San Diego Firewalk Response to Recent Incident

Like many in the area, we here at San Diego Firewalk were shocked to learn of the events at firewalking event last evening at Paradise Point. We extend our hopes for a speedy recovery to the two participants who received injuries.

San Diego Firewalk was in NO WAY consulted, involved, or associated with organizing or leading this event.

The details of who facilitated the event, what group may have sponsored it and what precautions were used remain unknown. We will be grateful when the full facts are known.

Firewalking is an experience of renewal shared with a group of individuals who seek greatness. Many cultures throughout world come together once a year, sometimes more, to celebrate our inherent power and renew the focus it takes to achieve what might normally seem impossible.

The majority of these events occur in a safe, controlled, environment and are led by responsible, skilled, leaders.

San Diego Firewalk has an 8-year record of successfully leading dozens of firewalks in the San Diego area with absolutely no incidents of similar harm. It is the responsibility of a trained and experienced leader to provide a safe event. Precautions exist that prevent exactly these types of occurrences, ensuring the safety of the participants at all times. From choosing the location, to knowing a platform is necessary and how to build a proper one, and even the timing of each individuals walk; dozens of variables must be thoughtful controlled.

Firewalking is a significant accomplishment, cultivating human potential to overcome any obstacle and achieve any dream, so long as focus is maintained.

We have all been told at some point to, ‘Live in the moment.’To align every aspect of ourselves. To experience the power of body, mind, and spirit working together towards a singular focus. The sum of our parts is greater than we dare to imagine. The courage and fearlessness gained from The Firewalk Experience allow ourselves to understand this truth.

More information on this incident in Mission Bay is being provided by NBC 7’s San Diego News and can be viewed here:

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Several-Burned-at-Firewalking-Event-in-San-Diego-201440741.html

Igniting the New Economy and Fulfilling Dreams Now

I attended my first Firewalk in July 2000 after my Life Coach said she would fire me as a client if I didn't make more progress and shift my self-imposed limitations about my life. After many months of complaining every week about my job, girlfriend, difficulties of starting a business and the constant rainy weather in Seattle, she had enough and said I MUST find the next FIREWALK and go DO IT NOW, OR ELSE!

When I got online I found out a "FIREWALK" is a large bonfire, burned down to the ground, raked into a thin bed of hot coals usually 8-12 feet long and then walked on. "Oh god", I thought, "how is this possible".

That fateful night, the moment right before Firewalking, I remember being scared, wondering what will happen, feeling that climbing Mt. Everest would probably be easier and SAFER. But I wanted a new future, I was tired of not making significant progress toward my goals and dreams.

After successfully firewalking on hot coals and not being burned, everything I thought possible expanded and the confusion in my life shattered. That Firewalk Experience transformed my life and opened a new path out from where I had been stuck. Within 6 months of Firewalking, I had left that empty relationship, moved to California and started my business. My life was in motion.

History of Firewalking

Firewalking has been a rite of passage and community ritual for hundreds of years. You can find Firewalking in Polynesian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Native cultures around the globe and still happening today. Originally, it was not a seminar as it often is now in the West. Although, it has always been a moment of inspiration, empowerment and enlightenment tied to the sacred. It is the fusion of Power and Soul.

In Polynesia the fire purified a person before receiving a sacred family Tattoo. In Coptic Christianity and many other cultures it was a test of the depth of one's faith. In most of the traditions the community came together to let go of the past and create a new beginning, honor the gods or God, and connect with the elements.

I'm an ordained Firewalking Priest in the New Thought tradition of Huna. In this tradition, walking on coals brings the mental, emotional and spiritual parts of oneself together as one in a moment of unity, harmony and enlightenment and is experienced in a very real and meaningful way.

Transformation by Fire

Firewalking offers the tangible experience of being purified and transformed by the element Fire. Firewalkers purify their intentions when they walk on Fire, and are left with the purpose and dream of their life and power to accomplish it. They also experience a deeper awareness and compassion for other people. Firewalkers experience dual consciousness: life before Firewalking vs life on the other side of the coals; meandering through life vs walking focused toward ones dreams.

The Firewalk is synergistic, because it brings all the Elements together.

The Wood from the Earth
The Water in the Wood
The Fire combusting with Air and Wood to transform into Energy and released to the Air
All that remains on the ground is a tiny handful of ash (Earth).

When I talk with people even years after they've Firewalked, they say the experience was deeply memorable and an allegory for living a successful life. That the experience provided ongoing inspiration and insight being courageous and free of fear, having laser focus, committing and following through on things that matter, and have deeper spiritual roots.

The New Economy and Dreams Fulfilled

We are using the Firewalk Experience as a tool to help people be free, abundant and powerful to generate success in the New Economy. Because Small Business Owners and "Solopreneurs" are the engine of the New Economy, these insights and experiences applied to sales, marketing and leadership help them fulfill their own dreams and generate a new economic future for themselves and the people they touch.

We have had at least five Firewalk Leaders host about a dozen Firewalks in 2009 in the San Diego area. We are gearing up for a Fall Line-Up of more Firewalks and breakthrough events to ignite their businesses and assist them in fulfilling their dreams. A portion of the proceeds from these events are given to charitable causes in the San Diego area.

————————————-
Julian D. Bergquist is an ordained Huna Firewalking Priest, workshop leader and coach. He is passionate about facilitating breakthroughs that result in effective relationships and improved communication in business, intimate relationships and with oneself. Find out about the next Firewalk and breakthrough experiences for the remainder of 2009 at http://www.SDFirewalk.com. Or call 619-573-6638

Dancing with the Fire

Dancing with the Fire

by Michael Sky

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Tolly Burkan and his wife Peggy Dylan wanted to teach us every aspect of successfully leading firewalk. Since their own approach had been to travel around from place to place, building fires wherever they could, our three-week training would consist primarily of ten public firewalk with a lot of traveling in between, so that we would get a taste of life on the road. Thus, although our group of ten students came together in Sacramento, we spent our initial two days journeying in a motorhome up to Seattle for our first firewalk. This two-day waiting period actually helped me, for I could see little difference between this group of people—all of whom had already walked on fire—and myself. I did not feel like their spiritual or psychological inferior, and I could thus reasonably expect to do as well as they.

Alas, on the day of my first walk, all reason and logic abandoned me. As the day wore on (firewalk always happen at night, which really means that they happen for an entire day) my body became uncharacteristically tense; a low level anxiety took over and gripped me. I was not hungry and I did not feel like talking. I kept thinking of the thousands of people who had already done this. I kept looking at my fellow trainees and seeing of our essential sameness. My mind would be somewhat reassured, but my body grew tenser still.

Midday they showed us a brief news clip of Tolly walking across an amazingly hot-looking bed of coals, and my stomach lurched in protest. I felt as if I had just witnessed an accident victim sprawled bloody across the pavement. I continued to fast and I talked even less. In a notebook I wrote, “I feel like I’m in an airplane, about to parachute into enemy territory.”

At this point, I felt twisted by a combination of fears. I worried that I would severely injure myself. Even worse, I might chicken out, a horrendous thought given the time, expense, and self-esteem I had committed to becoming an instructor. Or, worst of all, I might walk on fire, fail painfully, and limp home a crippled and embarrassed wreck. As evening approached, I found my mind less able to issue up reassurance, and more focused on my fears. My body grew tenser still.

Finally, the workshop began. Fifty or so people gathered, mostly looking as if they had just been told they had four hours to live. Tolly had an intense, yet entertaining style. Working the crowd, he first terrified us with what could go wrong, and then exploded the tension with his wonderful sense of humor. After an hour or so, we went outside and together constructed a large pile of wood, kindling, and newspaper. Then we circled about it, holding hands, while Tolly doused it with a gallon of kerosene and set it aflame. In moments, the fire blasted us with such heat that everyone took two steps away from the scattering sparks and billowing smoke. Definitely not a summer-camp fire, nor even a homecoming bonfire. We beheld an inferno, and if it was designed to frighten, it succeeded.

Back inside we went, and for the next two hours Tolly prepared us for walking. I remember agreeing with most all that he said, while at the same time feeling concerned that I did not really hear anything new. Clearly, I had hoped for some powerful technique or super meditation that would change me from “one who burns” into “one who doesn’t burn” but as time passed I felt distinctly unchanged and increasingly vulnerable. Things gradually took on a surreal air. It felt as if we were all doing drugs together or, again, as if we were all in a plane behind enemy lines, lost in our separate thoughts, contemplating doom, barely breathing.

Finally, the time came. We returned to the fire, which had calmed somewhat into a large pile of glowing embers and smoldering hunks of wood. We held hands, chanting softly as Tolly took a heavy metal rake and carefully spread the coals into a path some twelve-feet long and six-feet wide. With each pass of the rake, sparks flew off in every direction and what little breath we had left became filled with smoke. The heat was still so intense that people moved away from rather than toward the fire, its red-orange glow pulsing, menacing, yet oddly inviting. My mind finally emptied and quieted; I surrendered to the singing and felt transfixed by the fire. My body trembled out of control, as if it were somehow freezing on this warm spring evening. I could feel through their hands the similar shaking of those on either side of me.

Tolly laid down the rake, stepped up to the fiery path, and, with just the briefest pause, walked quickly across the coals. I registered that he took six steps and that he seemed okay, when suddenly another person walked across, and then another. I noticed my head shaking, side to side, as I watched feet sinking down into glowing, red, hot coals. People continued walking, one after another, and our singing steadily picked up, becoming more excited, more vibrant. My mind went blank, while my feet, acting on their own, carried me slowly toward the top of the path. My trembling increased and I sang even louder. Suddenly, I was at the top of the path. Moments later I moved—seven quick steps—I had walked on fire!

I felt overwhelmed with joy and found myself applauding each succeeding walker. The energy between us continued to rise, higher and higher, becoming more and more excited. It was all so beautifully stunning—the fire, the circle, the singing, the stars, the moon—and the wonderful feeling of grass beneath my happy feet. At last a strong shout of joy exploded through the group. Some people hugged, everyone laughed, and then slowly we all filtered back inside.

The funeral parlor had transformed into a circus. A tangible wave of relief rippled through a room filled with happy chatter and excited giggles. We took some time for sharing our experiences, and miracle stories abounded. I became aware of a spot on my left foot that felt a little hot, just slightly painful. Some other walkers seemed distressed also, including a fellow trainee who would turn out to have several bad blisters.

Later, as I called home to assure my wife and friends that I had survived it, feet intact, I began to feel a little let down. Obviously it had been a long, exhausting day. Somehow I had expected

more difficulty; it just seemed too easy. I mean, if anyone could do this, then. . . .

Dancing with the Fire – Chapter 3a

THE CO-CREATIVE PROCESS

The intelligence capable of orchestrating the diversity of all the cells in the human body is equally capable of orchestrating the diversity of the human family.

Ken Carey

To view the universe anew is to change in feeling and being. Just as there is no mind without body, no spirit without matter, there is no cognition without affect, no observation without personal change, no unmoved mover.2

George Leonard

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

James Jeans

It does indeed seem possible that we alive today could witness the beginnings of the emergence of a high-synergy society, a healthy social superorganism. If so, we could be among the most privileged generations ever to have lived.

Peter Russell

Most people wonder “why?” Why stand barefoot before a path of glowing, red-hot embers and choose to step forward? Why  run the risk of serious pain and injury? Why dance and sing with strangers around a fire in the dark; why take part in an ancient and primitive rite of passage; why even ponder such a strange and unlikely activity?

The discovery of fire by human beings, and the relationship  we have developed with it as we have learned to harness  its power and turn it towards purposeful good, marks a major step in the evolution of our species. Fire as made it possible for most of the people of this planet to live in otherwise cold and forbidding climates. It has given to our diets a vast array of foods that, without cooking, we would find unpalatable and of dubious nutritive value. It has enabled us to work creatively with metals, opening an entire industry, from the forging of the simplest tools to the fabrication of the minutest microchips. It has provided the power source and driving force of the industrial and postindustrial ages, the life-blood of our automobiles and airplanes, our cities and factories, our most complex surgical operations, our rockets to the moon.

Even in warmer tropical climates where fire has not been necessary for heating, cooking, the development of tools, or the fuel of industry and transportation, people have known that their lives depended upon fire of the sun and have treated their earthbound fires as offshoots, or little brothers, of that greater fire. Though the choreography has differed from one time and place to another, all primitive cultures have developed and followed certain rituals involving fire. Human culture universally sees fire an essential element for life on this planet, worthy of love, reverence, and thanksgiving, perhaps even of adoration and idolatry, and most certainly of respect. Thus we tend to view the discovery of fire as one of the most important moments in the history of humanity.

Pondering the discovery of fire, I imagine a brave and curious human being coming upon a blaze in the forest or on the plain, quite attracted to the fire’s warmth, to its beauty, to its dancing, flowing quality so similar to water. Such a person would quite naturally reach out to touch this bright, new substance, and thus discover—ouch!—that fire is hot and fire burns.

The discovery of fire involved the simultaneous uncovering of this fundamental law, the simple and painfully obvious truth that fire burns.

Over time, early men and women learned to turn fire’s burning towards purposeful good. They learned to heat their homes, to cook their food, to melt and forge important tools and implements. They learned to control fire, to harness its burning energy and use it, though ever mindful of the painful lesson that, if careless, fire could all too easily burn out of control, changing from life-improver to life-destroyer. This has always been fire’s essential nature: it will burn, possibly for good, possibly for ill, but it will burn. Outside of the firewalking experience itself, the law has always been: fire burns.

Early in life, each of us gets indoctrinated into the nature of fire. We touch the hot stove, the burning candle, the lit cigarette, and we personally discover fire—Ouch!, hot!, this stuff burns! As we grow, we learn to use fire in a myriad of helpful ways, and, inevitably, we pick up our share of accidental burns. Throughout our lives, again, outside of the firewalking experience, we never encounter anything but confirmation upon confirmation of the basic, unalterable fact that fire burns.

Therein lies one answer to the question, Why walk on fire?

Each time a person successfully brings bare flesh into contact with the extreme heat of glowing embers, and does not burn, then he or she demonstrates that we can reverse, suspend, or at least modify this most concrete and unquestionable of natural laws. The fact that fire burns, juxtaposed with the fact of successful firewalking, suggests that human beings can play some role in the formation of physical reality and its governing laws. Furthermore, in opening to that possibility, we must wonder if other natural laws have the same flexibility, and if there exist other unsuspected human resources that we might learn to bring forth.

This explains the draw of the firewalk, its beauty, its lessons, its awesome power: that we as human beings can connect to and play a role in the creative processes of our world. People walk on fire as a way of graphically demonstrating their active participation in the creation of reality. Reality can be shifted, altered, changed, and created anew, and the human spirit can and does play a causative role in such change and re-creation.

This does not just mean that we create change through our deeds and actions, but that we contribute to the continuing creation of reality through the special medium of human consciousness. It means that our thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds matter; that our attitudes, our beliefs, our aspirations, and our dreams matter; that our essential human consciousness matters— makes material; that our inner worlds exert influence in the
manifestation of external reality. A person dancing through hot coals demonstrates: “How I think matters, how I feel matters, my beliefs and desires matter.” The firewalker realizes that the next few steps in her life will unfold according to her own unique way of being in the world. The fire will burn, or not, depending largely upon her own personal responses to her world, and her own personal state of consciousness.

Since the days of Galileo and Newton, we have grown to believe in a universe ordered, structured, and governed by natural laws, the workings of which we can observe, understand, and intelligently manipulate, but which ultimately exist previous to and apart from the human experience. Such a viewpoint draws a firm line between the objective world, which exists external to and independent of human consciousness, and the subjective world, which derives from a person’s thoughts and feelings. It argues that the formation of the objective in no way depends upon the subjective, and that a person’s internal states have no causative effect upon external reality. Indeed, our medical science has only with the greatest reluctance begun to give up its steadfast denial that a person’s thoughts and feelings can have a causative effect upon his or her own body. Most scientists still consider it quite irrational to say that a person’s thoughts and feelings can have any effect whatsoever upon the external world.

