ABSTRACT
1IN the presence of friends and blood-relations parents ratify the union I of their children by means of fire, which they strike with iron out of flintstone. For marriages are joined with fire and flint, which represent, as it were, a wedded partnership, to make them fitter and more fortunate than they would be by any other token of mutuality, and this by the acceptance of a custom as maturely reflected upon as if the knowledge of it had originally come from the centre of Greece or Latium. Now it is not only these folk who esteem fire above everything, for there was a time, as Ziegler believes, when the Romans, greatest of all peoples, joyfully observed this rite. The motive they wish to indicate is this: the fire struck out of a flint and again enclosed within it reveals symbolically that it contains the bond or strength of indestructible love. For, as the flint holds inside itself fire, which is its close partner and which flashes out when the flint is struck, so in either sex there is a life concealed, which at length, as the result of their reciprocal tie, is brought into the open to become a living child. 1
Marriages are validated by iron, flint, and fire, and why
Romans
Flint
Child
