旧火故事 Tales of Ancient Fires

feiyining

本文原载于《黑齿》

从夏至算起的第二个满月后的第二天，或者是第三天的清晨，有庄严的队伍穿过阿尔提斯的街道，他们自赫斯提拉女神的祭坛而来，是法官、祭司、城邦使节、运动员和其他在前一天曾向宙斯誓约雕像（Zeus of the Oaths）宣誓的人们。他们朝着宙斯的祭坛走去，祭司将在那里献上“百牛”，而后挥动手中的火炬，以示比赛开始。1 青年们随之起跑，那时他们离终点很近，最初的赛道直接与祭坛相接。2 这让胜者可以就近点燃祭品，动物脂肪产生巨大的火焰腾起烟尘，混合着伊利斯城夏季的风，飘过阿尔菲奥斯河谷，飘过橄榄树的尖梢，飘过神庙与神本身。

假如这是，好比说公元前四百年的奥林匹亚吧。

但这并非现代奥运圣火接力的起源。事实上，由多位女性身着古典服饰扮演祭司、在赫拉神庙前点燃火种、在无数人的传递抵达遥远终点城市的现代仪式，是没有相应的古典传统的。3 现代人对于圣火传递的集体想象，源自于1936年纳粹时期的柏林奥运，由奥运组委会秘书长卡尔·迪耶姆提议的火炬接力4 ，一方面完全契合纳粹对古希腊作为德意志人种根源的投射，也符合他们将奥运会作为宣传平台的计划。在莱尼·里芬斯塔尔的镜头中，选手手持军工企业克虏伯制造的火炬，在夕照里奔跑，爱琴海的浪花喧腾叠映其后。火炬接力的传统不来自古奥林匹亚，另有其它异质混合物，时间令人忘却此般现代起源。

世情常如此，赫拉克利特说，“万物皆流”。

虽是为敬献宙斯而举行的庆典，古代奥林匹克运动会祭祀游行的起止之处，却都是在伊利斯城的市政建筑（Prytaneion）：盖因其中的公共炉灶（koinê Hestia )上，燃烧着经久不熄的永恒之火，也是灶神赫斯提亚的祭坛。5 她是瑞亚和时间之神克洛诺斯的长女，在宙斯的应允之下，以恒久的处女之身掌管着他神殿的炉灶，也因此掌管其下每个家庭、每个城邦的炉灶与火焰。6 阿尔提斯圣地中所有祭坛上的火种，也都来自于此，但若 "永恒之火 "本身熄灭了，如普鲁塔克所言，则不能用任何其他的火来续燃，只能试图从太阳那里，再次获得“洁净无垢”的光焰。7

彼时，古希腊诸多城邦中都设有公共炉灶，所有当地的居民尽可以来取用圣火，点燃家中炉灶。8 那赫斯提亚守护着的炉灶，是每个家庭的神圣中心，人们围绕在旁敬献诸神，举行仪式。比如新生的婴儿要在第七天时被抱到家中燃烧的炉火旁，在这称作“amphidromia”的命名仪式中，无名的灵魂得到认可与接纳9 ；比如在阿戈斯，有居住者故去的房屋须得熄灭其间灶火，而后从城市公共炉灶中取得“新火”，带回家中通过祭祀再次点燃。10 又比如海德格尔曾转述过的一则佚事：赫拉克利特正在家中炉边烤火时，曾有客来访，见来者踌躇失望，他开口相邀，说道，“诸神也在此处（炉火）”。11 世界就是一团“永恒的活火”，赫拉克利特如此诠释他的流变哲学，“一切转化为火，火又转化为一切”，火的实质即是神，智慧是神（火）保有的特质，浸透存在于所有的事物里，“是普遍的理性”。12

赫拉克利特又说：火按照一定的尺度燃烧，按照一定的尺度熄灭。粗率类比之下，就仿如古希腊城邦在燃烧着圣火的公共炉灶旁，接纳迎入外乡人、或是他邦使者的同时，每每在外建立新的殖民地，就要用一路携来的故地圣火，传递到新殖民地的公共炉灶上点燃。13 甚至新娘、军官、殖民首领（Oikistês），他们出门在外，也需要来自家乡的火。14 此间传递的火，就像能够把生食变熟一样，意图将多重的野性转化为单一文明。类似地，每当古罗马人建立一个新的殖民地时，会派出信使，去维斯塔神庙撷取圣火，建立维持新的殖民地与殖民者之间的联系。15

