Fire Is The Ultimate Transformatory Agent

Eastern Siberian and Mongolian religious tradition contains strong connections between shamans and smiths: Peter Vitebsky comments on the spiritual power of blacksmiths:

“He had a similar mastery of esoteric techniques, but a greater mastery of fire, and he made the metal ornaments which where essential attachments to the shaman’s costume. He was also the master of the shaman’s initiation…smith and shamans were nurtured in the same nest, but the smith was the shamans’ elder brother. He had no fear of spirits and the shaman, being the smith’s junior, could not cause his death because the smith’s soul was protected by fire.”

Shamans are concerned with transformation, with transference between worlds. Metalsmiths are also boundary-crossers, having charge over the alchemy that produces shiny metal from rough rock. Fire is the ultimate transformatory agent: heat changes wood to ash, flour and water to bread, clay to pots and ore to metal; fire and water (another significant agent of transformation) are the blacksmiths partners in making wrought iron. The smith has to control fire: success depends on his skill at ‘reading’ the fire, its color and sound key factors in judging temperature. Intimacy with fire, staring into its heart, induced weird dream images as the flames flicker, swirl and change color. The smith is involved in a complex set of cognitive processes, a ‘constellation’ of ideas, tools and material; like the shaman, he is engaged with performance, with a choreographed dance between forge fire, anvil and toolkit. The smith lives a paradox: he may be a solitary, marginal, ‘edge’ person, like the shaman, often living on the borders of the settlement, but he is nonetheless central to the community and depends on a network of support for his power. Like shamans, smith—working in all metals, not just iron—are associated with the ancestors and with long term memory; they are specialists, with an awe-inspiring and arcane ritual of praxis. They can produce objects that clang, rattle and ‘sing’, that can reflect light, people’s faces and the world and glow with color. John Creighton has suggested that goldsmiths making Iron Age coins deliberately manipulated their raw material to produce a particular yellow-gold, symbolic of the sun and other astral bodies depicted on the coinage, citing, as comparable, the Aztec shamanic tradition in which metalsmiths sought to replicate the shining world of dreamscapes. Irish medieval stories make unequivocal reference to the association between blacksmithing and shamanistic Druidry, a link shown clearly in the following excerpt from the Scela Eogain:

“When Cormac was born, the Druid-smith Olc Aiche put five protective circles about him, against wounding, against drowning, against fire, against enchantment, against wolves, that is to say every evil.”

-excerpted from “The Quest for the Shaman” by Miranda & Stephen Aldhouse-Green (2005)