This way of looking at the world has enabled us to chart with precision the movement of planets, stars, and galaxies, to know exactly when the sun will rise and set each day, to understand the workings of levers and wheels and pumps and gears. It enables us to drop a steel ball from two miles up and predict to the millisecond when it will touch ground. It enables all of the miracles of modern transportation, communication, and computation.
It enables us to understand the atomic and subatomic structure of matter and to use that understanding to unleash extraordinary energies. All of this and so much more has grown from a worldview which insists upon a firm separation between the internal world of human beings and the external world in which they move, a worldview which makes a great deal of sense, a worldview proven again and again by the very gifts and wonders which it enables. To argue against this point of view—to say that human thoughts and feelings have a creative impact upon the formation of reality—would seem to open a door into chaos and confusion, and to refute the clockwork universe that science offers and so amply demonstrates.

The worldview that I propose does not deny any of the veracity or the validity of science. Rather, it says that science has done a good job of describing the world thus far and we still need to broaden our basic understandings. For instance, at the time of Isaac Newton all of the laws of quantum physics held every bit as true as today. Quantum physics does not deny Newtonian mechanics; it encompasses it and then goes beyond. The successful evolution of the Newtonian worldview eventually enabled the insights and applications of quantum mechanics. Likewise, the successful evolution of quantum mechanics now suggests a new science—one that will successfully blend the subjective and objective universes and that will describe the role human beings can play in the continuing creation of reality.

Physicists first sensed this shift to a new science when, contrary to all of their training, the dividing wall between the objective observer and the externally observed began to break down, along with many of the other basic assumptions of classical physics. Starting with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in 1905, the tidy clockwork world of Newton and Descartes, with its separately defined objects and its clear cause and effect relationships, slowly unraveled until Einstein himself declared: “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.” Though many different discoveries and revelations would contribute to this shift toward a quantum worldview, probably none so thoroughly unsettled the scientific world more than the suggestion that total objectivity—the very backbone of scientific investigation and experimentation—was fundamentally impossible.

The quantum worldview so often runs in opposition to common sense that, however well quantum mechanics may accurately describe subatomic reality, it seems to hold little relevance to “normal” reality. For many of us, the natural laws of classical science obviously describe the whole picture in our day-to-day affairs. However, as a wealth of recent literature makes clear, there have always lived people, and at times entire cultures, for whom the quantum worldview has made perfect sense. Mystics and shamans, Taoist priests and Sufi dervishes, yoga masters and Indian healers—for such people the insights and revelations of quantum physics seem neither surprising nor alarming. Indeed, they have been describing the world in similar fashion for thousands of years. And while they may not have developed the technologies of Newtonian science, they have followed more ecologically grounded and environmentally sane ways. Nothing in the quantum worldview must ultimately run counter to common sense, though the senses common to twentyfirst-century Western humanity suffer from such a wide range of imbalances and aberrations that it will require a major leap in understanding to embrace this ancient-new reality.

In their Manual for Co-Creators of the Quantum Leap, futurists Barbara Marx Hubbard and Ken Carey outline some of the steps toward this new worldview. They assert, “Quantum transformations are traditional. Nature proceeds by long periods of incremental change marked by radical discontinuities, such as the leap from non-life to life, or single cells to animals, or animals to humans. Therefore we expect a quantum change to occur
from humans to the next stage. Hubbard and Carey feel that the key to this leap lies in the evolution of the human race to a level of consciousness through which it will actively participate in the continuing creation of reality. They speak of the “co-creative human”—one who has awareness of and alignment with the intention of creation; one who consciously cooperates with the designing intelligence; one who awakens to and makes manifest the next stage of evolution.

This presents a different “evolution” than the one that science has developed for the past hundred years. To the scientist, evolution occurs as a logical unfolding of circumstances set into motion billions of years ago. There happened, according to evolutionary theory, a “big bang” out of which all of the matter and energy of the universe came into being. From that moment forward, things have evolved, one thing leading naturally and linearly
to the next, various chemicals interacting with various other chemicals. Some water here, a few lightning flashes there, and stars evolved, planets evolved, our unique planet Earth evolved, our special earthen atmosphere evolved, non-life evolved into life, life evolved with Darwinian logic, apes into Homo sapiens, and so on. This scenario requires no actual creative intelligence, except perhaps at the time of the big bang. After that, He, She, or
It sat back and rested, apparently content to just watch the show. The death, or at least retirement, of God seems critical to this way of thinking, for the allowance of a continuing creative intelligence, an intelligence still actively participating in the creation of reality, might deny or confound the scientist’s desire to perceive and understand an orderly universe.

The evolutionary perspective that Hubbard and Carey describe assumes a continuing creative process—a divine presence, the will and hand of God—which has organized and directed the unfolding of our world and all worlds from the very beginning of space and time. There probably was a big bang (“And the Lord said, ‘Let there be light!’”), followed by the slow and gradual movement, or evolution, of the Divine into more and more complex forms with greater and greater capacities for self-consciousness. This evolutionary perspective assumes divine intention: to become a world as gloriously complex as Earth, and to become a race of creatures capable of consciously knowing—of knowing that they know—that they embody the Divine, with the destiny to become active participants in the continuing creation of reality.
“Our awareness that God or the designing intelligence of the universe is expressing as us is the ‘open sesame’ of the next stage of evolution. We must not shy away from this profound leap simply because our past experience seems to counsel against it. True, the mass of humanity has thus far demonstrated neither the power, nor morality, nor even the inclination of gods embodied. Evolution means change; we can change. Let’s not be caterpillars arguing against the possibility of flight.

We know that a child, while unable to perform or even imagine the procreative acts of an adult, certainly carries those acts in potential. Given time and proper nourishment, the child will grow, and one day, magically, astonishingly, the child will change. It will have reached its new stage of growth, and a whole new set of rules and possibilities will apply.

Humanity has been such a growing child and now, with all of the fear and excitement of emerging sexuality to a budding adolescent, the world changes within us and around us and calls us to actively play in the greatest sex of all, the creation of reality. As George Leonard writes, “But this new species will evolve…. What was once impalpable now summons us to dismantle the walls between ourselves and our sisters and brothers, to dissolve the distinctions between flesh and spirit, to transcend the present limits of time and matter, to find, at last, not wealth or power but the ecstasy (so long forgotten) of commonplace, unconditional being. For the atom’s soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest clay. The life of every woman or man—the heart of it—is pure and holy joy.

There have always been those individuals, rare for the most part, who have understood this evolving life of “pure and holy joy” and have been able to practically demonstrate their active participation in the continuing creation of reality. Humanity has recognized these individuals, proclaiming them as Christ and Buddha, or as masters and saints. Hubbard has referred to such people as “evolutionary mutants,” those who demonstrate the next stage of human evolution through such practices as healing, telepathy, manifestation, prophesy, etc. They have lived their lives as beacons, as fingers pointing toward the future, often echoing the words of Jesus: All that I do, you shall do, and more. They have left a wealth of guidance for the evolving human, maps for the evolutionary journey, teachings which may have eluded us in the past (like teaching sex education to a three-year old) but which begin to make sense during this age of transformation.

I like to think of the firewalk as yet another old evolutionary mutant. The practice of firewalking has existed for thousands of years in dozens of different cultures as a powerful teaching for the evolving human. It has served as a graphic demonstration of what people can do, and as a clear and usually unforgettable model of humans interacting with their world in a more evolved manner. Many have found that the simple act of viewing a firewalk, or even a video of a firewalk, has greatly expanded their vision of human potential. The firewalk has further served as a practical course of instruction for those who would consciously pursue and support their unfolding growth. Each journey across the fire offers an immediate lesson in the essential connection of mind, body, and environment. We mostly perceive a firm and solid wall separating our ordinary, pre-evolutionary world from the extraordinary world of evolving humanity. The life of each evolutionary mutant has served to soften this wall, causing breakthroughs, opening windows, and making cracks that the rest of us might peek through, catching glimpses and fleeting visions of our future possibilities.
The firewalk has been a dancing through these cracks, an actual experience of stepping over the border between the two worlds and, if only for brief seconds, breathing in the special vibratory quality of a long promised land.

I believe that the firewalk has arrived here, in the heart of scientific culture, and now, at the onset of a monumental evolutionary leap, because it can ultimately serve as a bridge between the two worlds, greatly reducing the stress and danger of the leap. Firewalkers agree with the findings and conclusions of the Newtonian worldview: that we live in an orderly universe, and that natural laws govern the ways of our world. In addition, firewalkers suggest that a creative process intends the orderliness and informs the laws of nature—a continuing creative process underlies and ultimately causes all of manifest reality. We, as conscious human beings, play a vital role in that process. God is alive and well, humans have just begun to fully realize this, and walking on fire serves as a preview of coming attractions. A major message of the firewalk and theme of this book is that a continuing creative process—which I will refer to as the “co-creative process”—determines the way the world manifests, the very fabric of reality and the laws that govern it. Each of us, to the extent that we consciously embrace our potential, has an integral place in that process. This means that reality arises as more than just the mechanical and linear unfolding of prior natural laws. The combined input of all of the conscious life on this planet continuously creates the world anew.

The difference between the person who walks across a bed of coals without the slightest sensation of heat or pain, and the person who takes one step and experiences searing heat and serious pain, has little to do with the texture of the skin, the speed of the walking, the heat of the coals, the amount of moisture on the feet, or any other external consideration. Though such considerations contribute to the final outcome, ultimate success and failure during a firewalk stems from the individual walker’s internal process, or present-time state of consciousness—the sum total of his or her thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and expectations. Walking on fire shows that our internal world continuously influences our external world, that our thoughts and feelings have creative power, that we play a key role in the co-creation of reality, and that we share in responsibility for the unfolding, evolutionary process of life on Earth.

Of course, we do not have to walk on fire in order to experience our role in the co-creative process. We must, however, consciously step into that possibility—the possibility that each of us shares in the creation of this world. Such a step may well feel frightening, as we venture into an unknown realm with immense responsibilities. Still, if we want to move forward in life, we must take the step. It can so easily lead to dancing.

Dancing with the Fire

*******

My second firewalk came two nights later at the same location.

I collected the release forms that night as people entered the room, and felt myself tense slightly as a pretty young woman named Kathy3 arrived, moving slowly on a pair of crutches. I would only find out later that Kathy was a social worker for handicapped rights, that she worked in her spare time on a suicide hot-line, and that she had a bumper sticker shouting “Expect A Miracle,” but I could tell the moment I saw her that she was a determined and self-sufficient woman who was working hard to overcome the limitations in her life.

As I watched her throughout the evening, it became apparent to me that Kathy had come to firewalking. So I worried when, just before going out to the fire, her husband asked if people with cerebral palsy should firewalk and Tolly recommended against it. I sensed that Kathy did not take kindly to, nor listen to, people telling her what she could not do.

For myself, this second firewalk was much the same as the first, though slightly colored with the memory of pain. I felt the same tension throughout my body and the body of the group. The fire seemed just as hot, and the path Tolly raked out looked a tad longer. My mind was every bit as incredulous when the firewalking began, and I experienced the same sense of shifting to a magical, otherworldly reality. I did manage, however, to walk before most everyone else, and thus felt double elation as I reached the other side, unburned. At some point Kathy started moving toward the fire, walking on her crutches really, her legs and feet stiffly dragging behind.

The electrical tension in the circle increased tenfold. Ever so slowly she moved, shuffling into and through the fire, so slowly that at times she seemed stationary, up to her ankles in glowing embers. Each step was a major victory, first carrying her into the heart of the fire, and then slowly carrying her out toward safety. Just at the end of the path she stopped, suddenly, and in the next moment she started screaming. We carried her  immediately from the fire and into the house, and later to a hospital, both feet severely burned, the skin already blistering and peeling. Somehow the firewalk continued, as one crazy person stepped forward in the midst of the terror and started the flow of walkers again. The mood afterwards was subdued, however, as we had little energy for celebration given what we had witnessed. I remember feeling torn. On the one hand, I felt finished with firewalking, and wanted never to take part in such a tragedy again. At the same time, I kept trying to believe that things do happen for good reason and that Kathy’s experience might become an important contribution to my understanding of firewalking.

Kathy would later say that she had been doing fine, feeling neither pain nor the slightest heat, all of the way to that final step. Then she looked down, and the image of her feet buried in burning embers overwhelmed her, causing her to think she was doing the impossible and to hear her lifelong admonishments: “You can’t. You’re unable to. You mustn’t.” At this point she began to burn. She asked that we not feel sorry for her or responsible for her actions, and she demonstrated her personal power by healing in a fraction of the time that her doctors had predicted. She felt truly grateful for the whole experience and stressed that she had in fact walked on fire successfully for all but one step.

12 • Dancing With the Fire

A newspaper reporter present that night had timed the walkers with a stopwatch. He said the average walker took between a second and a half to two seconds to get across the coals and that Kathy had been on them for a full seven seconds before she screamed. So she had indeed firewalked the equivalent of some fifty feet (at that time, a Guinness world record) without burning, and without even lifting her feet out of the fire. Through her extraordinary courage, Kathy had demonstrated what I would come to see as the two primary lessons of firewalking : yes, we can walk through extreme heat without burning; and yes, the fire is hot, we can get burned, and whether we burn or not depends more on our state of mind than on how we firewalk.

I would experience many other “firsts” during the remainder of my training. One night I had my first “cold” walk: I walked through the coals and not only did I not feel any heat, I actually felt cold—an incredible sensation—as if I were walking through snow. The next night I had my first real burn, a screeching pain that sent me to bed with my foot wrapped in a cold, wet towel, seriously debating the value of continued firewalking. I also parachuted out of my first airplane, sat through my first sweat lodge (another ancient ritual), and rappelled down my first rock face, as Tolly and Peggy found different ways to lead us through the lessons of the firewalk. Most importantly to me, one night I chose to walk first—to offer the final words to the group, to prepare the coals, and then to initiate and model the experience by going first. That night went so well I felt confident that I could create firewalks on my own. I felt ready, and excited, to go home and get started.

*******

It began raining early in the morning of Memorial Day that year, and the rain kept up through most of the day. My wife Penny and I were living with two friends in a suburban neighborhood in Concord, just west of Boston. We planned to have the firewalk on our front lawn. We called the local fire department and told them we were having a holiday cookout with an Hawaiian luau-style wood fire. I began to see the rain as a plus, as it would keep our neighbors indoors. I went to the supermarket and bought a case of charcoal lighter, if necessary to keep the fire going.

For the rest of the day we all just sat around the house, shut in by the rain, and quietly freaked out. Someone would stare into a book for ten minutes without registering a word. Or someone would put water on to boil and then stand empty-headed before the tea cabinet trying to remember why. We paced a lot, moving from one room to another with no discernable purpose. We managed some courageous gallows humor, which sometimes worked a giggling release and other times only served to deepen the gloom.

Our good friend Jonathon just happened to show up that afternoon, in town for the holiday. Jonathon is an engineer and the most logical, rational, linear, left-brain I have ever known. When I told him our plans for the evening, he at first became excited, for he only heard the part about my demonstrating the walk. As I slowly made it clear to him that everyone might walk on fire, his eyes bugged out and he started looking for the exit. I asked if he would like to serve as firetender, staying outside and keeping the fire going for us while we were inside preparing to walk. He gladly said yes, happy that he could take part and witness the walk without feeling compelled to do something so utterly outrageous. Evening finally arrived, as did my friends. Once again I found myself sitting in a roomful of people waiting to have root canals without anesthesia. However, this time there was no one present (myself included) who really knew that it would all work out. Fear feeds on fear. If you look to your old friend for reassurance and instead see fear in his eyes, you will tend to feel frightened, which he will spot in your eyes, further frightening him, which further frightens you, which further frightens him . . . and so it went.

14 • Dancing With the Fire

By this time I had come to understand two basic facts about people that almost always hold true at the start of a firewalk. First, we feel disinclined to intentionally move in the direction of pain, unless we have clear social approval, as, for instance, in the case of athletes or dancers. While we might understand and even applaud the marathon runner’s contorted features and occasional shin splints, we consider it quite stupid to intentionally step on a fire and then suffer injury. Second, we have a deep, cellular, instinctive  relationship to fire and its burning nature: virtually every life-form on this planet knows better than to move in the direction of fire, so again, anyone foolish enough to even consider such a practice probably deserves any resulting pain.

