In primitive societies, fire was conceived as a property stored in trees, like sap. The indigenous people of California believe that the world was once a globe of fire from which this element passed into the trees, and now it emerges every time two pieces of wood are rubbed together.
In the history of civilization, the use of fire is a way of intervening to control the environment. Essertage, the technique of cutting down part of a forest, burning the woods, planting the land, and then leaving it again to return to the forest, is one of the oldest known agricultural techniques and a method of colonization and domestication.
Betty Meggers, regarding the Amazon, talks about the slash-and-burn technique used by indigenous communities as a way to address the nutritional poverty of the soil in certain areas. According to the anthropologist H.T. Lewis, fire has contributed to the domestication of animals because it favored the growth of tender grasses and young shoots, which attract herbivorous game.
Gaston Bachelard wrote:
“What the fire touches has a different taste in the mouths of men. What the fire has illuminated retains an indelible color, what the fire has caressed, loved, adored, has acquired memories and lost its innocence. The appearance of fire frightens most animals except those that, in domestic life, are accustomed to it.”
Fire allowed humans to conquer the superfluous. The domestication of fire is a form of control in a constant oscillation between disobedience and knowledge, desire and need.