Finding the Fire Mother

Auntie made the fire at the edge of the garden, where the cultivated bumped up against the wild in the form of a living fence of bramble and saplings. She laid a tidy circle of stones, and set within them the pieces of sacred trees she had gathered over a week or so of solitary rambles. Prayerfully she lit the tinder in the spaces between the sticks, using an ember carried from the stove, and breathed on it. She looked at me, unspeaking---Auntie never spoke if she could help it when she was doing her rituals and I had learned to hear her unvoiced instructions pretty well after two years of following her about. I leant forward and breathed on the little licking flames too. The two of us crouched there sharing our breath with the fire until it was strong. It burned and she fed it for hours with more twigs from rowan and birch, oak and holly, hazel and hawthorn and yew.

As it burned low, she placed dried flowers on the ghost-shapes of burnt away sticks and they went to ash almost at once, ghostly too with a teasing brief waft of scent, no more. Once the flames were out, she fetched a poker and began to turn the ashes, pulling odd bits of charcoaled wood and examining them, looking, as she had told me earlier, for the Mother, the black mother from the heart of the fire. "You have to find the one with the face", she explained, answering the question I hadn't dared to ask aloud. After a few minutes of digging with the poker, she ranged a row of dark, sooty pieces of charred wood before her, and began to scrutinise each one in turn. She set the rejected pieces down reverently, not carelessly, in a group by the fire stones. The next one she picked up was looked at longer, turned this way and that, but finally set aside with the others. Then she found her; there was an instant recognition. Wordlessly she held the burnt wooden form up so I could see, too. It did have a vaguely human, womanly shape, and where the face should be I could see a pair of indentations like eyes, and perhaps---was I imagining it---the hint of a mouth? I looked up at aunt, and she nodded, and set this one in a small basket she had brought, under a rose-bush, while she stacked the stones from the fire-ring in a pile and raked apart the ashes.

The fire darkened stones she returned to the field, and the faceless pieces of wood she set in a bowl in the kitchen. Later she would grind them to powder in the bigger mortar, keeping one jar-full for treating stomach aches, and another for making ink. But the Fire Mother she brought into our house, and prepared to place her on the icon shelf in the corner. We had only the one icon, a little image of the Lady in her starry blue cloak and crimson gown holding out her hands as though inviting an embrace. My mother used to hold out her arms in that way to me when I came in to supper, before she died. Auntie made a little shrine box for the Fire Mother, using an old picture frame and beeswax, and wrapping her with red thread in a criss-cross pattern, and adding a special stone with a hole in it, a tiny linen bundle containing certain herbs tied shut with more red thread, a blue glass bead, a small seashell, and dried rosebuds from the hedge. She placed the Fire Mother on the shelf next to the Lady's icon, and stepped back to look at them. She turned to me and said, "They are twins, you see", and I nodded, though I didn't quite know what she meant by it.

I thought it over for days after, sitting where I could see the icon shelf, playing cat's cradle with a bit of string, watching the shapes made by the string lines, coming and going as i moved my fingers. Sometimes the shapes echoed the lines of the red thread wrapped around the Fire Mother; sometimes they were like points on stars. I sat there running my carved horse and cart over the rug, using the patterns on it as roads, dark and bright woven together, shapes emerging and linking endlessly. The same shapes were stitched on the cloth that draped the shelf, on Auntie's apron, at the edges of our blouses. They were carved into the triangle-topped post that marked my mother's grave, too, and painted on the bee houses in the garden. All around me such shapes warded us and guided the eye through their patterns, red lines, black lines, like tree branches intersecting against the sky, dark against the light. I liked the Lady in the starry cloak, and I liked the Fire Mother in her red thread. They drew the eye in different ways; but the Lady felt high and distant from my world, while the Fire Mother felt close. Her sooty form had darkened my hands and my aunt's, and she came to us from our own fire, in our own place. In her subtle features there was room for all our needs, all our sorrows. Fire Mother could hold it all, the burning darkness and the red light, the soot and the clean loaf, a human heart's longing and pain.