Yet my friends and I had our reasons, strong enough to carry us forward in the presence of our doubts and fears, for there we were. Despite a clumsy and halting presentation on my part, the evening progressed and our moment with the fire approached. I told them to take a little break while I went outside to see how the fire had managed in the rain. I found Jonathon keeping his lonely vigil, umbrella overhead, and I took a rake and poked clinically through the fire, attempting to determine whether we had enough coals to do the walk. I felt suddenly blasted with the heat (the fire had done quite well in the rain), with the fire’s electric, glowing, orange burst of energy, and my stomach seized up with the undeniable danger of our enterprise. I took a deep breath, put on a happy face, and went slowly back inside, attempting to emanate all-knowing reassurance. My friends later said that I was white with terror.

We proceeded out to the fire. The rain had lightened to a soft and cooling presence, and a wonderful blessing and balance for our undertaking. We formed a circle, holding hands, except for Jonathon, who stood dry and sensible beneath his umbrella. The singing began. I took the rake and began spreading the coals: all this earth is sacred, every step we take, all this life is sacred, every step we take. As the fiery carpet first spread out before them, I heard a tangible group gasp. Nothing I had said could have prepared them for the intensity of the heat, for the explosion of sparks and smoke, for the solid red-orange sheet of pulsing embers. Minds boggled, bodies trembled, and our singing grew louder, viscerally driven.

I stood before the hot coals, thinking: “Either it works, or it doesn’t, here goes….” I firewalked across, no problem! I was then stunned to see one friend following immediately after, and then another, and another. Whereas the walks during my training had all progressed slowly, half of our group had walked in the first thirty seconds. Whether they had an extreme desire to walk on fire, or an extreme desire to be finished with walking on fire, they were all smiling, and in the space of a minute we had shifted from unthinking terror to exhilarating joy.

I looked over to Penny, who had not yet walked and who was visibly shaking. I had had a dream just before returning home in which Penny had stepped forward and burst into flames. I was hoping that wouldn’t happen. For her part, she had always steadfastly maintained that firewalking was not her sort of thing at all, and that if her husband hadn’t had the temerity to land one in her own front yard she might have forever remained among the blissfully uninitiated. But there it was, and walk she did, smiling brightly all the way into my waiting arms.

We had by then reached the magical shift that most firewalks achieve: the fire had become friendly and inviting, the singing inspired, and the group intensely bonded, with a strong sense that anything was possible. As if to affirm it all and top it with a final encore, Jonathon stepped up to the fire, umbrella still raised overhead, and strolled across the coals with wonderful aplomb, the perfect ending to an unforgettable dance. We were well on our way to an adventure that, years later, continues to provide a wealth of such moments.

What Price Firewalking, Measuring Aka, etc?

1951

BY

Max Freedom Long


Charles W. Kenn, HRA and F. H. F., our good friend who is rapidly becoming the recognized authority on the Hawaii of yesterday, and who gave us the book reporting on the Honolulu firewalking (eg. walking on hot coals) tests some months ago, questions the experimental work of the summer. He writes, as of October 3rd, from Honolulu:

      “Your last Bulletin was interesting. But I still believe that it is not important that we find some logical reason to explain why things happen as they do in Huna. The very fact that they do happen is all that is necessary to know. The Polynesians tell the story of Maui, the culture hero, who succeeded in accomplishing six deeds for the benefit of man, but with the seventh, in trying to find the secret of indefinite earthly life, he perished.  This gives us a deep insight into the ways of thinking of these peoples, as well as the suggestion that they, too, realized that it is folly to inquire into the why of spiritual things, The Huna concept of immortality lies in the idea of ancestor worship, ho`omana kupuna, that a descendant is only a continuation of ancestors, a germ of that spark within him was taken from all ancestors down the line, and the ceremony ofoki piko cutting the umbilical cord of the first born starting a new clan, lahui, is for the purpose of perpetuating that new line indefinitely through descendants in a straight line. … The idea of measuring this or that aka body seems rather far-fetched from where I sit. I presume. that every man has his own ideas about certain things which appear to govern his actions more than what really is or is not basic Huna philosophy. Remember the story of the boy who took his father’s watch apart to see what made it tick, but found that the ticking had stopped and that he could not get the watch together again? Maui, in search of the secret of immortality (his seventh deed), entered the open mouth of the sleeping monster (mo`o) and went on into its insides to examine its heart.. On his way out, having learned the secret, the mo`o awakened and closed its jaws, crushing Maui to death.”

      THIS IS WHERE I CAME IN…HRA Kenn is on firm ground when he objects that the measuring of aka bodies of men and thoughts are not a part of basic Huna (Ho`omana). In self-defense I must make my position clear. Years ago, when I was trying to learn what the na kahuna of many kinds and classes knew or had known, believed or had believed, and did or had done, I found myself up to the ears in the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle mighty few of whose parts matched.

While I learned after a fashion what rites were observed and what things were attempted and what were accomplished, I was not at all satisfied. I wanted to know WHY. I still want to know WHY. I am made that way. And, by the same token, I affirm that UNTIL one knows the hows and whys of any action of body or mind or energy, one is working more or less in the dark. That was where I came in. I'm irresistibly urged to go on down and have a look at the heart to see what makes it tick, to get at the Secret. When and if I come up with that Secret, and it the jaws close on me, I will at least have followed the paths dictated by my particular cast of mind. I am not content at all to know the exact ritual and precise facts of the rite of cutting the umbilical cord of the first born. I want to know how those ancestors of ours got to be na Aumakua and WHY they should be worshiped. At this point in my long search after thirty years I still have not learned exactly how I should construct a thought form cluster to make my prayer, or exactly how to generate and use the mana which I am convinced that the na kahuna used. If an instrument, be it a pendulum, a Biometer or HRA Cameron’s invention, will measure the size and shape of a thought form cluster I make, and. tell me how long it endures or where it goes or how to make it radiate more strongly — even if that isn’t basic Huna — I'm all for it. After all these years of sniffing around in the facts, beliefs and all pervading superstitions, of other men — most of whom have been dead for a very long time — I now want a few simple things which will WORK.

I know that this seems very much like the seventh deed of Maui, and I admit that some of the matters touched upon in our HRA studies are indeed far-fetched in their relation to what we accept as “basic Huna” the Huna of almost no ”whys” at all.

   " I DO BELIEVE…HELP THOU MY UNBELIEF.”

      This quotation from Mark 9:24 describes the state of mental confusion of most of us.

We accept some set of rites and beliefs, affirm our complete faith in their verity and in the fact that if we believe completely, we can get our prayers answered. But, even as the hopeful but fearful father in the New Testament story, we affirm and beg for help to confirm our belief — all in the same breath.

      CHILDHOOD FAITH AND DOCTRINES has been derived for most of us from early BELIEF IN Church training, teaching, contacts and personal observation and experience. As children we have been encouraged to believe, and to pray. Most of us learned very early in life that our prayers were seldom answered. We may have felt a great sadness because of this or because we observed the prayers of our elders go unanswered. In any event, our forming minds received deep impressions of doubt which lasted down the years,

What renews and strengthens? Evidence? Is “seeing believing?” Yes, our greatly weakened belief to both, provided there has not been an emotional reaction in childhood or later, to the lack of answers to our most earnest prayers — a response amounting to an emotional storm which left in its wake a series of fixed hurts and doubts, to say nothing of almost inevitable resentments. To get rid of these fixations or to hurdle them, requires far more than a single convincing piece of evidence showing that God is in His heaven and that He or His angels hear and answer prayer.

Where a at strong set of fixations exist, no amount of pounding with evidence will cause the slightest change. Ancient Huna and modern Psychology teach us this. Then how to “…help thou my unbelief?” Will some Savior do it for us? Improbable at this late date. The only way we know to get rid of fixations is (1) to find them,. and (2) to rationalize their cause and thus drain them off.

      For a number of years I have advocated this approach. I still advocate it. I am still busy using it myself. I have gone back to my early days to search for the origin of my personal fixed doubts. When I find such a source, it always is accompanied by the damning rationalization and complete and irrefutable proof that I first prayed, and that, as a result, secondly, I got no resultant answer. The instant I touch such a sore spot — unhealed for all the years — I am slapped in the face and across the heart by that old logic which is the blind behind which the emotional content of the fixation lurks. That Is why, some years ago, I saw that, at least in the majority of cases, it was necessary to make a fresh start, to find the best possible set of beliefs, to accept them logically and emotionally, and to begin the slow work of rebuilding the crushed belief in a Higher Power, and faith in the possibility of an answer to prayer.

Armor against fresh frustration and the danger of awakening and strengthening the old fixed doubts, lies, at least for me, in having in hand and ready for use at all time, a LOGICAL EXCUSE OR REASON by which to explain to myself WHY I made a prayer action and WHY I got no results. Huna has been a godsend to me. It tells me (1) what I have to do, and do correctly, to make a successful prayer-action. It tells me the conditions that will or will not permit the proper action on my part the limitations under which I must be willing to work. I must not hurt another. I must not have a guilt sense to prevent the low self from making the contact with the Aumakua and sending the mana, the carefully readied thought-structure of the condition desired, etc. (2) I must keep doubts from entering in as I make my picture of the desired conditions lest the structure contain the things I desire to avoid, I must water my prayer-plant in the Aumakua garden each day with the water of mana. I must not change my picture — pull up my plant to see if it is taking root. I must hold the faith unfalteringly, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, and, if the game is worth the candle, year by year. (3) I must make certain that I do not mention my prayer-action and the follow-up to someone who will curse the entire project with a sneer of scorn or word of doubt. This is to be avoided at all costs. Mental attitudes rub off of one of us on to another like soot and black contagion. The slightest whisper of doubt will hit us with trip hammer force as powerful suggestion because old doubt fixations are so easy to revive. The need to “go into your closet to pray” is a very great need indeed. Nothing Is so fragile as the thought picture of the prayer, so easily shattered -or so brilliant with the light of Faith and that Love whose overshadowing we must come to know as Real beyond reality.

To the simple mind of an islander — a kahuna of yesterday – there was I grant you less need for the elaborate rationalization and complete understanding which are an utter necessity for me. He had not been treated to such large doses of a religion which bad retained outer form but had lost its workable knowledge of both low and high magic. Perhaps, as a child, he had seen the prayer-actions made, the rituals gone through, careful step by careful step, and had seen the gods respond and the fire-walk made possible. Contrast such a proof ,such a powerful physical stimulus, with the vague or even contradictory answers to prayer in Christian circles . Even a simple belief must be based on something, but a belief complexed by fixations resulting from repeated failures in demonstration cannot be rebuilt except on new and massive foundations of proof and repeated proof. I would that each of us could perform the rites and be given the proofs of fire-immunity before every major effort of prayer.

      Lacking an ever-ready firewalk for proof, to help my unbelief, I grasp at all straws. My need is immediate, not a matter of tomorrow or something to talk to death or fritter away in speculation, I sit twice, or more often at times, each day in the TMHG ritual, and I have the burden on my heart and the uplift under my spirit, of the needs of those who work with me.

Some of my friends are ill, a few are blind, many are in trouble of one kind or another. Anything that will bolster up my faith and help my unbelief is priceless. If Verne Cameron can let me make a thought picture of a vase on a shelf, then find it with his gadget and measure its size and outline its shape tell me how long it remains there as a real structure, that helps me to know that Huna is right. —my accepted belief — and that I can and do make forms by thinking, actual and substantial forms, even if of matter too fine to be seen by the eyes or felt by the hands.

The same can be said of every bit of corroborative proof that there are thought-form-structures, that things do radiate a form of energy, that invisible cords do connect people, things and man with his Aumakua…Heaven knows that I have one answer to prayer after another; and that hardly a day. passes without the arrival of letters telling that my friends are getting definite answerers to their prayers and to their TMHG prayers in which we work together as a congregation through telepathic aka thread contact. These proofs would be far more than sufficient for a simple and unhampered mind which remained a stranger to the doubt fixations I have known, but for me, such proofs need to be renewed as the offices on the altar, daily, yes, almost hourly.

No, not basic Huna — but for me, basic necessity.

The Relentless Majesty of Huna

Chapter 3: Na i ke Umu Ki
(The Hunian Firewalk)

And how the Umu Ki Ceremony was returned to Huna

2006
by Ho`anoiWahinenuiho`aLani

      It was about 800 years ago that the gods decided to offer us the means to the acquisition of faith again, for those who wished to perpetuate it, to end their confusions and involuntary suffering. And the Created World was drenched in the fire-made-sacred of the Firewalk.

A number of religions were close enough to reality to see the path towards faith there, and kept that flame alive. It was somehow transmitted to the na Kahuna (Priests) of Polynesia at about that time.

And Arii-Peu Tama-Iti, HRA,  of our Hunian lineage tells us this of that time:

“It is to be seen that their purpose was accepted along with the theory and practice. In the lands of origin the rite had been used to provide or to give proof of, “purity” or “purification” in the religious sense. It was supposed to bring clairvoyance and clairaudience so that the fate of lost voyagers might be learned, lost articles recovered etc. It was a thanksgiving ceremony. It called down a blessing on crops and people and animals. It brought rain. It replenished the fish in waters nearby. In India one fire walked to fulfill a vow when prayers had been answered. Walking on hot coal was supposed to cure sterility. In Japan firewalk was used as a healing ritual for various forms of sickness.

In Polynesia firewalking was used more or less for the same purposes, but as an additional rite and not to replace older rites already in use … Once a set of ideas has been accepted, it is fitted neatly in with other ideas already a part of the scheme of things, and soon takes on the aspect of having been a part of the older systems for centuries back.”

-Arii-Peu Tama-Iti, HRA

Six hundred years passed. Firewalking spread all over the World again, giving many pomaika`i all over for the Children of God (all beings having a capacity for the loss of faith). Crops came and were watered, sicknesses healed, lost faith restored.

But then it began to die out all over the world again. And in Hawaii, no young haumana could be found, and the last of the na Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki (Priests of the Fire-made-sacred) called out to the na Aumakua, and were heard. Their plea heard even decades before they cried out.

And the cries  were heard by the gods, some of whom came together as our first Po`e Aumakua (Council of God-selves), and they presented kokiki before the child they had found in Boston. And all the painful, fearful choices made, and he arrived in the Hawaiian Islands, a sturdy young man, but shriven of all hope but for the Aloha of his friends who had called him to them in the time of his need.

It was 1872.

He spend several years creating the great Bishop Museum in Honolulu, the center of all scientific investigations of Polynesia and Micronesia. Dr. William Tufts Brigham was its designer, and first Curator and Director.

But like the super-heroes of the 1930's Comic Books, he had a secret life and identity. To the native Hawaiian with whom he had constant relationships with for the gathering of artifacts and researches, he was, “Kahuna Ha`ole Nui William”.  [Great White Priest]

Around 1890 one of another of his prayers was answered and he experienced one of the great mysteries and wonders of this world—the Firewalk…

As Kahuna Ha`ole Nui William told it to Kahuna Nui Max:

      “When I'm gone”, he [Kahuna Ha`ole Nui William Tufts Brigham] said to me [Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long] one evening, " you may tell what I am now telling you. I know you will tell it as nearly word for word as you are able. If I thought you would put words into my mouth which were not mine I would tell you nothing, but I trust you. You have the proper cautious approach and understanding needed in a study of the kahunas. You may say for me that I gave my word as a student and a gentleman that I would, and had, told the exact truth about what I saw and did. This is all either of us can do. Both of us will be branded unholy liars by a certain class. That class you can afford to snub, and, as I will be dead, I will have lost my childish fear of losing standing as a scientist. However, I trust that before you are as old as I am, the thing we call 'magic' will have been taken into the laboratory, in some way, and made a part of the working equipment of the world."

      Dr. Brigham, in his earlier days, made frequent trips to the " Big Island," or Hawaii. There were many kahunas working there at that time. In the course of his investigations on firewalk he made friends of a number of them. He posed as a ha`ole, or white, kahuna, and discussed beliefs and methods with the brown magicians on intimate terms-trying always to get from them the secret of secrets which they guarded so carefully.

      Among his kahuna friends were three Hawaiians who knew the fire-magic. They used it mainly to prevent lava flows from damaging the property of clients. One of them had 'been called in by Princess Ruth at the time the town of Hilo was being approached by a slow-moving lava flow. Everything had been done to stop the encroaching mass of lava, which was kept hot by the burning of self-generated gases in its substance. In a doughlike mass, and with a wide front, it continued day after day to tumble slowly forward, rolling and grinding, toward Hilo. Stone walls were built in front of it and promptly torn aside and absorbed.

