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In the early spring of 1921 the Roman Catholic bishop of Mysore, in Southern India, was invited by the local Maharaja to attend an exhibition of firewalking at his summer palace. By the bishops word, the exhibition took place as follows: The Mohammedan, according to Indian usage, came and prostrated himself before the sovereign and then went straight to the furnace. I thought that the man was going to enter the fire himself, but I was mistaken. He remained about a yard from the rink, and called upon one of the palace servants to step into the brazier. Having beckoned to him to come forward, he made an appeal into which he seemed to put all his power of persuasion, but the man never stirred. In the meanwhile, however, the Mohammedan had drawn closer to him, and then unexpectedly, taking him by the shoulders he pushed him into the little lake of glowing ashes. For the first moment or two, the Indian struggled to get out of the fire; then suddenly the look of terror on his face gave place to an astonished smile, and he proceeded to cross the trench lengthwise, without hesitation, as if he were taking a constitutional, beeming contentedly upon those who were standing round either side of him. His feet and legs were perfectly bare. When he got out, his fellow servants crowded around him to ask what it felt like, his explanations must have been satisfactory, for one, two, five, and then ten of the palace household plunged into the trench. After this is was the turn of the bandsman, of the Maharaj’s band, several of whom were Christians. They marched into the fire three by three and this juncture several cartloads of dried palm-leaves were brought down and thrown upon the embers. They blazed up at once breaking into tongues of flame higher than a man’s head. The Mohammedan introduced others of the palace servants to pass through the flames and they did it without taking harm. There must, I think, have been 200 people who passed over the embers, and a hundred who went right through the middle of the flames. Beside me were standing two Englishmen, the head of the Maharaja’s police force (a Catholic), and a Civil Engineer. They went to ask the Royal permission to try the experiment themselves. The Maharaja told them that they might do it on their own responsibility. Then they turned to the Mohameddan and he motioned to them to go forward. They crossed without any sign of burning. When they came back into neighborhood, I asked what they thought of it. “Well,” they said “we felt we were in a furnace, but the fire did not burn us.” When the Maharaja to mark the close of the proceedings, they Mohameddan, who was still standing close to the trench, fell writhing upon the ground, as if in an agony of pain. He asked for water; they brought it and he drank greedily. A Brahmin who stood near me remarked: “He has taken upon himself the burning of the fire.” (Herbert Thurston, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, pp.187-189) Concerning recent years, the history of firewalking in 1977 a radical shift happened in firewalkings evolution. In that year, Tolly Burkan, founding father of the global firewalking movement, first firewalked. He was taught by a friend, and was so transformed by the experience, he immediately wanted to share it with as many as possible. He wondered why no one was teaching firewalking to the general public, and felt it was a valuable service needing to be offered. He conceived the notion of employing firewalking as an exercise in personal growth, expanding awareness, overcoming fear, and removing limiting beliefs about oneself.
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