Firewalking and the Brain

The Physiology of High-Arousal Rituals

Dimitris Xygalatas
In the village of Agia Eleni in Greece, firewalking rituals are performed by
a community called the Anastenaria. Its members are Orthodox Chris-
tians. In addition to the Church rituals, however, they observe a sepa-
rate annual ritual cycle, focused on the worship of saints Constantine and
Helen. The most important event in this cycle is the festival of the two
saints, which lasts for three days and includes various processions around
the village, an animal sacrifice, music, and ecstatic dancing. The most dra-
matic moment of the festival is the firewalking ritual itself, where the par-
ticipants, carrying the icons of the saints, dance over the burning-red coals.
The Anastenaria claim to be guided by saints Constantine and Helen,
especially the former, who often appears in their dreams and gives them ad-
vice or orders, and draw their inspiration from the icons of the saints. Their
tradition started by Greek populations at the Black Sea coast of Eastern
Thrace, an area that was then part of the Ottoman Empire and today be-
longs to Bulgaria. After the Balkan wars, the Anastenarides came to Greek
Macedonia, bringing with them their icons and their rituals. Already from
the time of their performance in Eastern Thrace, the clergy had persecuted
the Anastenaria, accusing them of idolatry, threatening and beating the fire-
walkers, and throwing their icons into the fire. When they arrived at Greece,
they had to perform their rituals in secret. When the Church found out, they
confiscated their icons; priests and theologians wrote against them; they were
often ridiculed, and in some cases they were excommunicated. Even today,
the Church is very hostile towards them, and even in their villages they often
face contempt. Despite this troubled history, the tradition of firewalking is
alive and well, and keeps drawing new participants.
Why are the Anastenaria so keen on performing such a costly ritual?
High-arousal rituals often appear to be stressful, unpleasant, or even danger-
ous. Sometimes participation is coerced by a social group, as happens with
many initiation rituals. Firewalking, however, is performed voluntarily, and
actually against social pressure. Why then are many individuals willing to
198 Chapter 23 Dimitris Xygalatas

participate in ritual activities that would normally intimidate or seem appall-

ing to most people?1

High-arousal rituals and Commitment

It has been suggested that costly rituals function as proof of commit-
ment to the group (Sosis, 2003). Human coalitional behaviour entails a
considerable risk, and sometimes defection is more beneficial to the indi-
vidual. It might therefore be costly to participate in a coalition when others
defect. Certain violent rituals such as initiations can function as a means of
warranting commitment, by challenging potential members to pay a costly
price in advance, before joining the group. People’s willingness to go through
costly ordeals in order to join a group is evidence of their seriousness about
their participation.
This hypothesis seems to provide a plausible explanation for people’s
participation in costly rituals. Firewalking could be a way of signaling com-
mitment to the community, thus e.g., gaining social status in exchange. And
this might very well have been true about the Anastenaria until recently.
However, the composition of the group has radically changed during the past
decades, due to specific socio-economic factors. While for some hundreds of
years firewalking was performed exclusively by the people of Eastern Thrace,
and later their descendents who lived in the villages of Greek Macedonia,
today the firewalkers come from all over Greece, and meet in Agia Eleni
twice a year to take part in the festival. Thus, for most of the participants,
the performance of firewalking appears to be a goal in itself rather than a
means of participating in the group. The Anastenaria get together in order to
perform the ritual; this is the purpose for the group’s existence.
The cost of participation is significant on various levels. First of all,
firewalking is an extremely stressful or even painful activity, and so is the
preparation for it. Attendance also implies financial costs, as the participants
have to be away from their work as well as to cover their expenses for the
duration of the festival. On the other hand, those who have prestigious jobs
risk loosing credibility and status in their field by signalling themselves as
Anastenarides. The opposition of the Greek Church to this tradition makes
matters worse for the Anastenarides, as they are seen by many as pagan, her-
etics, or superstitious.

1 Firewalking rituals are performed in many cultures the world over, and people usu-
ally do not get burned, because of the low conductivity of coals. However, the extraordinary
thing about this ritual is not that people are able to firewalk unharmed but rather that they are
willing to try it in the first place. I stress this point and thank Daniel Dennett for pointing out
that this might not always be as self-evident as I might have thought.
Firewalking and the Brain 199

It thus seems that some rituals, including firewalking, can continue to

draw new participants, even when the original conditions of their perfor-
mance have been completely altered. What is it then that makes those activi-
ties so appealing to people, despite their high cost?

