fire-walking
noun [mass noun]
The practice of walking barefoot over a substance such as hot stones or wood ashes, often as part of a traditional ceremony.To show their enthusiasm for the corporate team, the employees were asked to engage in the ritual of fire-walking - literally to walk barefooted across a bed of white-hot coals....
- It was she who brought my attention to the practice of fire-walking in Northern Greece.
- Early on Cliff told us why fire-walking works and I was relieved to hear that it was to do with physics and not faith.
Derivatives
fire-walker
- The fire-walkers, confidant that they could walk a long bed of coals, were seen to all hop off in alarm, either when their supernatural powers ran out, or when the simple physics of the matter caught up with their delusions.
- When strong antipathy or a kind of trivialisation is being expressed it is invariably by members of the medical profession who seek to explain the empirical fact that the fire-walkers feel no pain, and their feet show no blisters.
- If the fire-walkers ' efforts mean that the forest has now gone back to its source, the earth, just like the bull's blood, obviously it shows an involvement in the notion of cyclic progression.