You want to know why
we walk across the scorching coals
with our feet bare and our hands bearing gifts
for holy Apollo of the Soracte;
I will tell you, it is an open mystery.
Our fathers say that once the people came to the mountain
to make sacrifice to Father Śuri who rules below
when a pair of wolves rushed up and snatched the entrails from the fire.
The cow-herders chased the wolves for a long while,
until they arrived at a cave. Ack, the stench of that place
was enough to make even a strong man fall dead on the spot;
all the cow-herders succumbed to it.
The pestilential gasses spread,
blighting the neighboring land and decimating the people’s herds.
They were about to abandon their cities
when a stranger in white and crowned with ivy arrived,
an expert in sacred rites and prophet of the line of Melampous.
He discerned the root of the plague lay in divine wrath for their ill-treatment of the god’s heralds,
and it could only be cut through the celebration of joyous games
– the people would sing and dance through flame
after a span of time spent imitating wolves,
that is to say living like brigands and plundering their neighbors.
And so every winter we put on our wolf-cloaks and go out from our cities,
our human laws and lives forgot. And when we’re done we meet here on the mountain,
and when the spirit seizes us, we leap into the purgative inferno
and come out the other side unharmed and hallowed by him.