另有一个更著名的故事，发生在公元前479年的普拉塔亚战役结束之后，为了净化波斯人造成的火种污染，德尔斐神谕有言：在从圣地德尔斐的公共壁炉中取得圣火、重新点燃本地祭坛之前，不可进行祭祀。一名叫做欧奇达斯的男子于是在一天内从普拉塔亚到德尔斐奔跑往返，力竭而死。16 在此复述这个故事，并不是因为它是一个关于马拉松的故事。在此刻看来，这是一个无论如何要恢复“正常”的故事：递过新火的手，让被灾祸碾过的败毁的失序的土地，与赫斯提亚，与理性，与原本的世界再次相连，让坏朽的未来回到轨道。

面对几经波折的东京奥运圣火传递——一开始取消希腊境内的行程，搁浅一年后再启，一再削减规模，传递过程中还是出现数名感染者——如果今天德尔斐神谕重开，女祭司会说些什么呢？

她还能否在此刻找到任何什么等同于如此单一、纯净的涤荡之火，将秩序调整回归正常吗？可要调到哪个时间点才算正常呢？祂甚至连《经济学人》的全球正常指数都不会纳入考虑，即使指标重回疫前指数，它还是一台只有单一未来的烂车。17 无论祂现在有没有找到火种，我们都知道，祂不缺欧奇达斯。我们已经有无数个为系统失能而牺牲自己的未来，为单一的技术文化世界提供养料的人。

现在，传递圣火这件事本身被另一种传递——病毒——所困囿。理想中，疫苗本该更像是火种，只是历经数月地缘政治博弈后，全球已接种疫苗中，仍只有0.3%的剂量是在低收入国家进行的。18 我们清楚，火种并不在欧奇达斯手上，而是在殖民首领（Oikistês）手上。我们还要再等等，一直等到殖民首领占了新殖民地，才会点亮当地的炉灶。

1. David C. Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
2. Stephen G. Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 95.
3. 从宙斯神庙到体育场的距离从未超过200米，奥林匹克庆典的祭祀中也没有接力的环节。Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games. 167.Tony Perrottet, The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games (Random House Publishing Group, 2004).
4. IOC, Berlin 1936 Olympic Torch Relay - Highlights, December 16, 2020, https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/berlin-1936/torch-relay.
5. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (Zone Books, 2006). 147-51.
6. Janis Jennings, Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth: Fire at the Center (Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2003). 33 Hom. Hymn. in Ven. 18: “…So Zeus the Father gave her a high honour instead of marriage, and she has her place in the midst of the house and has the richest portion. In all the temples of the gods she has a share of honour, and among all mortal men she is chief of the goddesses…”
7. Βίοι Παράλληλοι Πλουτάρχου· Numa Pompilius, Chapter 11, trans. by John Dryden/A. H. Clough.Κ. Αντωνόπουλος, “The Eternal Fire and the Cult of Goddess Hestia in Olympia and the Greco-Roman World” (University of Athens, 2014); Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games.
8. Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1971). 348-51; Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics. 87
9. Barbara Tsakirgis, “Fire and Smoke: Hearths, Braziers and Chimneys in the Greek House,” British School at Athens Studies 15 (2007): 225–31. 230.
10. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Harvard University Press, 1985). 61
11. Pavel Gregoric, “The Heraclitus Anecdote,” Ancient Philosophy 21, no. 1 (2001): 73–85.; Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 270.
12. 《赫拉克利特著作残篇：希腊语、英、汉对照》，罗宾森、楚荷译（台北：华艺，2015），199。撒穆尔·伊诺克·斯通普夫、詹姆斯·菲泽，《西方哲学史：从苏格拉底到萨特及其后》，邓晓芒、匡宏译，（北京：世界图书, 2009），10–12; T. M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments (University of Toronto Press, 1987), 55.
13. Stephen G. Miller, The Prytaneion: Its Function and Architectural Form (University of California Press, 1978); Louis Gernet, The Anthropology of Ancient Greece (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
14. Irad Malkin, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, USA, 2011).,211.
15. T. C. Worsfold, “The History of the Vestal Virgins” (London, 1932). 18.
16. Αντωνόπουλος, “The Eternal Fire and the Cult of Goddess Hestia in Olympia and the Greco-Roman World.” 47;Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games. 166.
17. The Economist, “The Global Normalcy Index” (The Economist, July 1, 2021), https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/tracking-the-return-to-normalcy-after-covid-19.
18. Josh Holder, “Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World,” The New York Times, July 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html.

