As wildfires increasingly threaten American cities, people are being forced to rethink our relationship with fire. As historian Stephen J. Pyne writes, thinking about fire, in various changing ways, is something people have been doing since the beginning.

For the vast majority of human history, visible fires were a crucial part of daily life. “The first act of a day was to kindle a fire; the last act, to bank the coals,” Pyne writes. “And in between, fire was a constant companion.”

Naturally, the power of fire took on mythical meanings, often representing death and renewal. Cultures around the world told stories in which the possession of fire defined the beginnings of humanity. In some versions of the myth of Prometheus, for example, humans were denied the skills given to animals to help them survive, but the gift of fire allowed them to become technological creatures capable of dominating the earth.

Pyne suggests that these myths parallel a real evolutionary story. By learning to cook food, humans outsourced part of their digestive process, allowing their guts to shrink while providing them nutrients to support a large brain. Controlled fire also helped people shape the land to their advantage, and allowed for the creation of brick, cement, glass, and other crucial materials.

For ancient thinkers in Greece, China, and elsewhere, fire was a fundamental element. It was also almost universally connected with life—feeding, growing, and dying. Through the Enlightenment, scholars described plants and animals as having an “inner fire.”

Fire was also a staple in religion. It might be a weapon of a god, or a god itself. It might cleanse temples, produce burnt offerings, or sanctify an altar. But Pyne notes that, over time, religious fires became tamer. Where the story of Sodom and Gomorrah involved melting mountains and a rain of “fire and brimstone,” the Gospel of Matthew compares the Last Judgement to the burning of tares—weeds found in a grainfield. Increasingly urban people viewed fire less as an elemental force of creation and destruction than the stuff of candles and hearths.

By the nineteenth century, scientists viewed fire as a result of deeper forces of chemistry and physics rather than a foundational aspect of the universe. On a more mundane level, people in many places were hiding fire away in closed stoves, steam engines, and furnaces. And uncontrolled fire became a problem to solve.

“Once the manifestation of gods and the source of life… fire had become alien, a destroyer of cities, a savager of soil, a befowler of air, an emblem (in science as in agriculture) of the hopeless primitive,” Pyne writes.

Europeans increasingly tried to prevent the burning of forests and other landscapes, and they spread this practice across their colonial empires. The result was the disruption of ecosystems and economies built on relationships among human societies, fire, and living things. In an age of climate change, as fires become increasingly dangerous, that’s only beginning to shift in a different direction.

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