Fire Elementals Make a Man Impervious to Fire

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 8 pages

From The Theosophist of August 1883, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings V under the heading A Human Storage Battery. The case is quoted at length from the medical press: C.H. Hughes, editor of the Alienist and Neurologist, reproducing Dr S.C. Woodman's account in the Michigan Medical News of William Underwood, a young man of twenty-seven whose gift was generating fire through his breath, assisted by manipulation with his hands.

The account is circumstantial. He would take anybody's handkerchief, hold it to his mouth and rub it vigorously while breathing on it until it burst into flame and burned until consumed; he would strip, rinse out his mouth, wash his hands and submit to rigid examination to preclude any humbug, and then set paper or cloth alight by breath alone; out shooting without matches he would collect dry leaves, lie down and breathe them into a fire. Blavatsky's explanation is the one the title states: that a congenital and unusual proportion of salamandrine properties — a preponderance of the fire elementals — is what permits a man to do this, and by the same account permits others to walk through beds of blazing fire unscathed. The framing is characteristic of this series: the phenomenon is not disputed but referred to a cause the physicians reporting it had no category for.

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