      A large number of men spent days throwing earth and rock into the flow to thicken and stop it. Even water was ditched to a place in front of it. Nothing availed. Closer and closer it crept, destroying everything as it went. The Princess came from Honolulu by ship. She met the Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki at Hilo and went to the face of the flow. There she cut off locks of her hair at his direction and, while he recited the proper invocations, threw the locks into the slow-tumbling mass.

      It is recorded in history that the flow went but two rods farther before stopping. The town was saved.

This old kahuna and two others had agreed with Dr. Brigham that they would demonstrate their fire-walking art when opportunity offered. They also had promised to let him do some firewalking under their protection.

At a time when the volcanic mountain Mauna Loa, on the island of Hawaii, was active, Dr. Brigham happened to be close at hand. I will present the story as I reproduced it from my notes a few days after he gave it to me. As he tells the story, see him : a huge old man in the eighties, hale and hearty, although recently having suffered the loss of a leg ; mentally alert, enthusiastic, eager, humorous, and withal very earnest. It is night and he is seated in a great easychair beside a ponderous oak table which stands in the centre of a long low room.

" When the flow started," related Dr. Brigham, " I was in South Kona, at Napo`opo`o. I waited a few days to see whether it promised to be a long one. When it continued steadily, I sent a message to my three kahuna friends, asking them to meet me at Napo`opo`o so we could go to the flow and try the firewalking.

" It was a week before they arrived, as they had to come around from Kau by canoe. And even when they came, we couldn't start at once. To them it was our reunion that counted and not so simple a matter as a bit of fire-walking. Nothing would do but that we get a pig and have a luau (native feast).

" It was a great luau. Half of Kona invited itself. When it was over I had to wait another day until one of the kahunas sobered up enough to travel.

" It was night when we finally got off after having to wait an entire afternoon to get rid of those who had heard what was up and wished to go along. I'd have taken them all had it not been that I was not too sure I would walk the hot lava when the time came. I had seen these three kahunas run barefooted over little overflows of lava at Kilauea, and the memory of the heat wasn't any too encouraging.

" The going was hard that night as we climbed the gentle slope and worked our way across old lava flows towards the upper rain forests. The kahunas had on sandals, but the sharp cindery particles on some of the old flows got next their feet. We were always having to wait while one or the other sat down and removed the adhesive cinders.

" When we got up among the trees and ferns it was dark as pitch. We fell over roots and into holes. We gave it up after a time and bedded down in an old lava tube for the rest of the night. In the morning we ate some of our poi and dried fish, then set out to find more water. This took us some time as there are no springs or streams in those parts and we had to watch for puddles of rain water gathered in hollow places in the rocks.

" Until noon we climbed upward under a smoky sky and with the smell of sulphur fumes growing stronger and stronger. Then came more poi and fish. At about three o'clock we arrived at the source of the flow.

" It was a grand sight. The side of the mountain had broken open just above the timber line and the lava was spouting out of several vents-shooting with a roar as high as two hundred feet, and falling to make a great bubbling pool.

" The pool drained off at the lower end into the flow. An hour before sunset we started following it down in search of a place where we could try our experiment.

" As usual, the flow had followed the ridges instead of the valleys and had built itself  up enclosing walls of clinker. These walls were up to a thousand yards in width and the hot lava ran between them in a channel it had cut to bedrock.

" We climbed up these walls several times and crossed them to have a look at the flow. The clinkery surface was cool enough by then for us to walk on it, but here and there we could look down into cracks and see the red glow below. Now and again we had to dodge places where colourless flames were spouting up like gas jets in the red light filtering through the smoke.

" Coming down to the rain forest without finding a place where the flow blocked up and overflowed periodically, we bedded down again for the night. In the morning we went on, and in a few hours found what we wanted. The flow crossed a more level strip perhaps a half-mile wide. Here the enclosing walls ran in flat terraces, with sharp drops from one level to the next. Now and again a floating boulder or mass of clinker would plug the flow just where a drop commenced, and then the lava would back up and spread out into a large pool. Soon the plug would be forced out and the lava would drain away, leaving behind a fine flat surface to walk on when sufficiently hardened.

" Stopping beside the largest of three overflows, we watched it fill and empty. The heat was intense, of course, even up on the clinkery wall. Down below us the lava was red and flowing like water, the only difference being that water couldn't get that hot and that the lava never made a sound even when going twenty miles an hour down a sharp grade. That silence always interests me when I see a flow. Where water has to run over rocky bottoms and rough projections, lava burns off everything and makes itself a channel as smooth as the inside of a crock.

"As we wanted to get back down to the coast that day, the kahunas wasted no time. They had brought ti leaves with them and were all ready for action as soon as the lava would bear our weight. (The leaves of the ti plant are universally used by fire walkers where available in Polynesia. They are a foot or two long and fairly narrow, with cutting edges like saw-grass. They grow in a tuft on the top of a stalk resembling in shape and size a broomstick.)

" When the rocks we threw on the lava surface showed that it had hardened enough to bear our weight, the kahunas arose and clambered down the side of the wall. It was far

worse than a bake oven when we got to the bottom. The lava was blackening on the surface, but all across it ran heat discolourations that came and went as they do on cooling iron before a blacksmith plunges it into his tub for tempering. I heartily wished that I had not been so curious. The very thought of running over that flat inferno to the other side made me tremble-and remember that I had seen all three of the kahunas scamper over hot lava at Kilauea.

" The kahunas took off their sandals and tied ti leaves around their feet, about three leaves to the foot. I sat down and began tying my ti leaves on outside my big hob-nailed boots. I wasn't taking any chances. But that wouldn't do at all-I must take off my boots and my two pairs of socks. The goddess Pele hadn't agreed to keep boots from burning and it might be an insult to her if I wore them.

" I argued hotly-and I say 'hotly' because we were all but roasted. I knew that Pele wasn't the one who made fire-magic possible, and I did my best to find out what or who was. As usual they grinned and said that of course the 'white' kahuna knew the trick of getting mana (power of some kind known to kahunas) out of air and water to use in kahuna work, and that we were wasting time talking about the thing no kahuna ever put into words-the secret handed down only from father to son.

" The upshot of the matter was that I sat tight and refused to take off my boots. In the back of my mind I figured that if the Hawaiians could walk on hot lava with bare calloused feet, I could do it with my heavy leather soles to protect me. Remember that this happened at a time when I still had an idea that there was some physical explanation for the thing.

" The kahunas got to considering my boots a great joke. If I wanted to offer them as a sacrifice to the gods, it might be a good idea. They grinned at each other and left me to tie on my leaves while they began their chants.

" The chants were in an archaic Hawaiian which I could not follow. It was. the usual' god-talk 'handed down word for word for countless generations. All I could make of it was that it consisted of simple little mentions of legendary history and was peppered with praise of some god or gods.

" I almost roasted alive before the kahunas had finished their chanting, although it could not have taken more than a few minutes. Suddenly the time was at hand. One of the kahunas beat at the shimmering surface of the lava with a bunch of ti leaves and then offered me the honor of crossing first. Instantly I remembered my manners ; I was all for age before beauty.

" The matter was settled at once by deciding that the oldest kahuna should go first, I second and the others side by side. Without a moment of hesitation the oldest man trotted out on that terrifically hot surface. I was watching him with my mouth open and he was nearly across-a distance of about a hundred and fifty feet-when someone gave me a shove that resulted in my having my choice of falling on my face on the lava or catching a running stride.

" I still do not know what madness seized me, but I ran. The heat was unbelievable. I held my breath and my mind seemed to stop functioning. I was young then and could do my hundred-yard dash with the best. Did I run ! I flew ! I would have broken all records, but with my first few steps the soles of my boots began to burn. They curled and shrank, clamping down on my feet like a vice. The seams gave way and I found myself with one sole gone and the other flapping behind me from the leather strap at the heel.

" That flapping sole was almost the death of me. It tripped me repeatedly and slowed me down. Finally, after what seemed minutes, but could not have been more than a few seconds, I leaped off to safety.

" I looked down at my feet and found my socks burning at the edges of the curled leather uppers of my boots. I beat out the smoldering fire in the cotton fabric and looked up to find my three kahunas rocking with laughter as they pointed to the heel and sole of my left boot which lay smoking and burned to a crisp on the lava.

" I laughed too. I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe and that there was not a blister on

my feet-not even where I had beaten out the fire in the socks.

" There is little more that I can tell of this experience. I had a sensation of intense heat on my face and body, but almost no sensation in my feet. When I touched them with my hands they were hot on the bottoms, but they did not feel so except to my hands. None of the kahunas had a blister, although the ti leaves had burned off their soles.

" My return trip to the coast was a nightmare. Trying to make it in improvised sandals whittled from green wood has left with me an impression almost more vivid than my fire-walking."

It is one of the tragedies of Huna, although something which adds spice and potentialities and turbulence to our lineage, that Kahuna Ha`ole Nui William Tufts Brigham, first Mo`i of Huna, didn't pass on this miracle to his only haumana and mamo, Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long. But if he had, this would have been a very short story indeed!

But like my descendant, Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki, Kahuna William performed “experiments” on the actions to convince themselves that fire is really hot—and that fire burns:

"It's magic," he [Kahuna William] assured me [Kahuna Max]. ” It’s a part of the bulk of magic done by the kahunas [Priests, Ministers] and by other primitive peoples. It took me years to come to that understanding, but it is my final decision after long study and observation."

" But," I objected, " didn't you try to explain it some other way ? "

The doctor smiled at me. " Certainly I did. It has been no easy task for me to come to believe [religious] magic possible. And even after I was dead-sure it was [religious] magic I still had a deep seated doubt concerning my own conclusions.. Even after doing the fire-walking I came back to the theory that lava might form a porous and insulating surface as it cooled. Twice I tested that theory at Kilauea when there were little overflows. I waited in one case until a small overflow had cooled quite black, then touched it with the tips of my fingers. But although the lava was much cooler than that I ran across, I burned my fingers badly-and I'd only just dabbed at the hot surface."

" And the other time ? " I asked.

He shook his head and smiled guiltily. " I should have known better after that first set of blisters, but the old ideas were hard to down. I knew I had walked over hot lava, but still I couldn't always believe it possible that I could have done so. The second time I got excited about my insulating surface theory, I took up some hot lava on a stick as one would take up taffy. And I had to bum a finger again before I was satisfied. No, there is no mistake. The kahunas use magic in their fire walking as well as in many other things.

"There is one set of natural laws for the physical world and another for the other world. And-try to believe this if you can : The laws of the other side are so much the stronger that they can be used to neutralize and reverse the laws of the physical."

…All in all, it would appear that fire-magic works in strange ways which are little related to the " laws " of Science. -MFL

The loss of the fire-made-sacred under the adoption of Kahuna Max to Kahuna William, was a deep loss for Huna.

Kahuna Max longed for that experience all his life—but it never could break free to come to him.

In 1949 the Po`e Aumakua almost panicked to bring the fire-made-sacred back into Huna hands. There were only two na Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki left in Polynesia at all, and none of them Hawaiian.

From the Society Islands, a kokiki was presented to a Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki. His fellow Tahitians had come to ruin in Hawaii. Wanted to come home, but had no way to do that. No money. Would he go to Hawaii and put on several Firewalks to make money to send them home?

He would. He chose his wyrd, his kokiki, and the kumu hua of the Firewalks were ho`oikaika in the manawa. (The thought forms strengthened in the Time/Space Continuum until they ua and became a reality in the NOW.)

And Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Tu-Nui Arii-Peu came to his kinfolk in the time of their need.

In the unfolding of the Huna Wyrd, he needed help in arranging matters, and our HRA member, the greatest Hawaiian Scholar, Arii-Peu Tama-Iti (Charles Kenn) was right there to help him! As the Po`e Aumakua of Huna intended, but they each had to chose their kokiki themselves. All the na Aumakua can do is create a Kumu Hua in the Manawa and bright the coincidence into fruition. The decisions are always up to us.

 

Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Tu-Nui Arii-Peu, kumu Arii-Peu Tama-Iti, HRA and an honored Sacred-Fire attendant

1949, Honolulu Firewalk

      Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Tu-Nui Arii-Peu decided to initiate kumu Arii-Peu Tama-Iti into the Firewalk cult. Thus the fire-made-sacred would have been returned to Huna, through the HRA.

But the Po`e Aumakua of Huna is not unopposed. There are two opponents to Huna, and all other truly important and good changes to humanity's Wyrd. Evil (The Will to Win at Any Cost), and The Opposition. Indeed, it is the mark of a potential success to attract the attention of Evil and/or The Opposition. They show interest in things which matter. Their entry into a scene emphatically points to the seriousness and potential good a thing might accomplish.

We are on ke alanui e pono ia `o huna (the great path of Huna righteousness), are the Path, Evil are as the bandits on the Path hiding behind the boulders, ready to snap out at the sign of weakness. They offer corruption and the winning, they are free of Service. They seek to titillate one's Evil inside us to answer their call.

But The Opposition is on a different plane of existence. It is the incline of the Path. The faster the climb, the more exhausting. It seeks to block progress by titillation of one's virtues into the making of decisions which cause others to fail.

Arii-Peu Tama-Iti: February 20, 1949.

      As I stepped down to the first stone in the walk, any misgivings I may have had, left me. My mind seemed to become strangely empty or blank. The very uneven surface before me suddenly seemed to become smooth almost like a pavement. I stepped slowly forward, planting my feet firmly on the stones, but found myself doing as most of the others had done, using my arms to help keep my balance as I stepped from one rounded surface to the next.

      I felt no sensation of heat on the bottoms of my feet as I entered the pit and began my crossing, but the heat on my face and hands was terrific.

      I was nearing the end of the pit, with two steps to go, when a friend standing at the side called out, “Atta boy, Mr. Kenn!” My attention was momentarily distracted and I involuntarily glanced up at him. I did not falter in my deliberate pace, but at the instant he called out to me, there came a sharp stab of pain in the ball of my right foot and in the toes—this foot was just coming down. My pace automatically quickened and as the other foot made contact with a stone for the last step, a similar stab of pain was felt in it. I stepped out of the pit and found both of my feet continuing to pain me with a sharp tingling, but not with the familiar sensation of burns. I examined both feet and nothing was to be seen in the way of markings or blisters. Later, at home, I made another inspection and found what seemed to be hard lumps under each toe. The stinging sensations resembled the pricking of many needles, but the soles of my feet were not hot to the touch, or sore. This condition lasted for about five hours. In the morning my feet were back to normal in every way and the strange lumps had vanished completely.

      The feeling of having the mind a blank was a common experience among the fire walkers I talked to. It is evident that a break in this peculiar mental state, or an interruption of the successful course of the walk, acted in some way to “break the spell,” and that burns then occurred as if no protection had been offered”

That assumption, although specious, is only partially true, isn't it? The Goddess Wahinenuiho`alani and his Aumakua were still able to protect him a little. There were no burns, only the tingling which can signal the work of the mana loa of healing.

February 19,1949

Mazeway

      Any which has a “Mazeway” is a “religion”, anything which duties not, isn't a religion.

We all live our lives as if we are in a Maze. When food, shelter, love, etc. are plentiful, everything is smooth and easy, there is not great need for a religion, except as a form of entertainment.

But when things get scarce, and hard, and in desperation, we seek a map to our Maze—a Mazeway. The Mazeway are the moral instructions on how to live a good life in our Maze, it is the instructions given to us to help us in our choices.

One such fundamental Moral teaching of Huna is: Affiliations over Acquisitions. In other words, in all choices between our duties and our desires, we must choose our duties first. To fulfill our duties to our `ohana before increasing our own treasure or hungers.

It is a tool of The Opposition to corrupt us by turning our virtues into vices. But these situations are rare in life, but their effect on us is devastating upon us and all we know when they sneak up on us. When we are confronted by kokiki corrupted by The Opposition—there are no good choices. It is a time of our inevitable condemnation under a doom. It is our pono that death comes to us all, and we may start another lifetime innocent of the decisions made in past lives (but not the consequences to our souls).

Although Evil (the Will to Win) is too subtle and Metaphysical for Science to ever discover or know, The Opposition is so powerful that it exists both in the Eternal Metaphysical World and the Cr4eated World of physics as well. Here the Scientists call The Opposition—Entropy.

In 1980, I was in a conversation with Arii-Peu Tama-Iti about his resignation from Huna three decades before, and what it meant that he was an honored speaker at the International Huna Conference in Napo`opo`o on the Big Island of Hawaii.

