The other day I was out walking in the early heat, listening to goat bells, thinking about trauma in places and in people. I was thinking about old wounds. Earnestly— I was feeling desperate— I asked the path, the ground, the trees, what do we do with a wound, once it has been acknowledged, once it has been cleaned? But when it still aches, and aches?
“What is the origin of the fire?”
I heard— εστία. The Greek word for Hestia, primordial goddess of the hearth. In Greek Εστία literally means the home and the hearth. The home as hearth. It is also the name of the goddess, but in the ancient Greek conception, and still as the word is used today, it means home and hearth first. Then the goddess. The goddess is these. She is inseparable.
A little before this, while outside at a café in the summer wind, just before an offshore earthquake made my chair feel like it was suddenly at sea, I was talking about the wildfires in California with my Cretan archaeologist friend Marianna. She explained to me how in Greek, when they ask “what was the origin of the fire?” they call this origin “η εστία της φοτιάς.” Not the fire of the fire, as I was confusedly translating in my head. The origin. So Εστία isn’t really primarily the hearth fire at all, as I had always imagined. She is the coinciding, the nexus, the knot in the net where all these meet — origin point, home place, hearth place. One. I am put in mind of the word omphalos. The center of the world, where the Python once reigned, and priestesses took oracle from them, and the Earth’s fumes.
Hestia as the center of the world in every hearth, in every home. In each of us.
I am put in mind of creation stories. How, in times like these, chaos has become a dangerous place we could easily lose ourselves in. How we have lost the sense of creation out of chaos, as it once was when she was a Goddess—Chaos, mother of Gaia, Eros, and Nyx (Earth, Love, Night). It is important to speak of origins. Of what we are made of. Of what holds, and makes us. After Chaos came Earth, and Eros. Many creation stories the world over begin with light. The light inside darkness. They begin with a culture-hero who goes forth and brings back fire in a little box — in the curve of a mushroom, the kind that keeps an ember lit.
But what I heard when walking wasn’t so much about lighting a lamp in the middle of chaos— important, and connected, as that is. It was something closer to making home. That powerful grounding, that sense of centrifugal motion toward alignment with center. There is the ember, yes. The hearth that is warmth, safety, the place of stories and music and food. But more than any of this I am put in mind of the house temples of Old Europe, as archaeologist Marija Gimbutas described them in her site reports about Neolithic communities across the Balkans. She was often challenged on this point, because archaeologists with a more institutionalized point of view would come in and say something like—how do you know this is a temple? It just looks like a big house or a workshop, full of pottery, kilns, looms, and many figurines and vessels and altar tables.
Precisely, she would say. A temple.
Matter and spirit side by side. The knot in the net where they cross. This is the sacred at the heart of creation. This is what the feminine knows.
This essay by Sylvia V. Linsteadt is in anticipation of her upcoming advaya course, When When Were the Land.
