joseph Chilton Pearce

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.

  A high point was reached when one of the fakirs noticed a professor of psychology avidly intrigued and dumbfounded. The fakir, sensing the longing, told the good professor he, too, could walk the fire if he so desired -- by holding the fakir's hand. The good man was seized with faith that he could, shed his shoes, and hand-in-hand they walked the fire ecstatic and unharmed.

  These phenomena question our assumptions concerning biological necessities. They are the margins of error¤ in our tightknit world view. In the scientific picture these margins of error prove to be passports to new areas of thought, as Max Planck said. But this never invalidates the functional reality of current postulates and systems. That the quasars may lead to concepts of speed and energy beyond those given by the Einsteinian universe does not lessen in any way the truth of Einstein's system or denigrate one of history's proudest times. New contracts are no more true than false, but matters of choice. The new, in fact, needs the old against which to move to gain meaning or value. The riddle of the quasars, and the inherent promise of them, is comprehensible only against the backdrop of our current viewpoints. The quasars will not fit into these current viewpoints -- and only by the misfitting itself are the quasars in fact noticeable -- or nameable as quasars.

  ---

  * borderline conditions

  And so -- fire burns. The cause-effect of fire burn underlies the physical world. There could be no such phenomenon as fire did fire not burn. But fire does not have to burn a person in this particular case at this particular time. Neither does cancer have to kill this particular person at this particular time; nor do any of the other grim dragons of necessity have to apply to this person or that person -- nor to any person who can believe in another way, or another construct.

  Is there a pattern? Yes. There is the conscious desire for the experience, the asking of the question. There is the detachment from the commonplace; the commitment to replace the conventional with a new construct; the passion and decorum -- the intensive preparation, the gathering of materials for the answer; the freedom to be dominated by the subject of desire -- the sudden seizure, the breakthrough of mind that gives the inexplicable conviction that it can, after all, be done; and then the serving of the new construct, the instant application.

  If a few lone people can reverse causality in isolated cases, what could truly-agreeing people in a mass do with broad statistics? (And in this new worldwide monoculture our technological push is so bent on achieving, what kind of agreement concerning reality is going to be the dominant shaping force?)

  Erich Neumann, in an unrelated context, contended that the actual process of fire is experienced "with the aid of images" which derive from the interior of one's psychic world, and are "projected upon the external world." The subjective reaction, he claims, always takes precedence historically. Fire-walking seems to confirm this. Fire-walking is made possible by replacing "historical precedents" with
non-ordinary images. The non-ordinary event takes place in the external world through the same reality function by which all events take place.

  Fire-walking is found in "simpler" societies probably because these people have fewer investments in strict causal modes. We are so heavily committed to our constructs that any suggestion of their relativeness fills us with anxiety. It is for reward that the Hindu undergoes the discipline and risk. The followers of Jesus were those who "hated the world." One does not abandon an eminently satisfactory system. New life can only be created by metaphoric mutation -- synthetic re-creation of the old, and the old must be surrendered for this synthesis to take place.

  To give up one's belief concerning some structure of reality, there must be an image that stands for the new goal or framework, even if the specifics of that goal are unclear. The new goal must be ultimately desirable or ambiguity results, an ambiguity which prevents the new from forming and only fragments and weakens the old. It is an all-or-nothing process.

  Voodoo, for instance, is a potent and real power in the Caribbean and other areas. If a man learns that he is destined to die, he tends to oblige. The same force is operative in our culture, but under sophisticated metaphors and more subtle sureties. If we are told that one of every four of us is destined to die of a certain disease, we fill the social requirements. The one on whom the lot randomly falls feels fated to oblige as surely as the black victim of voodoo.