Atash Behram – Types of Fire
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The opportunity to harvest natural fire from lightning doesn't occur very often, so it was necessary to maintain an eternal fire. This was a very important job, passed down from one generation to the next, so of course it would become ritualized, and stories and myths about the importance of the job would be created. Myths and rituals are how you conserve and propagate culture in a pre-literate society. Actually, the first tribe to do this was probably before the invention of modern language, so who knows what this would have actually looked like. Are there myths in a pre-oral culture? There are other modalities of thought and communication other than modern oral language, so maybe!
We know from the archeological record that the rate of tech progress in stone tools was extremely, almost incomprehensibly slow during the earliest stone ages. Likewise, it's probable that many long generations passed from the creation of firekeeping rituals (the eternal fire) to the discovery of techniques for making fire on demand.
My guess is that the eternal fire has ancient roots, was strongly culturally conserved, and re-invented multiple times.
Etymology tidbit: "Bhārata", India's Sanskrit name, refers to the forerunner clan that established India's first historically recorded political entity—the Kuru Kingdom—around 1200 BC near modern Delhi. The clan itself was named "Bhārata" due to their ardent bearing ("bhar-" in Sanskrit) of the sacred fire.
Perhaps now that will change!
Does anyone know the theological basis for the different numbers of purification rituals for each fire? For instance, why is the potter's fire purified 61 times?
That it some impressive cultural feat. It combines the human ability to take on the extraordinarily long term view [0] - planning ahead - (our prefrontal cortex is only fully developed at 25 years of age) and the control of fire which goes back at least 1 million (!) years [1].
Some of the Proto-Indo-Europeans [2] seemed to be very keen at ritualizing the control of fire which can be attested through various examples in Indo-European practices [3].
If one traces back the Indo-European origin of the word fire there are 2 main terms:
(1) *h₁n̥gʷnis
(2) *péh₂wr̥
The first one refers to the animate feature of fire (e.g. as "Spirit"/"God", "active") while the second one to the inanimate ("substance", "passive") [4], interestingly Proto-Indo-European is thought to have animacy gender as a distinct grammatical feature [5] which was later replaced by the masculine/feminine gender.
The germanic root for fire comes from the inanimate one while the Persian atash, the latin ignis or Agni (Vedic deity of fire) from the animate form.
[0]https://longnow.org/ideas/the-fire-that-never-goes-out/
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_hum...
[2]https://www.science.org/content/article/new-language-databas...
[3]https://books.google.at/books?id=cI-bEAAAQBAJ
[4]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...