Ritualistic and obsessive behaviour

Pascal Boyer (2005) has spoken of a possible relation between ritual be-
haviour and certain neuropsychological conditions like Obsessive Compul-
sive Disorder (OCD). Those suffering from OCD feel a strong compulsion
to perform certain actions that have no technical purpose in a very specific
way – in other words, rituals – without being able to justify their behaviour.
Indeed, they often recognise that this urge is irrational, but they feel that
they have to behave in a certain way in order to avoid some vague but seri-
ous danger. In the same way, people who perform rituals will often admit a
sense of urgency, an intuition that if these rituals are not performed in a very
precise way something terrible might happen.
All the Anastenarides I interviewed claimed that every single element
(using the icons, the incense, music, candles, dancing, or performing the ani-
mal sacrifice) is necessary for the performance of the ritual. They also claimed
that it would not be possible to perform the ritual if any of those elements
were missing. However, when asked about the purpose of those actions, they
were not able to answer, although everyone was convinced that there must
be a meaning; they just didn’t know what it was. Furthermore, people were
strongly convinced that no alterations could be made in the way the ritual is
performed. This is how we have found those things, and this is how we must
keep them. In reality, however, as we shall see, the ritual changes all the time,
adapting to practical and environmental conditions, but in the eyes of the
participants it appears unchanged.
Boyer links ritualistic behaviour to the human contamination-avoidance
systems. The consideration of those systems, according to Boyer, can explain
the compulsion of performance, the obsession with accuracy and the anxiety
at incorrect or missed performance involved in high-arousal rituals. Also, it
can explain the conceptual vagueness and the lack of a “standard” meaning
attributed to the ritual elements. “Whatever meaning people find in ritual
actions consists in interpretations of these actions rather than content trans-
mitted by these actions” (Boyer 2005, 14).
Indeed, there does not seem to be a standard explicit reason for the per-
formance of the ritual. The most common answer people provide is that they
do it “for the Saint”. But when pressed to elaborate on what this means, many
of my subjects admitted to me they didn’t know why the ritual is performed,
and some even said that “nobody knows”. Others gave me some justification
200 Chapter 23 Dimitris Xygalatas

for its performance, which however changed from person to person. What
is more interesting is that there was a big discrepancy between the accounts
of novice and experienced participants. It seems that many of them perform
firewalking without any specific reason, but later come up with an explana-
tion for it, in a process of cognitive dissonance (Xygalatas, in press).

Endogenous substances and motivation

High-arousal rituals can stimulate the production of endogenous sub-
stances in the human body. Motor hyperactivity, emotional hyper-arousal,
stress, pain, dehydration, sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme tem-
peratures, are all elements that can lead to increased release of endorphins
(Henry 1982; Prince 1982). Endorphins can affect emotion and motivation,
and even produce analgesic effects, anxiety reduction, and feelings of ecstasy,
euphoria or tranquillity, which follow a state of stress or terror in certain
rituals without any apparent reason. Subjects often attribute this sudden
relief to supernatural intervention and speak of miraculous healing (Frecska
& Kulcsar 1989).
Endorphins can also increase the release of another neurotransmitter,
dopamine, into the synapses. Both types of substances can elevate attention
and emotion (Damasio 2000, 60). According to the ‘motivational salience
hypothesis’ (Deeley 2004; Kapur 2003), dopamine mediates the represen-
tation of an external stimulus as an attractive or aversive reality, assigning
salience and motivational importance to an experience. In this way, sensory-
emotional hyper-arousal can influence cognitive elements such as perception,
attention and memory. Extreme levels of dopamine are typically produced in
schizophrenic patients and further increase before and during psychotic epi-
sodes. These patients then experience delusions and hallucinations, to which
they attribute the utmost significance. Antipsychotic medication is aimed to
block dopamine receptors in the brain, thus lessening this sense of salience.
The Anastenarides often report having hallucinations during the per-
formance of the ritual: “as I was dancing, I raised my eyes, and the ceiling
was gone. There was nothing! I saw the sky above me, clear and blue. I saw
the angels in white clothes, dancing and singing the Great Doxology”. Other
Anastenarides report having seen Saint Constantine talking to them or
dancing with them, while a woman told me that she saw (and felt!) Saint
Helen pouring water in front of her feet while she was firewalking.
Psychotic patients report experiences of increased consciousness, such
as: “I developed a greater awareness… my senses were sharpened. I became
fascinated by the little insignificant things around me”; “I noticed things I had
never noticed before”; “I felt there was some overwhelming significance in
this”;“I felt like I was putting a piece of the puzzle together” (Kapur 2003, 15).
Firewalking and the Brain 201