We were alone except for the HRI BoD John Bainbridge, who taped the conversation—then lost that tape.

Arii-Peu Tama-Iti, now very old, told me the story of what had happened after the Firewalk of 1949.

His initiation into na Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki was incomplete, and his kumu had gone back to Tahiti. He received an invitation to join him, and finish his initiation. Live his family for a time.

At about the same time, he received word that his friend Melville [Leinani Melville, I think], was dieing in San Francisco and was calling for him.

Now, the Huna moral precept is: Serve your friends before you serve yourself. IN a situation between becoming a Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki or sitting with your friend as he dies, the only choice is to go to your friend. Even if there was foresight of what was about to happen, he would have understood that in going to his friend he would fail his gods, and fail generations of HRA in Huna. Still, Huna would have said to go to his friend.

But The Opposition was involved in…not trying to prevent the fire-made-sacred from returning to Huna, but ensuring that the person who brought it was a person who had the right to do it, by self-sacrifice and cost.

He didn't know. The Kalo wasn't with him yet. He knew of the prophecy, of course. That the next Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki would rule all of Hawaii. But he didn't know that a Death Prayer Priest knew of his initiation, and the invitation to come to Tahiti to complete his initiation.

Or in Arii-Peu Tama-Iti's own words, in his book, Firewalking from the Inside which he had the HRA and Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long publish, he relates:

      “Chief Tu-Nui Arii-Peu let down the bars and made the inevitable welcome. Being permitted by circumstances to let down the bars, he opened his heart as well, and with his customary generosity offered me everything.

      …[H]e has adopted me as his blood son, has given me an honored place in his family line, and has made me the proud possessor of his distinguished ancestors. He has also given me a new name to use as a member of his family. I am using that name in the author’s signature of this report. I am Arii-Peu Tama-Iti as well as Charles W. Kenn. At this writing I plan to accept his warm invitation and go to spend most of the coming winter season with him on Huahine where I can continue searching for information of value. I shall also, in all probability, complete my initiation into the cult of the fire-walk to the point of being able to use for myself what has been taught to me. If I succeed, I shall be one of the three remaining fire-walkers in Polynesia.

      As a candidate for initiation as a fire walking priest of the Ti Oven Cult, I was allowed to see every step leading up to the final crossing of the hot stones. Of necessity I was permitted to forgo the long and arduous training of other days, but was given the assurance that once I learned every step in the rite and all of the invocations, I would undoubtedly be able to perform the ritual. I would then have been consecrated to the work and would have been properly ordained, or introduced to the gods so that they would, thereafter, respond to my invocations.

      So following the Huna precept: Affiliation over Acquisition, and never suspecting what would happen, he came to San Francisco and held his friend's hand as he died.

MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH, the Kahuna `Ana`ana saw his chance, and took it. He set himself against Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Tu-Nui Arii-Peu in far away Tahiti, and took his life.

As far as is known, Arii-Peu Tama-Iti never Firewalked again. His soul turned `awa olelo (bitter mouth) and he resigned from the HRA and spent many years preaching against Huna to all the Polynesian organizations which would have his lecture to them.

His error was in Externalizing (Other-Sourcing) the results of his decisions of which kokiki to follow. And knowing that he was trapped by The Opposition and Wyrd, so that no decision would have led to a good outcome. SO he decided to hate Huna and Kahuna Max rather than himself. But if he had been Self-Sourcing, he would not have needed to hate at all. Nor to despair. (For in desperation, we destroy what we love.) If he had changed his attitude to Self-Sourcing, he still would have grieved his losses and Huna's losses. But inside, he would have known his purity of intention, and that would have sustained his soul. For that is all Oiai`o calls upon us to do—to  Serve as best we may. We arenot called to Win. Although that's always nice and fun. It isn't always possible.

And so, in 1980, I wondered why he was there with us Huna na haumana. He told me that is was simple, Huna had ho`ikaika (persisted) through the death of Kahuna Max Freedom Long, he never thought it would survive, and since it had, it should be given a chance to perpetuate itself and do the good it would do.

He was a grand gentleman, although no one ever knew of his turning around in the matter except for John Bainbridge and myself. But what could I do but forgive him. A couple of months later he died of old age. And anti-Huna, anti-ha`ole Polynesian folks still quote Charlie Kenn's bad opinion of us to me to prove to me how Evil Huna and Kahuna Nui Max and I am.

The anti-white, anti-Huna militants are strange. They complain that Huna isn't Hawaiian (it isn't), the word huna has no religious connotations in the Hawaiian language, where it means secrets or dust. Then they complain that since it is Hawaiian, we must have stolen it from them…? And besides we“didn't get it right”.

<SHRUG> Huna is its own thing, it always was.

From Arii-Peu Tama-Iti's letter of resignation:

Charles W. Kenn, HRA and F. H. F., our good friend who is rapidly becoming the recognized authority on the Hawaii of yesterday, and who gave us the book reporting on the Honolulu firewalking tests some months ago, questions the experimental work of the summer. He writes, as of October 3rd [c. 1949], from Honolulu:

“Your last Bulletin was interesting. But I still believe that it is not important that we find some logical  reason to explain why things happen as they do in Huna. …The Huna concept of immortality lies in the idea of ancestor worship, ho`omana kupuna, that a descendant is only a continuation of ancestors, a germ of that spark within him was taken from all ancestors down the line, …I presume. that every man has his own ideas about certain things which appear to govern his actions more than what really is or is not basic Huna philosophy. Remember the story of the boy who took his father’s watch apart to see what made it tick, but found that the ticking had stopped and that he could not get the watch together again? Maui, in search of the secret of immortality (his seventh deed), entered the open mouth of the sleeping monster (mo`o) and went on into its insides to examine its heart.. On his way out, having learned the secret, the mo`o awakened and closed its jaws, crushing Maui to death.”

[MFL:] THIS IS WHERE I CAME IN. …HRA Kenn is on firm ground when he objects that the measuring of aka bodies of men and thoughts are not a part of basic Huna. In self-defense I must make my position clear. Years ago, when I was trying to learn what the kahunas [Priests and Ministers]  of many kinds and classes knew or had known, believed or had believed, and did or had done, I found myself up to the ears in the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle mighty few of whose parts matched.

…I am not content at all to know the exact ritual and precise facts of the rite of cutting the umbilical cord of the first born. I want to know how those ancestors of ours got to be Aumakuas and WHY they should be worshiped. At this point in my long search after thirty years I still have not learned exactly how I should construct a thought form cluster to make my prayer, or exactly how to generate and use the mana which I am convinced that the kahunas used. If an instrument, be it a pendulum, a Biometer [Psychometric Analysis]  or HRA Cameron’s invention [the Aurameter], will measure the size and shape of a thought form cluster I make, and. tell me how long it endures or where it goes or how to make it radiate more strongly — even if that isn’t basic Huna — I'm all for it. After all these years of sniffing around in the facts, beliefs and all pervading superstitions, of other men — most of whom have been dead for a very long time — I now want a few simple things which will WORK.

CHILDHOOD FAITH AND DOCTRINES has been derived for most of us from early BELIEF IN Church training, teaching, contacts and personal observation and experience. As children we have been encouraged to believe, and to pray. Most of us learned very early in life that our prayers were seldom answered. We may have felt a great sadness because of this or because we observed the prayers of our elders go unanswered. In any event, our forming minds received deep impressions of doubt which lasted down the years. What renews and strengthens? Evidence? Is “seeing believing?” Yes, our greatly weakened belief to both, provided there has not been an emotional reaction in childhood or later, to the lack of answers to our most earnest prayers — a response amounting to an emotional storm which left in its wake a series of fixed hurts and doubts, to say nothing of almost inevitable resentments. To get rid of these fixations or to hurdle them, requires far more than a single convincing piece of evidence showing that God is in His heaven and that He or His angels hear and answer prayer.

Where a at strong set of fixations exist, no amount of pounding with evidence will cause the slightest change. Ancient Huna and modern Psychology teach us this. Then how to “…help thou my unbelief?” Will some Savior do it for us? Improbable at this late date. The only way we know to get rid of fixations is (1) to find them,. and (2) to rationalize their cause and thus drain them off.

For a number of years I have advocated this using it myself.  I still advocate it. I am still busy, I have gone back into this method of approach to my early days to search for the origin of my personal fixed doubts. When I find such a source, it always is accompanied by the damning rationalization and complete and irrefutable proof that I first prayed, and that, as a result, secondly, I got no resultant answer. The instant I touch such a sore spot — unhealed for all the years — I am slapped in the face and across the heart by that old logic which is the blind behind which the emotional content of the fixation lurks. That Is why, some years ago, I saw that, at least in the majority of cases, it was necessary to make a fresh start, to find the best possible set of beliefs, to accept them logically and emotionally, and to begin the slow work of rebuilding the crushed belief in a Higher Power, and faith in the possibility of an answer to prayer.

Armor against fresh frustration and the danger of awakening and strengthening the old fixed doubts, lies, at least for me, in having in hand and ready for use at all time, a LOGICAL EXCUSE OR REASON by which to explain to myself WHY I made a prayer action and WHY I got no results. Huna has been a godsend to me. It tells me (1) what I have to do, and do correctly, to make a successful prayer-action. It tells me the conditions that will or will not permit the proper action on my part the limitations under which I must be willing to work. I must not hurt another. I must not have a guilt sense to prevent the low self from making the contact with the Aumakua and sending the mana, the carefully readied thought-structure of the condition desired, etc. (2) I must keep doubts from entering in as I make my picture of the desired conditions lest the structure contain the things I desire to avoid, I must water my prayer-plant in the Aumakua garden each day with the water of mana. I must not change my picture — pull up my plant to see if it is taking root. I must hold the faith unfalteringly, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, and, if the game is worth the candle, year by year. (3) I must make certain that I do not mention my prayer-action and the follow-up to someone who will curse the entire project with a sneer of scorn or word of doubt. This is to be avoided at all costs. Mental attitudes rub off of one of us on to another like soot and black contagion. The slightest whisper of doubt will hit us with trip hammer force as powerful suggestion because old doubt fixations are so easy to revive. The need to “go into your closet to pray” is a very great need indeed. Nothing Is so fragile as the thought picture of the prayer, so easily shattered -or so brilliant with the light of Faith and that Love whose overshadowing we must come to know as Real beyond reality.

To the simple mind of an islander — a kahuna of yesterday – there was I grant you less need for the elaborate rationalization and complete understanding which are an utter necessity for me. He had not been treated to such large doses of a religion which bad retained outer form but had lost its workable knowledge of both low and high magic. Perhaps, as a child, he had seen the prayer-actions made, the rituals gone through, careful step by careful step, and had seen the gods respond and the fire walk made possible. Contrast such a proof ,such a powerful physical stimulus, with the vague or even contradictory answers to prayer in Christian circles . Even a simple belief must be based on something, but a belief complexed by fixations resulting from repeated failures in demonstration cannot be rebuilt except on new and massive foundations of proof and repeated proof. I would that each of us could perform the rites and be given the proofs of fire-immunity before every major effort of prayer.

Lacking an ever-ready firewalk for proof, to help my unbelief, I grasp at all straws. My need is immediate, not a matter of tomorrow or something to talk to death or fritter away in speculation, I sit twice, or more often at times, each day in the TMHG ritual, and I have the burden on my heart and the uplift under my spirit, of the needs of those who work with me.

Some of my friends are ill, a few are blind, many are in trouble of one kind or another. Anything that will bolster up my faith and help my unbelief is priceless. If Verne Cameron can let me make a thought picture of a vase on a shelf, then find it with his gadget and measure its size and outline its shape tell me how long it remains there as a real structure, that helps me to know that Huna is right. —my accepted belief — and that I can and do make forms by thinking, actual and substantial forms, even if of matter too fine to be seen by the eyes or felt by the hands.

The same can be said of every bit of corroborative proof that there are thought-form-structures, that things do radiate a form of energy, that invisible cords do connect people, things and man with his Aumakua…Heaven knows that I have one answer to prayer after another; and that hardly a day. passes without the arrival of letters telling that my friends are getting definite answerers to their prayers and to their TMHG prayers in which we work together as a congregation through telepathic aka thread contact. These proofs would be far more than sufficient for a simple and unhampered mind which remained a stranger to the doubt fixations I have known, but for me, such proofs need to be renewed as the offices on the altar, daily, yes, almost hourly.

No, not basic Huna — but for me, basic necessity. -MFL

But there would be no response back from Arii-Peu Tama-Iti for thirty years. He had become `awa olelo (bitter mouthed) about Huna.

Kahuna Nui Max would have to spend all his days without the miracle of the Firewalk in Huna. That was a part of the cost of Arii-Peu Tama-Iti's choice at his kokiki.

Then in 1968 I was standing in Kahuna Nui Max's home. We were talking about how I was to live my life to come. What would I do? Move to Pine Ridge Rez and raise Appaloosa horses with my girlfriend, then wife? Or become a Kahuna `o Huna?

He had, for the first and only time been yelling at me. That becoming a rancher would be a waste of this lifetime.

  1. And since Kahuna Nui had sent me a set of the HRA Bulletins and Huna Vistas Newsletters in 1962, what, if any duty would I assign to myself (I asked this of myself, Kahuna Nui Max never asked me for anything but to choose).

But the fire of the Firewalk always scared me silly.

I have no idea who I ho`ohiki Kahuna Max that I would return the fire-made-sacred to Huna. Unwind the pilikia of Arii-Peu Tama-Iti and kahuna Ha`ole Nui William's decisions which had lot it to us.

Years passed. Kahuna Nui Max died. I met Arii-Peu Tama-Iti in Hawaii.

My mom died, my best friend died, and I moved to the San Francisco area. In time, that ho`ohiki was definitely on a back burner. I never really thought of it.

Then the Po`e Aumakua commenced to start to give me kokiki to fulfill my ho`ohiki I had made kahuna Nui Max just before he shamanistically adopted me and ordained me as a Kahuna `o Huna of the Huna Fellowship.

One day there came a phone call. It was a lady representing Tony Robbins. I had never met anyone associated with him or his organization.

The lady told me that they were aware of me, and that Tony Robbins wanted me to attend his upcoming Firewalk in the Disneyland Hotel in Buena Park. It was on a Scholarship and there would be no cost for the materials and the five hour Seminar before it. We didn't discuss how she had gotten my phone number.

A few weeks later I found myself in the Disneyland Hotel at a Seminar costing hundreds of dollars, but I scholarshipped in for free. And I knew no one there, nor how they knew of me. The Po`e Aumakua rules.

I Firewalked for the first time that night. I warned Tony Robbins about his danger in doing a Firewalk the following month in Hawaii. Once he landed there, he got in touch with a native Kahuna who blessed his Firewalk, and carefully explained his purposes in a radio interview he did on Honolulu radio. Because he heeded my warning, and took my suggestions, no harm came to him. I never saw him again, nor was I ever contacted by his organization after that night. What happened? I have no idea.

I was still scared to try to lead a Firewalk. Even after my conversation with the Huna Goddess of the Firewalk, Wahinenuiho`aLani, whom I was even named after by a Hawaiian Kahuna to assist me in my desperate kainoa.

But still my fear blocked me.

Then the WWW Internet was created, and the BBS left behind. I was in conversation one time with a Methodist kahuna, Reverend Larry. I was grousing as I usually did, about the Firewalk. And Rev. Larry asked me if I could chant the prayers of the Firewalk which had come down the Hunian lineage. I said that I could. He asked me if I could build the firepit and light the fire. I said I could. Then he asked me something which opened the door to me: “Just what part do you expect God, and not you, to play in all this?”

And I was enlightened in the matter, and changed from Other-Sourcing to Self-Sourcing. I can't be expected to win, Oiai`o and the Po`e Aumakua only can ask me to be willing to Serve. “Winning” is always out of my hands.

Search engines brought me at last to kahuna Paka. And the story of Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Keonaona's and my initiation into the Po`e I Ke Umu Ki is related here. Once you have read it, return here for the rest of the story:

Initiation into the Body of Firewalk Priests => Click here

 

The Hopi Prophecies of the Ending of this, the Fourth World

      The date for the return of the fire-made-sacred was March 21, 2001. That date had been set for over twenty years before. A place for the Firewalk had always been inserted by me into the Makahiki Celebration. In all the years before, that space of time had just been blank. All the festivities had just stopped for about three hours, a place was set for the Firewalk, but there was no fire.

