A vast proportion of the labour which mankind has
expended throughout the ages has been no better spent; it has been like
the stone of Sisyphus eternally rolled up hill only to revolve eternally
down again, or like the water poured for ever by the Danaids into broken
pitchers which it could never fill.
[The belief that the need-fire cannot kindle if any other fire remains
alight in the neighbourhood.]
The curious notion that the need-fire cannot kindle if any other fire
remains alight in the neighbourhood seems to imply that fire is
conceived as a unity which is broken up into fractions and consequently
weakened in exact proportion to the number of places where it burns;
hence in order to obtain it at full strength you must light it only at a
single point, for then the flame will burst out with a concentrated
energy derived from the tributary fires which burned on all the
extinguished hearths of the country. So in a modern city if all the gas
were turned off simultaneously at all the burners but one, the flame
would no doubt blaze at that one burner with a fierceness such as no
single burner could shew when all are burning at the same time. The
analogy may help us to understand the process of reasoning which leads
the peasantry to insist on the extinction of all common fires when the
need-fire is about to be kindled. Perhaps, too, it may partly explain
that ceremonial extinction of all old fires on other occasions which is
often required by custom as a preliminary to the lighting of a new and
sacred fire.
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