Similarly, firewalkers have told me, reflecting on their experience: “This

experience has changed the way I see the world, the way I deal with things”;
“It has opened my eyes”; “It has made me notice small details that I thought
were insignificant before”.
In this process, delusions appear as a top-down cognitive explanation
of these experiences of extreme salience and significance. Psychotics invest
explanations on these experiences in an attempt to rationalize an otherwise
confusing sensation. And since delusions are constructed by the individual,
they are shaped on the basis of the patient’s relevant cultural context (Kapur
2003, 15). Thus, a patient in Texas might speak of a conspiracy to overthrow
the government organized by communists or Saddam Hussein, while a
villager in Cameroon might speak of spirits or witches. This process is so
powerful that it can often lead to apocalyptic or conversion experiences.
One patient I interviewed was undergoing treatment for psychotic behavior,
caused by drug abuse. I had talked to him various times while his condition
was developing, and he expressed various theories about people – includ-
ing myself –, machines, or even aliens conspiring against him. Although his
treatment still continues, he now shows no symptoms of psychotic behavior
and can realize what happened to him. This is how he described one of his
experiences: “I was hearing voices in my head and I was trying to make sense
of them. I said: ‘They must be coming from some god; and if I am the only
one who is hearing them, then I must be a very special person.’ I was con-
vinced that I was some kind of prophet [laughing]”. This patient is an atheist.
The same kind of convictions can be observed in firewalkers after their
first performance. Characteristically, some of them said: “I came to realize
that the whole universe was conspiring to bring me here to perform the
ritual”, “I was called by Saint Constantine to perform the ritual”, or “I realised
that it was my destiny to become a firewalker”. Once a patient arrives at
such an explanation, it serves as an overall framework of further action and
thought, driving him or her to find further confirmatory evidence (Kapur
2003). In this way, they develop a grand theory of their entire existence, us-
ing a kind of post hoc reasoning to justify previous actions.
Throughout my life… things were happening to me. Things that were
not accidental. There was a whole set of seeming coincidences, which I
later [after firewalking] realised that were simply part of my life’s nexus
(15, emphasis mine).
In this way, the meaning and significance of high-arousal rituals can
be constructed by the participant after its actual performance. Participa-
tion might be a random event, caused by personal impulse or curiosity.
However, the sensory and emotional extravagance involved in such rituals
202 Chapter 23 Dimitris Xygalatas

begs interpretation. Endorphins can produce subjective rewards on a brain

level, and dopamine can invest them with a feeling of significance and utter
reality, offering a powerful schema into which all sorts of new events can be
incorporated. This in turn provides participants with sufficient motivation
to maintain and transmit the ritual, further reinforcing its consequences and
dynamics. Thus, the ritual acquires an independent dynamics as an attractor
of susceptible individuals, independent of any reasons that might have been
responsible for its original collective performance.
Of course, direct measures of endorphin and dopamine levels during
the performance of the ritual remains very difficult to obtain, as this would
require very intrusive methods (although there are indirect indications).
However, there is solid data from experimental studies conducted in the
laboratory on the effects of neurotransmitters (e.g., see Harris & McNa-
mara, this volume). After all, there is nothing special about firewalking, and
the same physiological processes can be involved in other rituals, as well as
other high-arousal situations, e.g. a rave party, or even be induced by drugs
(Greenfield, 2000). It is therefore possible that more research on the func-
tions of neurotransmitters could broaden our understanding of religious
behaviour, and particularly high-arousal rituals.

Author’s Note
I would like to thank Jesse Bering and Joseph Bulbulia for commenting
on the manuscript of this paper and for providing valuable comments.

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