Bone Fires

Bone Fires

Bonfires, or more accurately, bone fires are a long part of the rituals, rites and marking the movement of the year especially "the fire festivals".

Beltane fast approaches and while my fire has never been for Bel, I understand this complicated connection to the bone fire. I love fire and it rather likes me. Burns which should and could be awful don't seem to have any effect on me at all and I can put my hands into almost boiling water with little to no damage. More than that I seem to "get it" and many a time making fires while camping or for rituals people have remarked on it. I have never seen it as a "masculine" element either. The average male (not TK) is useless with fire, putting rubbish on it, or being stupid, disrespectful or dangerous with it, or poking it for no reason at all. (< Seriously irks me for no reason I can fathom).

I grew up with real fires and could carefully (and safely) make them before I was 10 years old. I cut kindling with an axe (yes modern parents, a real axe!) and cleaning the hearth, laying the fire, light it and keeping it going were, "women's work". Going out and getting wood, with axes and chainsaws was "man's work". So this whole "man, ug, fire, ug" is a mystery to me. 

I could tell you how a hawthorn sings on the grate, burning with a bright yellow flame that fades more quickly. Or soft sweet pine hiss and spitting and giving hot sparks that burning the dogs fur and they leapt from the grate. I knew that hawthorn saw dust and pine kindling start the fire best, that oak burn best for the best constant heat, that chestnut is best if you want to keep fire in the grate all night long.

Fire was sacred to me long before I knew why.  Bone fires are different of course.

For a start, a bone fire smells and has a very different energy than one made simply from wood. It is a complicated chemical process that even our ancestors could see changed bone (organic, living, wet) to stone (ancestral, ancient, of the Gods). You have to get the wood part of your fire steady and hot before you add the bones, which if you try this are usually sheep bones, but you can use what you safely and spiritually can.

Leaping over, or driving animals through a bonfire (bone fire) to me seems to imply a blessing  from the ancestral realm for the living. We never did anything like that. Our fires were practical save for Bonfire Night. Back in the day we didn't "do" fireworks but a fire... They were huge, especially as I was so small. 20 feet high, shooting sparks into the inky night light a thousand red stars being born. No-one spoke. It was mesmerizing. A giant pillar of flame, twisting in spirals and making our faces hot and our backs feel even colder. It was alive and while we watched it's birth, life and eventual death no-one could turn away. 

Tonight I will carve messages for my passed loved one and build a bone fire. I have plenty of hawthorn saw dust, and I can get pine kindling too. My fire will be for Bran and Branwen.

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Bright Blessings xxx