You probably didn’t think about it at the time, but most likely your first fire ritual was when you were about four or five years old. We ALL did it. Fire magic. Spell casting. Manifesting our wishes using our minds and our breath. I’m talking about the ritual of birthday candles.
Why do we stick candles in a cake, sing a song of celebration, then, ritually have the celebrant close their eyes, make a wish and blow them all out at once? Candle or fire magic, is one of the easiest and most effective methods to create change.
Rituals using fire are among the most ancient types of magic. Since man began using fire to stay warm, keep the predators away and cook their food, fire has been of utmost importance in a myriad of ways. Probably keeping the predators away was the most important form of practical magic using this element. Fire allowed humans to live in previously uninhabitable environments, and whether good or bad, change their relationship to food through cooking.
The ancients also knew how powerful fire was energetically speaking. Fire consumes. Fire transmutes. Fire creates huge amounts of energy. Fire takes one thing and turns into something else. When we are working with magick and attempting to transform something (an old habit, addiction, subconscious program) and turn it into something else, this element is a sure fire way to do so. Pun intended.
Alchemists used fire to heat the “Prima Materia” the prime matter in their lab experiments to create the alchemy of changing one thing into something else. They were attempting to turn lead into gold, but they were metaphorically trying to transmute their consciousness from the base egoist human (lead) to illuminated Spiritual awakening (gold). I’ll talk more about alchemy in another blog.
When we dance around a fire there is an immense amount of energy getting released, not only by our moving bodies, but by the fire itself. Since we know everything is made of energy, harnessing and utilizing this potential of energetic fuel can instigate the changes that we are working toward. We can “throw out the old” into the fire (energetically) let the fire burn it up and turn it into something new, something hopefully better. Just like with our birthday candles, when we go through the ritual process and if we believe, perhaps our wishes will come true. While we don’t blow out the fire in a fire circle, we do allow our wishes to rise up with the energy of the flames.
Comments