On the day we would do our first Firewalk since 1890 or 1949, depending on how you counted it, the earth shook in Tahiti. The final prophecy of the Hopi of the ending of this, their “Fourth World” depended on a “Home in the Sky falling with a huge noise and looking to be a blue star”.

The earth shook when the Blue Star fell from the heavens. Mir, the Russian Space Station, that “House in the Sky” was headed straight for out Firewalk! The noise shook the ground. It was a brilliant Blue Star.

Natch, I figured we would all die. We didn't. That was the last of the Prophecies, all the rest have been fulfilled in their order. Now only two things had to happen, and we could kiss our butts good-by. The Hopi would have to cease their ceremonies, and a chip of the tablets the prophecies were carved into so many hundreds of years ago, would be returned.

An Indian friend of mine recently told me that the Hopi have just ended their Ceremonies.

Bummer. I wonder if that means something interesting is going to happen now? Other than the return of the fire-made-sacred of the Firewalk to Huna, that is.

So then the first Huna Firewalk on a Makahiki was conducted by me in 2001. Was conducted by Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Keonaona on Makahiki, 2002. The next by our kumu, Kahuna Paka in 2003. The next by recently initiated, Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Manawanui in 2004. Then by Kahuna Akahikane in 2005 (now where has that boy gone to?), the next by Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Ulana in 2006. And in the year of 2007, after that Firewalk, I will retire from Firewalks, so long as everything goes as planned, and my slot taken by Kahuna I Ke Umu Ki Manawanui.

The Malamaka`opuahiki

      It was 1980, and I was in Napo`opo`o on the Big Island of Hawaii for the HRI International Huna Conference.

I had been asked to come there because it was feared by some that the teachings of Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long were all but lost amongst the Huna people, and was being replaced by New Age teachings.

As far as I know, I am the only person in the history of Huna who has operated a Huna Healing practice in Professional Offices, for over a dozen years. Huna lone.

At one point, Dr. E. Otha Wingo, the President of HRI came up to me and told me that he had had several complaints against me for quoting Max Freedom Long, and he asked me not to quote him any longer…

For my Huna Healing Practice, I had had inexpensive Business Cards made up. Kahuna Max had defined what a “Huna Practitioner” was, and since I had fulfilled those requirements, that's how I was identified. I gave out those cards to the haumana there.

By 1983, at a HRI Regional Huna Conference in San Francisco area, Otha had tested me, and along with BoD John Bainbridge, approached me, and asked me if I would be insulted if they honored my depth of skill with Huna, by certifying me as a Certified Huna Teacher. I told them that I would be delighted and they did as they said they would do.

It also came to my attention there, that many people, not Huna Teachers or Practitioners in any way, had also had Business Cards printed up with the words, “Huna Practitioner” on them.

Rather than fight that, and be all Other-Sourcing and all, I decided for once to be Self-Sourcing, and I just when to a printing company and had the most magnificent Business Cards made up I could conceive of. In the process of looking through all his catalogs, I came across a symbol of three selves in harmony. It was an unnamed gold foil stamp. I had it stamped into all the dark brown ripple Business Cards with now identified me as a “Kahuna”. I had been a Kahuna ever since Kahuna Nui Max Freedom Long had ordained me, but I thought it would be an arrogance to identify myself as such. I didn't know at that time that “Kahuna” just means any Priest, Minister or Pastor, etc. in the Hunian language. But I knew that I needed to distinguish myself from the others.

When I moved up to the San Francisco area, got professional offices, I needed a letterhead, and my great looking business cards were still looking great, so I had my printer take a photo of the symbol and use that as our letterhead.

Then I discovered that in the Hawaiian language, that symbol is called: malamaka`opuahiki (ma lama ka `o pua hiki), “the light, obscured by the cloudbank, persists”. I have no memory of how I found that out.

That was about in the year 1985. During that time, an artist, “Ki” wanted some healing work done and offered to trade his artistic labor for healing. He painted our Hunian altar painting. We didn't know what image to use, so I looked on my desk and handed him our letterhead, and he painted the Malamaka`opuahiki.

But he painted it strangely, mystically.

At first as I looked at it, I just felt a tingling in my mind. Later he explained it to me.

Twenty years later or so, I had just completed my first Firewalk on the Makahiki.

For days before the event when I was smoking my pipe in our backyard, I had visions of me memorializing the experience. In the visions of the future time of Huna (which is why I am the Mo`i. It isn't because I am good organizationally, but because I see the Hunians in the future, and move myself to become that, and the others join me in fellowship as we journey into the Light towards our Hemolele and our eventual reunion with out Beloved and Graduation into a new Aumakua) I looked at my outer left wrist, and saw the Malamaka`opuahiki ho`ailona`aku (tattooed) there.

I go the next day or so to get the ho`ailona`aku. Some of the people who are my first companions in Huna fellowship come as well. They will get the Malamaka`opuahiki where I get mine.

      And then that night, something unexpected and wonderful happens as I am outside smoking my pipe.

In a vision I am back to Kahuna Nui's front room in 1968, and I see myself ho`ohiki (vowing) to Kahuna Max that I will return the fire-made-sacred to Huna. And now I see the shadows of all those in my fellowship, now and to come, in that room with me. They are holding their wrists towards Kahuna max, showing him that I would succeed. He never knew…

Later that night, I take the Hunian members who had Firewalked successfully, and who had had ho`ailona`aku sunk into their skin to honor their kumu, and I honored them at a special Hiwa Ceremony. (Hiwa=the warm, embracing darkness=Shamanic).

I wondered if the ho`ailona`aku of the Malamaka`opuahiki remained in the Dreamworld section of Po, so I could show the beauty to my bud, Donl and my mom when I join them (die). And that night I had a dream, and in the dream I looked at my left wrist, and there it was. It had followed me even into Po! I'm so happy.

I imagine that you want to know what happens in the Hiwa Ceremony. But what goes on there is the deepest mysteries of Huna which I have explored. And it must remain a mystery to all who have not undergone it.

The next Makahiki approaches, and another Firewalk is prepared, and other things, the Aha`aina (Ritual Feast), The Makahiki Games. The `Awa Ceremony prepared. Many things. The pono of Huna abides!

The First Huna Firewalking

1890s
by William Tufts Brigham
as Transcribed by
Max Freedom Long
and originally published in
Recovering the Ancient Magic

 

     Dr. Brigham, in his earlier days, made frequent trips to the “Big Island,” or Hawaii. There were many kahunas working there at that time. In the course of his investigations he made friends of a number of them. He posed as a haole, or white, kahuna, and discussed beliefs and methods with the brown magicians on intimate terms—trying always to get from them the secret of secrets which they guarded so carefully.

      Among his kahuna friends were three Hawaiians who knew the fire-magic. They used it mainly to prevent lava flows from damaging the property of clients. One of them had been called in by Princess Ruth at the time the town of Hilo was being approached by a slow-moving lava flow. Everything had been done to stop the encroaching mass of lava, which was kept hot by the burning of self-generated gases in its substance. In a doughlike mass, and with a wide front, it continued day after day to tumble slowly forward, rolling and grinding, toward Hilo. Stone walls were built in front of it and promptly torn aside and absorbed.

      A large number of men spent days throwing earth and rock into the flow to thicken and stop it. Even water was ditched to a place in front of it. Nothing availed. Closer and closer it crept, destroying everything as it went. The Princess came from Honolulu by ship. She met the fire-kahuna at Hilo and went to the face of the flow. There she cut off locks of her hair at his direction and, while he recited the proper invocations, threw the locks into the slow-tumbling mass.

      It is recorded in history that the flow went but two rods farther before stopping. The town was saved. This old kahuna and two others had agreed with Dr. Brigham that they would demonstrate their fire-walking art when opportunity offered. They also had promised to let him do some fire-walking under their protection.

      At a time when the volcanic mountain Mauna Loa, on the island of Hawaii, was active, Dr. Brigham happened to be close at hand. I will present the story as I reproduced it from my notes a few days after he gave it to me. As he tells the story, see him: a huge old man in the eighties, hale and hearty, although recently having suffered the loss of a leg; mentally alert, enthusiastic, eager, humorous, and withal very earnest. It is night and he is seated in a great easy-chair beside a ponderous oak table which stands in the center of a long low room.

      “When the flow started,” related Dr. Brigham, “I was in South Kona, at Napoopoo. I waited a few days to see whether it promised to be a long one. When it continued steadily, I sent a message to my three kahuna friends, asking them to meet me at Napoopoo so we could go to the flow and try the fire-walking.

      “It was a week before they arrived, as they had to come around from Kau by canoe. And even when they came, we couldn’t start at once. To them it was our reunion that counted and not so simple a matter as a bit of fire-walking. Nothing would do but that we get a pig and have a luau (native feast).

      “It was a great luau. Half of Kona invited itself. When it was over I had to wait another day until one of the kahunas sobered up enough to travel.

      “It was night when we finally got off after having to wait an entire afternoon to get rid of those who had heard what was up and wished to go along. I’d have taken them all had it not been that I was not too sure I would walk the hot lava when the time came. I had seen these three kahunas run barefooted over little overflows of lava at Kilauea, and the memory of the heat wasn’t any too encouraging.

      “The going was hard that night as we climbed the gentle slope and worked our way across old lava flows towards the upper rain forests. The kahunas had on sandals, but the sharp cindery particles on some of the old flows got next their feet. We were always having to wait while one or the other sat down and removed the adhesive cinders.

      “When we got up among the trees and ferns it was dark as pitch. We fell over roots and into holes. We gave it up after a time and bedded down in an old lava tube for the rest of the night. In the morning we ate some of our poi and dried fish, then set out to find more water. This took us some time as there are no springs or streams in those parts and we had to watch for puddles of rain water gathered in hollow places in the rocks.

      “Until noon we climbed upward under a smoky sky and with the smell of sulfur fumes growing stronger and stronger. Then came more poi and fish. At about three o’clock we arrived at the source of the flow.

      “It was a grand sight. The side of the mountain had broken open just above the timber line and the lava was spouting out of several vents—shooting with a roar as high as two hundred feet, and falling to make a great bubbling pool.

      “The pool drained off at the lower end into the flow. An hour before sunset we started following it down in search of a place where we could try our experiment.

      “As usual, the flow had followed the ridges instead of the valleys and had built itself up enclosing walls of clinker. These walls were up to a thousand yards in width and the hot lava ran between them in a channel it had cut to bed rock.

      “We climbed up these walls several times and crossed them to have a look at the flow. The clinkery surface was cool enough by then for us to walk on it, but here and there we could look down into cracks and see the red glow below. Now and again we had to dodge places where colorless flames were spouting up like gas jets in the red light filtering through the smoke.

      “Coming down to the rain forest without finding a place where the flow blocked up and overflowed periodically, we bedded down again for the night. In the morning we went on, and in a few hours found what we wanted. The flow crossed a more level strip perhaps a half-mile wide. Here the enclosing walls ran in flat terraces, with sharp drops from one level to the next. Now and again a floating boulder or mass of clinker would plug the flow just where a drop commenced, and then the lava would back up and spread out into a large pool. Soon the plug would be forced out and the lava would drain away, leaving behind a fine flat surface to walk on when sufficiently hardened.

      “Stopping beside the largest of three overflows, we watched it fill and empty. The heat was intense, of course, even up on the clinkery wall. Down below us the lava was red and flowing like water, the only difference being that water couldn’t get that hot and that the lava never made a sound even when going twenty miles an hour down a sharp grade. That silence always interests me when I see a flow. Where water has to run over rocky bottoms and rough projections, lava burns off everything and makes itself a channel as smooth as the inside of a crock.

      “As we wanted to get back down to the coast that day, the kahunas wasted no time. They had brought ti leaves with them and were all ready for action as soon as the lava would bear our weight. (The leaves of the ti plant are universally used by fire-walkers where available in Polynesia. They are a foot or two long and fairly narrow, with cutting edges like saw-grass. They grow in a tuft on the top of a stalk resembling in shape and size a broomstick.)

      “When the rocks we threw on the lava surface showed that it had hardened enough to bear our weight, the kahunas arose and clambered down the side of the wall. It was far worse than a bake oven when we got to the bottom. The lava was blackening on the surface, but all across it ran heat discolorations that came and went as they do on cooling iron before a blacksmith plunges it into his tub for tempering. I heartily wished that I had not been so curious. The very thought of running over that flat inferno to the other side made me tremble—and remember that I had seen all three of the kahunas scamper over hot lava at Kilauea.

      “The kahunas took off their sandals and tied ti leaves around their feet, about three leaves to the foot. I sat down and began tying my ti leaves on outside my big hob-nailed boots. I wasn’t taking any chances. But that wouldn’t do at all—I must take off my boots and my two pairs of socks. The goddess Pele hadn’t agreed to keep boots from burning and it might be an insult to her if I wore them.

      “I argued hotly—and I say ‘hotly’ because we were all but roasted. I knew that Pele wasn’t the one who made fire-magic possible, and I did my best to find out what or who was. As usual they grinned and said that of course the ‘white’ kahuna knew the trick of getting mana (power of some kind known to kahunas) out of air and water to use in kahuna work, and that we were wasting time talking about the thing no kahuna ever put into words—the secret handed down only from father to son.

      “The upshot of the matter was that I sat tight and refused to take off my boots. In the back of my mind I figured that if the Hawaiians could walk over hot lava with bare callused feet, I could do it with my heavy leather soles to protect me. Remember that this happened at a time when I still had an idea that there was some physical explanation for the thing.

      “The kahunas got to considering my boots a great joke. If I wanted to offer them as a sacrifice to the gods, it might be a good idea. They grinned at each other and left me to tie on my leaves while they began their chants.

      “The chants were in an archaic Hawaiian which I could not follow. It was the usual ‘god-talk’ handed down word for word for countless generations. All I could make of it was that it consisted of simple little mentions of legendary history and was peppered with praise of some god or gods.

      “I almost roasted alive before the kahunas had finished their chanting, although it could not have taken more than a few minutes. Suddenly the time was at hand. One of the kahunas beat at the shimmering surface of the lava with a bunch of ti leaves and then offered me the honor of crossing first. Instantly I remembered my manners; I was all for age before beauty.

      “The matter was settled at once by deciding that the oldest kahuna should go first, I second and the others side by side. Without a moment of hesitation the oldest man trotted out on that terrifically hot surface. I was watching him with my mouth open and he was nearly across—a distance of about a hundred and fifty feet—when someone gave me a shove that resulted in my having my choice of falling on my face on the lava or catching a running stride.

      “I still do not know what madness seized me, but I ran. The heat was unbelievable. I held my breath and my mind seemed to stop functioning. I was young then and could do my hundred-yard dash with the best. Did I run! I flew! I would have broken all records, but with my first few steps the soles of my boots began to burn. They curled and shrank, clamping down on my feet like a vice. The seams gave way and I found myself with one sole gone and the other flapping behind me from the leather strap at the heel.

      “That flapping sole was almost the death of me. It tripped me repeatedly and slowed me down. Finally, after what seemed minutes, but could not have been more than a few seconds, I leaped off to safety.

      “I looked down at my feet and found my socks burning at the edges of the curled leather uppers of my boots. I beat out the smoldering fire in the cotton fabric and looked up to find my three kahunas rocking with laughter as they pointed to the heel and sole of my left boot which lay smoking and burned to a crisp on the lava.

      “I laughed too. I was never so relieved in my life as I was to find that I was safe and that there was not a blister on my feet—not even where I had beaten out the fire in the socks.

      “There is little more that I can tell of this experience. I had a sensation of intense heat on my face and body, but almost no sensation in my feet. When I touched them with my hands they were hot on the bottoms, but they did not feel so except to my hands. None of the kahunas had a blister, although the ti leaves had burned off their soles.

      “My return trip to the coast was a nightmare. Trying to make it in improvised sandals whittled from green wood has left with me an impression almost more vivid than my fire walking.”

      Comment:

      There you have Dr. Brigham’s story. You will now doubtless be interested to know how a scientist tried to figure out the reason for his being able to do what he had done.

      “It’s magic,” he assured me. “It’s a part of the bulk of magic done by the kahunas and by other primitive peoples. It took me years to come to that understanding, but it is my final decision after long study and observation.”

      “But,” I objected, “didn’t you try to explain it some other way?”

