Gods of fire

Knipe counts some 200 hymns addressed to Agni in the Rigveda and Atharvaveda, from about 1400 to 1000 BCE, and W. J. Wilkins, writing in 1882, notes that only Indra has more. Britannica describes him as the fire “of the sun, of lightning, and of both the domestic and the sacrificial hearth”, with three or seven tongues, hair that stands up like flames, and a ram beside him; Wilkins’s description adds a garland of fruit and flames issuing from his mouth. Knipe notes that Agni became a minor god once the epics and Puranas were written, but Britannica points out that he is still invoked in many ceremonies, and Knipe that cremation is still the final offering of the body “to Agni Kravyād, consumer of the deceased”.

In Greece, Hestia was goddess of the hearth, one of the twelve Olympians, worshipped at the family hearth and at the city’s hearth in the town hall (Britannica). Knipe notes that she burned perpetually in her temple at Delphi “as a flame and with no image necessary to represent her”. Rome’s Vesta, identified with Hestia, had a round temple in the Forum where the Vestal Virgins tended the public fire; it was put out and relit each 1 March, and Britannica records that letting it go out at any other time was taken as a sign of disaster for Rome. Hestia has her own page.

Hephaestus, “the god of fire” in Britannica’s words, was the smith of the Greek gods; the Homeric Hymn to him praises him for teaching crafts to people who “before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts”. Rome’s Vulcan took on all his attributes in poetry, but in cult he was the fire to be averted: Britannica notes that he was invoked against fires.

The Aztec fire god Xiuhtecuhtli, “Lord of the Year”, was also called Huehueteotl, “Oldest of Gods”, and Tata, “Our Father” (Lewis Spence, 1913). Britannica describes him as a toothless old man with a brazier on his head, and the fire serpent, the Xiuhcoatl, as his insignia. Spence records that families made him a morning offering of bread and a drink, and that once a year every household fire was put out and rekindled before his image. At the end of each 52-year cycle, Britannica adds, new fire was carried from temple to temple and then into every home.