“Imagine you traveled back in time 100,000 years and happened upon a group of our ancestors gathered around an evening campfire. Would anyone be surprised to find them chanting, clapping, dancing in unison, or maybe just sitting mesmerised before the flickering flame?” writes Matt J. Rossano, Professor of Psychology at Southeastern Louisiana University, in his paper Did Meditating Make Us Human? The answer, I presume, is a resounding no from us all.
And yet, in today’s world of underfloor heating, radiators, stoves and ovens, months can go by without many of us seeing more than a candle flame. Unless, that is, you're lucky enough to have a working fireplace at home. Or you’re one of the millions, yes, millions, of people watching crackling fireplaces on YouTube. The modern-day version of our ancestors’ focal point, albeit one that streams in 4K and with adverts.
Though Rossano argues the ancient fire may have done far more than cook our food, keep us warm and ward off predators. “It was precisely this type of commonplace campfire activity (which I will call campfire rituals of focused attention) that produced the human mind as it is today,” he writes. “These ritualized gatherings before an open fire – repeated night after night, generation after generation for thousands of years – created the conditions that selected for the uniquely human cognitive characteristics of enhanced working memory capacity and symbolic thinking” he continues. In other words, the quiet, hypnotic act of sitting and staring into the flames, together, over countless millennia, may be part of what shaped the way we think, speak and imagine. Fire didn’t just keep our ancestors alive. It may have helped make them human.
Perhaps this is part of the reason we're still drawn to the flame. Where most sensible creatures run from fire, we pull up a chair, and, stranger still, we find it relaxing.
Anthropologist Christopher Lynn sat 226 adults down in front of a fire and took their blood pressure before and after. The result was oddly specific: a fire with its crackle and pop lowered blood pressure, while a silent one did nothing at all. The longer people watched, the calmer they got, and the effect was strongest in those who let themselves be properly absorbed by it. A muted or upside-down fire, meanwhile, just put everyone on edge.
So the soothing isn’t really about the flames being pretty. It’s the whole production: the warmth, the shifting light, the crackle, the faint smell of smoke, all conspiring into something close to a trance. The full sensory works. Which might explain why no one, I imagine, has ever pulled up a chair to gaze lovingly at a radiator.
It also goes a long way to explaining why, as long as we’ve had flames, we’ve made them sacred. The Aztecs marked every 52 years with the Xiuhmolpilli, the Binding of the Years: every fire in the empire was put out, then reignited from a single flame. The Celts lit four great bonfires to mark the turning of the seasons, honouring the gods and warding off spirits. Aboriginal Australians burnt native plants like emu bush to make a sacred, cleansing smoke that honours ancestors and sends unwelcome spirits packing. And in esoteric Japanese Buddhism, the Goma ritual still burns on, taking away worldly attachments, negative karma and spiritual obstacles.
Different continents, different centuries, entirely different gods, and yet the same quiet conviction: that to stand before a fire is to stand somewhere just outside the ordinary. That flames are worth gathering around for more than warmth.
So this Bonfire Night, as people whisper about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, reserve some of your attention for the fire itself. The same fire that calmed us, gathered us, shaped us and, if Rossano is right, very possibly played a role in shaping our brains to become what they are today.