Tuesday, September 18, 2018

The Necessity Of Sacred Fire Ritual (神圣火供的必要性)

Fire ritual is not only practiced in Hinduism, Tantrism but also a necessity for those who engaged in biblical magic practices...

When the Buddha is still alive, He always advises his disciples to be grateful to the grace of heavens. Although the heaven in Buddhism may differ to the heaven referred to in bible.

Fire ritual is an important part of Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism. The main character in fire ceremony is of course the 'Agni' or 'fire god'. The fire god is given a task to convey our wishes to the idam (本尊) or gods that we would like to engage in. Interestingly, the image of Agni in Tantrism is a man in white goat. Goat is the symbol of Satanism in the West, and fire is almost always related to Hell.

It is also interesting to know that in Middle Eastern conjuration practices, fire ritual is used to bind jinn and iblis or the like. Not only fire ritual is used to summon spirits, such ritual is also performed during festive seasons to renew a conjuror's oaths with his spirits. It is believed that the whole setting of fire ritual represents all of the living things and spirits both good and evil.

Symbolically speaking, men collected wood, the fire represents the jinn race, the light is the angles and the smoke becomes iblis. Despite it being cursed and stoned at, iblis is given the task to present human offerings to the God. So, without iblis as a messenger, our offerings cannot reach God. This is the reason why I have mentioned iblis is an important link between man and God. Anyone who can drive iblis to serve God will definitely be praised by God and be rewarded. Such a situation is naturally impossible in secular religious teachings.

In order to make our sacred fire ritual work, we must satisfy below conditions:

  • Our motive must be pure and not selfish
  • We must keep our precepts 
  • We must be blessed by our own spirits as you can see from the picture.
  • Pray in wholeheartedness
  • Think righteousness without distractions
  • The fire ritual is done according to a set of criteria 
I do think that the practice in Old Testament has some connections with Tantric Buddhism and the most obvious resemblance is in sacred fire ritual. Somehow this practice is only survived in tantrism. Perhaps it is worthwhile to do a further research.