Because Yazidis are not evil-worshippers .. and those who kill them are the real evil doers .. Fire is a divine mirror in which one tries to catch a glimpse of his own spark of divinity. Fire has been a major source of inspiration for mankind in its pursuit of ultimate reality .In its purity, in its lack of substance and the warmth it gives we find a similarity with God. While ,cogitating on its nature one finds a connection with what humans comprehend as being beyond this plenary world. In its enigma one finds an inspiration to describe the indescribable. This is the reason why the very first hymn of the Vedas is dedicated to Agni (Fire).There it is described as the first priest, the invoker of Gods. Thus an altar is a modern day wormhole, where the coding is a Vedic chant, project head is a priest, financer is a king and the vehicle is Fire. I really don’t know why and when the human started to perceive fire like this, because for a hunter-gatherer fire makes food ingestible, it was the only answer he could give to white flakes of shiver falling from heaven .When the beasts of the night came, this friend stood by him, flickering on top of a wood piece in his hand. Maybe when he used to go inside the deep dark caves, in that solitude he started to find the element of fire – enlightening...Maybe then he started to find something within him similar to the thing emerging from colliding stones. It would be ignorant to consider ourselves as spiritually rich in comparison to hunter-gatherers. We have a library of chants and saints, they never had one, so the voices never clashed, debates never happened, colors of skin had no meaning and one never had to run from reality in search for reality. There were as many religions as there were hunters, thus there existed a complete religious democracy. Some of those thinking fathers spent nights staring the night sky and merging with the infinite ,some pondered over thunder and rain ,some over sun and some over moon .The advent of these Gods preceded fire ,but the advent of fire changed the way they inferred these. Fire became an earthly representative of these celestial wonders, their harbinger. Fire still holds a great significance in ritualistic religions .Persian Aryans (Parsis/Yazidis/Mazdayasnis) still have fire temples, where it is not worshipped but it is kept alive for centuries so the connection with the divine never gets disrupted. It’s like avoiding technological malfunction in the Hubble telescope, a modern age telescopic eye looking into the depths of cosmos. Indian Aryans still burn their dead because nothing cleans better than fire , but Persians don’t cremate ,these religious cousins believe that the purity of fire must not be diluted with the human body ,the house of evil .Be the tantric priests or the shamans ,nearly all flag bearers of prehistoric cultures venerate fire. Those who believe in paradigm shifts can easily cognize what this paragraph is actually about. Fire is universal, it has no border rules to obey .In Sanskrit it is called Agni, which linguistically cognates with Latin Agnes .A synonym of Agni is pAvak, which cognates with modern day English word fire .The word for fire in south-east Asia and china cognates with word root api, a word which in turn cognates with word apri which literally means fire priests in Sanskrit. The avestan word for fire i.e. atar derives itself from atharvan, the foremost aryan fire-priest.This however doesn’t mean that we had a common beginning or all languages derive themselves from a proto-indo-European language .A radical explanation for this could be that humans are divine beings living in a spiritual world, where primitive word-roots developed as a result of their intuitive wisdom .Words developed later, where glottal differences played a key role. A mythologist views fire in a more dramatic manner, Agni has three sons which symbolize three sources of fire namely friction, electricity and sun. It has seven tongues symbolizing seven colors of light emanating from it .It is the king of south-east direction .That is where the Yajna is done because the sun rises in the south-east (that is debatable) and that is where we light up the earthly representative of sun to sing hymns of its glory. Agni is also known as abhimani, a mirror to reflect upon. Thus Agni is a manifestation of energy which we can physically see, thus ruminating over it is sapient. The times have changed and these ideas remain in the corners of old and ignored libraries. But we won’t prefer to check a glimpse into that .Our philosophy and our methods of contemplating about this universe have changed radically .What our imperfect senses tell us, we readily subscribe to it .Slaves to sense gratification !!, each action of humankind now in some way or the other aims at gratification. Unlimited desires and most of them remain unfulfilled ,still the striving never ceases ,the race never slows down .Stopping for introspection is like losing time but time is money and money is everything. Intuitive wisdom is a word which sounds taboo .Our savior science tells that there isn’t anything like that .Individualistic Materialism wanders free ,”reality is what you see !! not what you imagine!! “,it says. If you cannot touch, see, smell, taste or hear something ,it doesn’t exist. If there is something like that ,make your senses powerful ,equip yourself with a microscope or a telescope ,a radiometer or a multimeter, you will get it. The world is for pleasure .Keep the morality in your recycle bin ,restore it when you need it in court of law. Be selfish , because you are a free individual capable of making choices of your own. Any crime which is not a crime in court of law is not a crime ,so being selfish isn’t one. This is what we follow with pride. This is what losing the lesson of fire does to man. We are not individuals ,fire tells us that .We are all same ,the spark within is same. Ignorance has won the battle but the wheel of time never stops .It keeps on turning and when the clock again strikes twelve we might again start making meaning of it. Till then we can just hope of preserving the abhimani, just like in those fire temples .There are a few Parsis left in the world now ,most of them residing in India. Keeping the flame of wisdom alive so that when the time of awakening comes, we don’t have to start it all over again .The flickering friend is always there, we just have to see it so that we can see within ourselves.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 21:10:43 +0000
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