      The doctor smiled at me. “Certainly I did. It has been no easy task for me to come to believe magic possible. And even after I was dead-sure it was magic, I still had a deep-seated doubt concerning my own conclusions. Even after doing the fire-walking I came back to the theory that lava might form a porous and insulating surface as it cooled. Twice I tested that theory at Kilauea when there were little overflows. I waited in one case until a small overflow had cooled quite black, then touched it with the tips of my fingers. But although the lava was much cooler than that I ran across, I burned my fingers badly—and I’d only just dabbed at the hot surface.”

      “And the other time? “I asked.

      He shook his head and smiled guiltily. “I should have known better after that first set of blisters, but the old ideas were hard to down. I knew I had walked over hot lava, but still I couldn’t always believe it possible that I could have done so. The second time I got excited about my insulating surface theory, I took up some hot lava on a stick as one would take up taffy. And I had to burn a finger again before I was satisfied. No, there is no mistake. The kahunas use magic in their firewalking as well as in many other things. There is one set of natural laws for the physical world and another for the other world. And—try to believe this if you can: The laws of the other side are so much the stronger that they can be used to neutralize and reverse the laws of the physical.”

      In this case we have an instance in which the magical control of heat was of such a nature that it did not protect the leather in Dr. Brigham’s heavy boots, but did protect his feet.

      This feature of the case is interesting when we remember that the soles of the author MacQuarrie’s shoes were undamaged in his firewalking. All in all, it would appear that fire magic works in strange ways which are little related to the “laws” of Science.

      I affirm that I have proved that the case for Magic is properly grounded on such facts as anyone so desiring may investigate.

      Instead of investigating Magic, Science has chosen to scoff at it, and either try to explain it away or deny its existence. I further affirm that the child of Science—the Scientific Attitude-is guilty of a grave offense against the layman.

      This offense is grave in that it is utterly unjustified and in that it has fostered a misconception so deep-seated that it is now all but impossible for the average layman to bring his conscious mind to bear on Magic because of the prejudicing complex in his subconscious mind.

      Max Freedom Long

Te Umu-Ti, A Raiatean Ceremony of Firewalking

The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 1893

by

Miss Teuira Henry, of Honolulu

 

[As no member of the Council has been privileged to witness the ceremony described herein, the Council cannot undertake to guarantee the truth of the story, but willingly publish it for the sake of the incantation.] 

The ti-plant (Dracana terminalis) is indigenous to a great many islands of the Pacific, and the leaves being long and broad, are widely used for wrapping purposes by the natives in their method of cooking food. 

The ti-leaf, in the Society Group, was supposed to possess great magical power, and was much used for wands, or as garlands, by warriors or priests, and was also said to have enabled fugitives–by waving the branches before them– to fly over precipices and ravines away from their pursuers in troublous times. The yellow leaves are very much used in decorations, and have a sweet smell. It is stated that the ti-plant has been held in high esteem also by the Hawaiians, and is still supposed to possess great virtue. 

The ti-root is frequently two feet long, and varies from six to ten inches in diameter. It has something of the texture of sugar-cane and its thick juice is very sweet and nourishing, but it requires to be well baked before eating. 

The ti-ovens(firewalking pit) are frequently thirty feet in diameter, and the large stones, heaped upon small logs of wood, take about twenty-four hours to get properly heated. Then they are flattened down, by means of long green poles, and the trunks of a few banana trees are stripped up and strewn over them to cause steam. The ti-roots are then thrown in whole, accompanied by short pieces of ape-root (Arum costatum) that are not quite so thick as the ti, but grow to the length of six feet and more. The oven is then covered over with large leaves and soil, and left so for about three days, when the ti and apeare taken out well cooked, and of a rich, light brown colour. The ape prevents the ti from getting too dry in the oven. 

There is a strange ceremony of firewalking connected with the Umu Ti (or ti-oven) that used to be practised by the heathen priests at Raiatea, but can now be performed by only two individuals (Tupua and Taero), both descendants of priests. This ceremony consisted in causing people to walk in procession through the hot oven when flattened down, before anything had been placed in it, and without any preparation whatever, bare-footed or shod, and on their emergence not even smelling of fire. The manner of doing this was told by Tupua, who heads the procession in the picture, to Monsieur Morne, Lieutenant de Vaisseau, who also took the photograph* of it, about two years ago, at Uturoa, Raiatea, which being on bad paper was copied off by Mr. Barnfield of Honolulu. All the white residents of the place, as well as the French officers, were present to see the ceremony, which is rarely performed now-a-days.

* The photograph of fire walking event referred to is evidently taken from a sketch by hand, and is not therefore a photograph from life. –EDITORS.

No one has yet been able to solve the mystery of this surprising feat, but it is to be hoped that scientists will endeavour to do so while those men who practise it still live. 

E PARAU TAHUTAHU NO TE HAERERAA I TE UMU-TI.

NA TUPUA TANE, RAIATEA 1890.

TUPUA'S INCANTATION USED IN WALKING OVER THE UMU-TI.

E tapea na te rima i te rau ti, a parau ai:"E te Nu'u-atua e ! a ara, a tia i nia te haere nei taua i te Umu-Ti ananahi." Mareva na, e atua ïa ; e mau na te avae i raro ; e taata ïa. A hiotia ra i te vairaa o te umu ra, e a ofati i te rau ti, – mai te nao e :"E te Nu'u-atua e ! E haere oe i teie " nei po, e ananahi tatou atoa ia."Aruru ra i te au ti ei tautoo tahutahu, moemoe i roto i te marae, mai te ota-ataa i roto i te rau fau, e ia vai i reira hoe ai rui, a naô ai te poroi atu :-"Ae! a ara, e te Nu'n-atua e! to " avae e haere i te Umu-Ti. Te pape e te miti, e haere atoa. Te to'e uri, ma te to'e tea, e haere i te umu. Te ura o te anahi e te ruirui o te auahi, e haere ana'e; na oe e haere, e haere oe i teie nei po e ananahi o oe ia e о vаu ; e haere tana i te Umu-Ti."   TRANSLATION. Hold the leaves of the tt-plant before picking them, and say"Oh hosts of gods! Awake. arise!. you and I are going to the ti-oven tomorrow."If they float in the air, they are gods, but if their feet touch the ground they are human beings. Then break theti leaves off and look towards the direction of the oven, and say :"O hosts of gods ! go to-night and to-morrow you and I shall go"Then wrap the ti-leaves up in hau (hibiscus) leaves and put them to sleep in the marae where they must remain until morning, and say in leaving :-Arise! awake! Oh hosts of gods! Let your feet take you to the ti-oven; fresh water, and salt water come also. Let the dark earth-worm, and the light earth-worm, go to the oven. Let the redness, and the shades of the fire all go. You will go, you will go tonight and tomorrow it will be you and I ; we shall go to the Umu Ti." (This is for the night.) 
la aahiata ra, a tii a rave mai i te rau ti, a amo e i te umu roa, a tatara i te ineineraa o te feia e haere i nia i taua umu ra; a faatia ai i mua a nao ai :—E na taata e tahutahu i te umu e ! a ta pohe nal E to'e uri! e to'e tea ! te pape, te miti, te aama o te umu, te ru'i- ru'i o te umu, a hii atu i te tapua'e avae o te feia e haere nei, a tahiri na i te ahu o te roi. A mau na, e te Vahine-nui-tahu-rai e ! i te tahiri, e haere na taua i te ropu o te umu !  When the ti-leaves are brought away, they must be tied up into a wand and carried straight to the oven, and opened when all are ready to pass through ; then hold the wand forward and say :—"Oh men (spirits) who heated the oven! let it die out! Oh dark earthworms! Oh light earth-worms ! fresh water, and salt water, heat of the oven, and redness of the oven, hold up the footsteps of the walkers, and fan the heat of the bed, Oh cold beings, let us lie in the midst of the oven, Oh Great-woman-who-set-fire-to-the-skies! hold the fan, and let us go into the oven for a little while!"(Then all are ready to walk in we say: 
" Te hii tapua'e tahi !
Te hii tapua'e rua !
Te hii tapua'e toru !
Te hii tapua'e ha !
Te hii tapna'e rima !
Te hii tapua'e ono !
Te hii tapua'e hitu !
Te hii tapua'e varu !
Te hii tapua'e iva !
Te hii tapna'e tini !
Te Vahine-nui-tahu-rai e !
poia!" Haere noa 'tura ia te taata, mai te ino ore na ropu, e na te hiti o taua imm-ti ra 
Holder of the first footstep !Holder of the second footstep !Holder of the third footstep !
Holder of the fourth footstep !
Holder of the fifth footstep !
Holder of the sixth footstep !
Holder of the seventh footstep !
Holder of the eighth footstep !
Holder of the ninth footstep !
Holder of the tenth footstep !
Oh Great-woman-who-set-fire-to-the- skies !
all is covered ! "Then everybody walks through without hurt, into the middle and around the oven, following the leader, with the wand beating from side to side. 

The Great-woman-who-set-fire-to-the-skies, was a high born woman in olden times, who made herself respected by the oppressive men, when they placed women under so many restrictions. She is said to have had the lightning at her command, and struck men with it when they encroached upon her rights. 

All the above is expressed in old Tahitian, and when spoken quickly is not easily understood by the modern listener. Many of the words, though found in the dictionary, are now obsolete, and the arrangement of others is changed. Oe and taua are never used now in place of the plural outou and tatou; but in old folk-lore it is the classical style of addressing the gods in the collective sense. Tahutahu, means sorcery, and also to kindle a fire.

EXTRACT OF AN ACCOUNT OF THE UMU-TI, FROM A PAMPHLET PUBLISHED

IN SAN FRANCISCO, BY MR. HASTWELL.

"The natives of Raiatea have some performances so entirely out of the ordinary course of events, as to institute inquiry relative to a proper solution.

"On the 20th September, 1885, I witnessed the wonderful, and to me inexplicable, performance of passing through the ' Fiery Furnace.'

Firewalking Ground:

"The furnace that I saw was an fire walking pit of three or four feet in the ground, in a circular form (sloping upwards), and about thirty feet across. The excavation was filled with logs and wood, and then covered with large stones. A fire was built underneath, and kept burning for about a day. When I witnessed it, on the second day, the flames were pouring up through the interstices of the rocks, which were heated to a red and white heat. When everything was in readiness, and the furnace still pouring out its intense heat, the natives marched up, with bare feet, to the edge of the furnace, where they halted for a moment, and after a few passes of the wand made of the branches of the ti-plant by the leader, who repeated a few words in the native language, they stepped down on the rocks, and walked leisurely across to the other side, stepping from stone to stone. This was repeated five times, without any preparation whatever on their feet, and without injury or discomfort from the heated stones. There was not even the smell of fire on their garments."

Mystic Isles of the South Seas

1921

by

Frederick O'Brien 

 

 

Introduction

This is a simple record of my days and nights, my thoughts and dreams, in the mystic isles of the South Seas, written without authority of science or exactitude of knowledge. These are merely the vivid impressions of my life in Tahiti and Moorea, the merriest, most fascinating world of all the cosmos; of the songs I sang, the dances I danced, the men and women, white and tawny, with whom I was joyous or melancholy; the adventures at sea or on the reef, upon the sapphire lagoon, and on the silver beaches of the most beautiful of tropics.

In this volume are no discoveries unless in the heart of the human. I went to the islands below the equator with one thought—to play. All that I have set down here is the profit of that spirit.

The soul of man is afflicted by the machine he has fashioned through the ages to achieve his triumph over matter.

In this light chronicle I would offer the reader an anodyne for a few hours, of transport to the other side of our sphere, where are the loveliest scenes the eyes may find upon the round of the globe, the gentlest climate of all the latitudes, the most whimsical whites, and the dearest savages I have known.

"Mystic Isles of the South Seas" precedes in experience my former book, "White Shadows in the South Seas," and will be followed by "Atolls of the Sun,"  which will be the account of a visit to, and a dwelling on, the blazing coral wreaths of the Dangerous Archipelago, where the strange is commonplace, and the marvel is the probability of the hour.

These three volumes will cover the period I spent during three journeys with the remnants of the most amazing of uncivilized races, whose discovery startled the old world, and whom another generation will cease to know.

Chapter XXV

I meet a sorcerer…Power over fire…The mystery of the fiery furnace…The scene in the forest…Walking on hot stones…Origin of the rite.

WALKING to the neighboring district of Pueu with Raiere to see the beauties of the shore, we met a cart coming toward Tautira, and one of the two natives in it attracted my interest. He was very tall and broad and proud of carriage, old, but still unbroken in form or feature, and with a look of unconformity that marked him for a rebel. Against what? I wondered. Walt Whitman had that look, and so had Lincoln; and Thomas Paine, who more than any Englishman aided the American Revolution. Mysticism was in this man's eyes, which did not gaze at the things about him, but were blinds to a secret soul.

Raiere exchanged a few words with the driver of the cart, and as they continued on toward Tautira, he said to me in a very serious voice:

"He is a tahua, a sorcerer, who will enact the Umuti, the firewalking. He is from Raiatea and very noted. Ten years ago, Papa Ita of Raiatea was here, but there has been no Umuti since."

"What brings him here now?" I asked. "Who pays him?"

Raiere answered quickly:

"Aue! he does not ask for money, but he must live, and we all will give a little. It is good to see the Umuti again."

But, Raiere, my friend," I protested, "you are a Christian, and only a day ago ate the breadfruit at the communion service. Firewalking is etene; it is a heathen rite."

"Aita!" replied the youth. "No, it is in the Bible, and was taught by Te Atua, the great God. The three boys in Babulonia were saved from death by Atua teaching them the way of the Umuti."

"Where will the Umuti be?" I inquired. "I must see it."
"By the old tii up the Aataroa valley, on Saturday night."

That was five days off, and it could not come soon enough for me. I was eager for this strangest, most inexplicable survival of ancient magic, the apparent only failure of the natural law that fire will burn human flesh. I had seen it in Hawaii and in other countries, and had not reached any satisfying explanation of its seeming reversal of all other experience. I knew that fire walking as a part of the racial or national worship of a god of fire, had existed and persisted in many far separated parts of the world.

Babylon, Egypt, India, Malaysia, North America, Japan, and scattered Maoris from Hawaii to New Zealand all had religious ceremonies in which the gaining and showing of power over fire was a miracle seen and believed in by priests and laity. Modern saints and quasi-scientists had claims to similar achievements. Dr. Dozous said he saw Bernadette, the seeress of Lourdes, hold her hands in a flame for fifteen minutes without pain or mark, he timing the incident exactly by his watch. Daniel Dunglas Home, the famous Scottish spiritist, was certified by Sir William Crookes and Andrew Lang to handle walk on red hot coals in his hands, and could convey to others the same immunity. Lang tells of a friend of his, a clergyman, whose hand was badly blistered by a coal Home put in his palm, Home attributing the accident to the churchman's unbelieving state of mind. Crookes, the distinguished physicist,  took into his laboratory handkerchiefs in which Home had wrapped live coals, and found them "unburned, unscorched, and not prepared to resist fire."

The scene of the Umuti was an hour's walk up the glen of Aataroa, which began at our swimming-place.

On Thursday Choti, T'yonni, and I accompanied Raiere to the place of the tii, where the preparations for the sorcery were beginning. We went through a continuous forest of many kinds of trees, a vast, climbing coppice, in which all the riches of the Tahitian earth were mingled with growths from abroad. Oranges and lemons, which had sprung decades before from seeds strewn carelessly, had become giant trees of their kinds; and the lianas and parasites, guava, lantana, and a hundred species of ferns and orchids, with myriad mosses, covered every foot of soil, or stretched upon the trunks and limbs, so that exquisite tapestries garlanded the trees and hung like green and gold draperies between them. Mope-trees prevailed, immense, weirdly shaped, often appalling in their curious buttresses, their limbs writhing as if in torture, suggestive of the old fetishism that had endowed them with spirits which suffered and spoke. Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was a bare trail through this wood, which, led by Raiere, we followed, wading the Aataroa River twice, and I arriving with my mind deeply impressed by the esoteric suggestiveness of the scene.

