The flames of the saints. Rites and symbolisms of fire in Europe

The symbolic meanings of fire must first of all be ascribed to its role as a powerful tool of cultural transformation. The sacred value and the ritual practices connected to it originate from its practical functions: lighting and heating, cooking food, transformation of materials, preparation of the fields, etc. In the celebrations of the first agro-pastoral civilisations, fire is already a sacred symbol: an element that connects with transcendence, a divine instrument, a manifestation of divinity. Sacred fires continued to hold these values ​​throughout the Middle Ages, in the modern age and in contemporary times, not episodically, in various European regions, where they remain constitutive elements of numerous religious celebrations. Bonfires vary in number and size from place to place. In them they burn wood, straw, pruning scraps and waste materials. They are devotional and playful places around which the family or the entire community gather. Around the bonfires revolve a mythical-ritual universe and behaviors and beliefs that seem to repeat forms and gestures with which man for millennia has related to the transcendent entities on which he feels his own well-being depends. If today the link with the cycles of nature seems to have been lost and the traditional festivals have been affected by the processes of patrimonialisation, the fire rites continue to respond to the fundamental anxieties of existence, with requests around death, illness, production and to reproduction, to the very sense of being in the world. Lighting bonfires, dancing around the fire, jumping into the flames, burning puppets, collecting embers, walking through the fields and streets of the towns brandishing torches are behaviors intended to recompose and strengthen social bonds and to enter into communion with the divine, to purify community space-time, to support the fertility of men, fields and herds, to finally re-establish the natural and social cosmos.