On the morning of the second or third day after the second full moon following the summer solstice, a solemn procession makes its way through the streets of Altis. Coming from the Altar of Hestia, the participants are judges, priests, diplomatic envoys, athletes, and others who swore an oath in front of the statue of Zeus of the Oaths (Zeus Horkios) the day before. Upon arrival at the Altar of Zeus Horkios, the high priest makes the Sacrifice of One Hundred Oxen, then waves the torch in his hand to signal that the games have begun.1 With that, the athletes begin to run. They’re already quite close to the finish line because the track is directly connected to the altar.2 The winner of the race places his torch on the altar and burns sacrificial offerings. Smoke from the roaring flames produced by burning animal fat, mixed with the summer breezes of Elis, floats over the Alpheus River Valley, the tops of the olive trees, the temples, and the gods themselves. These were the Olympics of 400 BCE—if they did indeed happen this way.

However, this is not the origin of the modern Olympic torch relay. In fact, there is no corresponding tradition from the ancient Olympics to warrant the modern ceremony in which women dress in classical garments, playing the part of the priests and lighting a fire in front of the Temple of Hera, a fire that is then carried to its distant destination by countless runners.3 The modern collective imagination surrounding the passing of this sacred fire actually comes from the 1936 Olympics held by Nazi Germany. Carl Diem, secretary general of the organizing committee of the Games of the XI Olympiad, had proposed the idea of the torch relay.4 The event fully reflected the Nazi belief that ancient Greece was an important part of Germany’s Aryan roots and fit into their plan to turn the Olympics into a propaganda platform. In Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia, an athlete carries a torch made by munitions manufacturer Krupp and runs into the setting sun while the waves of the Aegean Sea roar behind him. The tradition of the torch relay did not come from the ancient Olympics; it is a composite ritual whose modern origins have been obscured. The world often works in this manner; as Heraclitus said, “Panta rhei.” Everything flows.

Originally a celebration in honor of Zeus, the sacrifices and processions for the ancient Olympic games began and ended in the prytaneion in Elis. The building housed an eternal fire that would never go out in the common hearth (koinê Hestia), which also served as the Altar of Hestia, goddess of the hearth.5 Hestia was the eldest daughter of Rhea and Cronus, and with Zeus’s approval, she became the virgin keeper of the hearth in his temple. By extension, she also watched over the hearth and fire of every family and city-state.6 All of the sacrificial fires of Altis came from that source, but if the “eternal fire” went out, Plutarch said that it could not be reilluminated with just any fire; one had to light a “pure and unpolluted” flame from the rays of the sun.7

Many ancient Greek city-states had a common hearth, from which all residents could use the flame to light their own hearths at home.8 The hearth, protected by Hestia, was the sacred center of every household. People gathered around it to make offerings to the gods and perform rituals. For example, on the seventh day after their birth, new babies were carried around the hearth at home. Through this ritual, called the Amphidromia, babies received legitimacy and acceptance into the family.9 In places such as Argos, whenever somebody died, the fire had to be extinguished in their house so that a “new” fire could be taken from the state hearth, the domestic hearth later rekindled with a sacrifice.10 Heidegger once retold the story of Heraclitus warming himself by the oven at home when a guest arrived. Noticing the visitor’s hesitation, Heraclitus invited him in and said, “The gods are here, too.”11 Heraclitus believed that the cosmos was an “ever-living fire”: “The totality of things is an exchange for fire, and fire an exchange for all things.” The essence of fire is divine, and wisdom is a unique quality of divinity (fire). Fire is the universal reason that permeates all things.12

Heraclitus also claimed that fire is kindled in measures and put out in measures.13 The inhabitants of ancient Greek city-states gathered around the common hearth of sacred fire to welcome outsiders or envoys from other cities, and when they established new colonies, they carried the sacred fire with them to the common hearth of the new territory.14 When brides, military officers, and the leaders of colonies (oikistês) left home, they had to carry the fires of their hometowns with them.15 This transported fire transformed the unpredictable wilderness into the unity of civilization, just like it turned raw food into cooked. Similarly, every time the ancient Romans founded a new colony, a courier would be sent to carry fire from the Temple of Vesta, thereby establishing and maintaining a connection between the colony and the colonizers.16

Another more famous story comes from the aftermath of the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE. In order to purify the fires that the Persians had polluted, the Oracle at Delphi pronounced that no sacrifices could be made until fire from the communal hearth in the sacred city of Delphi was used to relight the altars of Plataea. A man called Euchidas ran from Plataea to Delphi and back in a single day before he died of exhaustion.17 I retell this story here not because it is about the marathon, but rather it’s a parable about how to return to “normal.” Hand-carrying a new fire reestablished the connection between a disordered land crushed by disaster and Hestia, rationality, and the previous order of the world; it brought a crumbling future back on track.