On a level spot, under five ponderous mape-trees, eight or ten men of Tautira and of Pueu and Afaahiti were completing the oven. They had dug a firewalking pit twenty-five feet long, eighteen wide, and five deep, with straight sides. It had been done with exactitude at the direction of the tahua, who was staying alone in a hut near by. The earth from the pit formed a rampart about it, but was leveled to not more than a foot's height. At the bottom of the umu had been laid fagots of purau- and guava-wood, and on them huge trunks of the tropical chestnut, the mape. On the trunks were laid basaltic rocks, or lumps of lava, boulders, and the stones about, as big as a man's head. The firewalking pit was completed for the lighting.

To the north stood a giant phallus of stone, buried in the earth, but protruding six feet, and inclined toward the north. It was a foot in diameter, and was carved au naturel as the Maori lingam and yoni throughout Polynesia, and in India, where doubtless the cult originated. Before the break-down of their culture, this stone had been sprinkled with water, or anointed with coconut-oil, and covered with a black cloth, as in Hawaii. The Greeks called their similar god, Priapus, the Black Cloaked.

A trench had been made on the west side of the firewalking pit from which to ignite the fuel, a torch lit by fire struck from wood by friction. I did not see the lighting, which occurred Friday morning, thirty-six hours before the ceremony. The ordinance was set for eight o'clock. I swam in the river at five on Saturday, and lay down in my bird cage to be thoroughly rested for the night. It was not easy to fall asleep. There was a thicket of pandanus near my house, the many legs of the curious trees set in the sand of the upper beach, and these trees were favorite resort of the mina birds, which were as familiar with me as children of a family, and in many cases impudent beyond belief. They were the size of crows, and had bronzed wings, lined with white; but their most conspicuous color was a flaring yellow, which dyed their feet and their beaks and encircled their bold eyes like canary-colored rims of spectacles. Their usual voice was a hoarse croak that a raven might disavow, but they also emitted a disturbing rattle and a whistle, according to their moods. They were thieves, as I have said, but one was more audacious than the others. He would come into my open house at daybreak, and perch on my body, and awaken me pecking at imaginary ticks. He picked up a small compass by its chain and flew away with it.

This particular wretch had learned to speak a little, and would say, "Ia ora na oe!" sharply, but with a decided grackle accent. Despite the irritating cacophony of the mina, I must have slept more than an hour; for when I was suddenly awakened, the sun was almost lost behind the hills. The talking mina was dancing on my bare stomach and calling out his human vocabulary.

I sprang up, my tormentor uttering a raucous screech as I tossed him away. While I hastily cooked my supper, the colors of the hiding sun spread over the sky in entrancing variety. I could not see the west, but to the northeast were rifts of blood-red clouds edged with gold over a lake of pearly hue, and to the right of it a bank of smoke. Against this was a single cocoa on the edge of the promontory, a banner my eye always sought as the day ended. Rising a hundred feet or more, the curving staff upheld a dozen dark fronds, which nodded in the evening breeze.

There was the slightest chill in the air, unusual there, so that I put on shirt and trousers of thin silk and tennis shoes for my walk, and with a lantern set out for the tii. Along the road were my neighbors, the whole village streaming toward the goblin wood. Mahine and Maraa, two girls of my acquaintance, unmarried and the merriest in Tautira, joined me. They adorned me with a wreath of ferns and luminous, flower-shaped fungus from the trees, living plants, the taria lore, or rat's-ear, which shone like haloes above our faces. The girls wore pink gowns, which they pulled to their waists as we forded the streams. Mahine had a mouth-organ on which she played. We sang and danced, and the tossing torches stirred the shadows of the black wold, and brought out in shifting glimpses the ominous shapes of the monstrous trees. With all our gaiety, I had only to utter a loud "Aue!" and the natives rushed together for protection against the unseen; not of the physical, but of the dark abode of Po. In this lonely wilderness they thought that tupapaus, the ghosts of the departed, must have their assembly, and deep in their hearts was a deadly fear of these revenants.

When we approached the umu, I felt the heat fifty feet away. The fire walking pit was a mass of glowing stones, and half a dozen men whom I knew were spreading them as evenly as possible, turning them with long poles. Each, as it was moved, disclosed its lower surface crimson red and turning white. The flames leaped up from the wood between the stones.

About the oven, forty feet away, the people of the villages who had gathered, stood or squatted, and solemnly awaited the ritual. The tahua, Tufetufetu, was still in a tiny hut that had been erected for him, and at prayer. A deacon of the church went to him, and informed him that the firewalking pit was ready, and he came slowly toward us. He wore a white pareu of the ancient tapa, and a white tiputa, a poncho of the same beaten-bark fabrics. His head was crowned with ti-leaves, and in his hand he had a wand of the same. He was in the dim light a vision of the necromancer of medieval books.

He halted three steps from the fiery furnace, and chanted in Tahitian:

O spirits who put fire in the oven, slack the fire!
O worm of black earth,
O worm of bright earth, fresh water, sea water, heat of the oven, red of the oven, support the feet of the fire walkers, and fan away the fire!
O Cold Beings, let us pass over the middle of the oven!
O Great Woman, who puts the fire in the heavens, hold still the leaf that fans the fire!
Let thy children go on the oven for a little while!
Mother of the first footstep!
Mother of the second footstep!
Mother of the third footstep!
Mother of the fourth footstep!
Mother of the fifth footstep!
Mother of the sixth footstep!
Mother of the seventh footstep!
Mother of the eighth footstep!
Mother of the ninth footstep!
Mother of the tenth footstep!
0 Great Woman, who puts the fire in the heavens, all is hidden!

Then, his body erect, his eyes toward the stars, augustly, and without hesitation or choice of footprints, the tahu walked upon the firewalking pit. His body was naked except for the tapa, which extended from his shoulders to his knees. The heat radiated from the stones, and sitting on the ground I saw the quivering of the beams just above the fire walking pit.

Tufetufetu traversed the entire length of the umu with no single flinching of his muscles or flutter of his eyelids to betray pain or fear. He raised his wand when he reached the end, and, turning slowly, retraced his steps.

The spectators, who had held their breaths, heaved deep sighs, but no word was spoken as the tahua signed all to follow him in another journey over the white-hot rocks. All but a few, their number obscured in the darkness, ranged themselves in a line behind him, and with masses of ft'-leaves in their hands, and some with girdles hastily made, barefooted they marched over the path he took again. When the cortege had passed once, the priest said, "Fariu! Return!" and, their eyes fixed on vacancy, six times the throng were led by him forward and back over the firewalking pit. A woman who looked down and stumbled, left the ranks, and cried out that her leg was burned. She had an injury that was weeks in curing.

At a sign from Tufetufetu, the people left the proximity of the firewalking pit, and while he retired to his hut, several men threw split trunks of banana-trees on the stones.  A dense column of white smoke arose, and its acrid odor closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, my friends of our village were placing the prepared carcasses of pigs on the banana-trunks, with yams, ti-roots and taro. All these were covered with hibiscus and breadfruit leaves and the earth of the rampart, which was heaped on to retain the heat, and steam the meat and vegetables.

I examined the feet and legs of Raiere and the two girls I had come with, and even the delicate hairs of their calves had not been singed by their fiery promenade.

Meanwhile all disposed themselves at ease. The solemnity of the Umuti fell from them. Accordions, mouth-organs, and jews'-harps began to play, and fragments of chants and himenes to sound. Laughter and banter filled the forest as they squatted or lay down to wait for the feast. I did not stay. The Umuti had put me out of humor for fun and food. I lit my flambeau and plodded through the mope-wood in a brown study, in my ears the fading strains of the arearea, and in my brain a feeling of oneness with the eerie presences of the1 silent wilderness. I was with Meshack, Shadrach, and Abednego in their glorious trial in Nebuchadnezzar's barbaric court. I was among the tepees of the Red Indians of North America when they leaped unscathed through the roaring blaze of the sacred fire, and trod the burning stones and embers in their dances before the Great Spirit.

The Umuti was not all new to me. Long ago, when I lived in Hawaii, Papa Ita had come there from Tahiti. His umu was in the devastated area of Chinatown, a district of Honolulu destroyed by a conflagration purposely begun to erase two blocks of houses in which bubonic plague recurred, and which, unchecked, caused a loss of millions of dollars.

The pit was elliptical, nine feet deep, and about twenty-four feet long. Wood was piled in it, and rocks from the dismantled Kaumakapili church. The fire burned until the stones became red and then white, and they, too, were turned with long poles to make the heat even. I inspected the heating process several times. At the hour advertised in the American and native papers, in an enclosure built for the occasion, with seats about the fire walking pit, the mystery was enacted. The setting was superb, the flaming furnace of heathenism in the shadow of the lonely ruin of the Christian edifice.  Papa Ita appeared garbed in white tapa, with a wonderful head-dress of the sacred ti-leaves and a belt of the same. The spectators were of all nations, including many Hawaiians. The deposed queen, Liliuokalani, was a most interested witness.

Papa Ita looked neither to the right nor left, but striking the ground thrice with a wand of ti, he raised his voice in invocation and walked upon the stones.' He reached the other end, paused and returned. Several times he did this and when photographers rushed to make a picture, he posed calmly in the center of the firewalking pit and then, with all the air of a priest who has celebrated a rite of approved merit, he retired with dignity. As he departed from the inclosure, the natives crowded about him, fearfully, as viewed the Israelites the safety of Daniel emerging from the lions' den. Did I not see the former queen lift the hem of his tapa and bow over it? It was night, the lights sputtered, and I was awed by the success of the incantation. A minute after Papa Ita had gone, I threw a newspaper upon the path he had trod, and it withered into ashes. The heat seared my face. The doctors, five or six of them, Americans and English, resident in Honolulu, shrugged their shoulders. They had examined Papa Ita's feet before the ceremony and afterward. The flesh was not burned, but, well— What ? I confess I do not know. A thermometer held over the umu of Papa Ita at a height of six feet registered 282 degrees Fahrenheit.

There could be no negation of the extreme heat of the oven of Tufetufetu. I had tested it for myself. No precaution was taken by the walkers. I knew most of them intimately. There was no fraud, no ointment or oil or other application to the feet, and all had not the same thickness of sole. At Raratonga, near Tahiti, the British resident, Colonel Gudgeon, and three other Englishmen had followed the tahua as my neighbors had here. The official said that though his feet were tender, his own sensations were of light electric shocks at the moment and afterward. Dr. William Craig, who disobeyed the tahua and looked behind, was badly burned, and was an invalid for a long time, though Dr. George Craig and Mr. Goodwin met with no harm. The resident half an hour after his passage tossed a branch on the stones, and it caught fire. In Fiji, Lady Thurston with a long stick laid her handkerchief on the shoulder of one of the fire walkers, and when withdrawn in a few seconds it was scorched through. A cloth thrown on the stones was burned before the last man had gone by.

What was the secret of the miracle I had witnessed? How was it that in all the Orient, and formerly in America, this power over fire was known and practised, and that it was interwoven with the strongest and oldest emotions of the races? That from the Chaldea of millenniums ago to the Tautira of to-day, the ceremonial was virtually the same? Our own boys and girls who in the fall leaped over the bonfire of burning leaves were unpremeditatedly imitating in a playful manner and with risk what their forefathers had done religiously.

In Raiatea, the chief Tetuanui informed me, the membership of the Protestant church of Uturoa walked on the firewalking pit, and embarrassed the missionaries, who had taught them, as the Tautirans were taught, that the Umuti was a pagan sacrament.

In some islands it was called vilavilairevo, and in Fiji the oven was lovu. According to legend, the people of Sawau, Fiji, were drawn together to hear their history chanted by the orero, when he demanded presents from all. Each, in the brave way of Viti, tried to outdo the other in generosity, and Tui N'Kualita promised an eel that he had seen at Na Moliwai. Dredre, the orero, said he was satisfied, and began his tale. It was midnight when he finished. He looked for his present at an early hour next morning.

Tui N'Kualita had gone to Na Moliwai to hunt for the eel, and there, as he sank his arms in the eel's hole, he found it a piece of tapa that he knew to be the dress of a child. Tui N'Kualita shouted: "

Ah! Ah! this must be the cave of children. But that does not matter to me. Child, god, or new kind of man, I'll make you my gift."

He kept on angling with his hand in the hole, and caught hold of a man's hand. The man leaped back and broke his grasp, and cried:

"Tui N'Kualita, spare my life and I will be your war god. My name is Tui Namoliwai."
Tui N'Kualita answered him:
"I am of a valiant people, and I vanquish all my enemies. I have no need of you."
The man in the eel's hole called out to him again:
"Let me be your god of property."

No," said Tui N'Kualita; "the tapa I got from the god Kadavu is good enough."
"Well, then, let me be your god of navigation."
"I 'm a farmer. Breadfruit is enough for me."
"Let me be your god of love, and you will enjoy all the women of Bega."
"No, I've got enough women. I 'm not a big chief. I'll tell you: you be my gift to the orero."
"Very well; and let me have another word. When you have a lot of ti at Sawau, we will go to cook it, and will appear safe and sound."

Next morning Tui N'Kualita built a big oven. Tui Namoliwai appeared and signed to him to follow.
Maybe you are fooling me, and will kill me," said Tui N'Kualita.
"What? Am I going to give you death in exchange for my life? Come!"
Tui N'Kualita obeyed, and walked on the lovu. The stones were cool under his feet. He told Tui Namoliwai then that he was free to go, and the latter promised him that he and his descendants should always march upon the lovu with impunity.

When I returned to my bird cage at Tautira, I sat down and considered at length all these facts and fancies. I believed in an all inclusive nature; that the Will or Rule of God which made a star hundreds of millions of times larger than the planet I had my body on, that took care of billions of suns, worlds, planets, comets, and the beings upon them, was not concerned in tricks of spiritism or materializations at the whim of mediums or tahuas. But I had in my travels in many countries seen inscrutable facts, and to me this was one. Nobody knew what was the cause of the inaction of the fire in the lovu or umu. It was not a secret held by anybody, or a deception.

One might believe that the stones arrive at a condition of heat which the experienced sorcerers know to be harmless. One might conceive that the emotion of the walkers produces a perspiration sufficient to prevent injury during the brief time of exposure; or that the sweat and oily secretions of the skin aided by dust picked up during the journey on the oven was a shield; or that the walkers were hypnotized by the tahua, or exalted by their daring experiment, so that they did not feel the heat. Even this theory might not account for the failure to find the faintest burn or scorch upon those who fulfilled the injunction of the sorcerers.

The people of Tautira, from Ori-a-Ori to Matatini, had the fullest confidence that Tufetufetu had shown them a miracle, and that it was not evil; but to the American and European missionaries the Umuti was deviltry, the magic of Simon Magus and his successors. This was shown clearly in the statement of Deacon Taumihau of Raiatea, which I give in English:

This is the word of the oven of Tupua.
This is the way he did that thing. He cut three fathoms of wood. The oven was three fathoms long and three wide. Heap up the wood the first day, and carry by sea the stones for the oven.
Do not take the stones of the marae, for the marae receives the evil spirits, the spirit of the god of the night.
The first night of the ceremony, the sorcerers of Raiatea, Tupua and his kind, march around the oven. They seek the spirits of the men of the night, and they go about the oven, but they do not light the fire.
That same night one goes to find the sacred leaves of the ti. He takes the leaves that float in the wind; those called raoere ti, and which are used as medicine. He gathers the leaves and carries them to the oven.
The fire is lighted at four of the morning. When the fire is burning brightly, and the oven is very hot, the sorcerer gives his assistants charge of the fire, and instructs them as to their duties.
When the flames are down, Tupua approached the oven, and before walking upon it, he pronounced the following prayer.
"0 men about the oven! Piraeuri and Piraetea! Let us join the army of the gods in the furnace!"
Then, said Tupua:
"0 water, go in the fire! 0 sea water, go in the fire!" Waving the ti leaves on the border of the oven, Tupua said:
"0 Woman who puts the fire in the heaven and in the clouds, permit us to go on foot over fire walking pit!"

Then those who wish to, pass onto the oven, one after another. If but one falls all will be burned. The last must watch the sorcerer, to return when he makes the sign.

 That is the way this deed, the deed of the devil, is done by Tupua.
The woman called Vahine tahura'i is an evil spirit
Concerning Piraeuri and Piritea, Tupua would better not have spoken, as it was a useless prayer.
Do not introduce the sorcery in the land of the whites!
Do not carry there this custom of lighting the oven! It is the work of an evil spirit of the night; this act of Tupua.
For that reason I have said little of him in my story. I have spoken.

—Taumihau, The Man.