If the Oracle at Delphi were to speak once more, what would she say? The torch relay for the Tokyo Olympics has experienced many setbacks: first they canceled the section in Greece, then relaunched a year later. They scaled back the program time and again, but the passing of the torch still resulted in several cases of the virus.

Could the Oracle find anything like that single fire, pure and cleansing, to bring everything back to normal? What time could she send us back to that would count as “normal?” The Economist’s Global Normalcy Index would not be among her considerations; even if the index returns to pre-pandemic levels, the world would still be a train wreck waiting to happen.18 Regardless of whether that fire exists today, we know that she is not wanting for a Euchidas. We already have countless people who have sacrificed their futures for the system, who have provided fodder for the world of a mono-technological culture.

Now the act of passing the sacred fire has been blocked by another kind of transmission: the virus. Ideally, the vaccines should be more like that fire; it’s just that after months of political games, only 0.3% of global vaccination doses have been administered in low-income countries.19 We know that, once again, the torch is in the hand of an oikistês, not an Euchidas. We must wait until an oikistês founds a new colony for that local hearth to be lit.

Translated from the Chinese by Bridget Noetzel.

1. David C. Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
2. Stephen G. Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 95.
3. 从宙斯神庙到体育场的距离从未超过200米，奥林匹克庆典的祭祀中也没有接力的环节。Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games. 167.Tony Perrottet, The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games (Random House Publishing Group, 2004).
4. IOC, Berlin 1936 Olympic Torch Relay - Highlights, December 16, 2020, https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/berlin-1936/torch-relay.
5. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (Zone Books, 2006). 147-51.
6. Janis Jennings, Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth: Fire at the Center (Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2003). 33 Hom. Hymn. in Ven. 18: “…So Zeus the Father gave her a high honour instead of marriage, and she has her place in the midst of the house and has the richest portion. In all the temples of the gods she has a share of honour, and among all mortal men she is chief of the goddesses…”
7. Βίοι Παράλληλοι Πλουτάρχου· Numa Pompilius, Chapter 11, trans. by John Dryden/A. H. Clough.Κ. Αντωνόπουλος, “The Eternal Fire and the Cult of Goddess Hestia in Olympia and the Greco-Roman World” (University of Athens, 2014); Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games.
8. Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1971). 348-51; Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics. 87
9. Barbara Tsakirgis, “Fire and Smoke: Hearths, Braziers and Chimneys in the Greek House,” British School at Athens Studies 15 (2007): 225–31. 230.
10. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Harvard University Press, 1985). 61
11. Pavel Gregoric, “The Heraclitus Anecdote,” Ancient Philosophy 21, no. 1 (2001): 73–85.; Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 270.
12. 《赫拉克利特著作残篇：希腊语、英、汉对照》，罗宾森、楚荷译（台北：华艺，2015），199。撒穆尔·伊诺克·斯通普夫、詹姆斯·菲泽，《西方哲学史：从苏格拉底到萨特及其后》，邓晓芒、匡宏译，（北京：世界图书, 2009），10–12; T. M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments (University of Toronto Press, 1987), 55.
13. Stephen G. Miller, The Prytaneion: Its Function and Architectural Form (University of California Press, 1978); Louis Gernet, The Anthropology of Ancient Greece (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
14. Irad Malkin, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, USA, 2011).,211.
15. T. C. Worsfold, “The History of the Vestal Virgins” (London, 1932). 18.
16. Αντωνόπουλος, “The Eternal Fire and the Cult of Goddess Hestia in Olympia and the Greco-Roman World.” 47;Young, A Brief History of the Olympic Games. 166.
17. The Economist, “The Global Normalcy Index” (The Economist, July 1, 2021), https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/tracking-the-return-to-normalcy-after-covid-19.
18. Josh Holder, “Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World,” The New York Times, July 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html.