“In the midst of adoration and ritual precaution, they kept a fiery stone which the poetic imagination had made into a messenger of the sun. 

“With the brightness of the most beautiful rubies, it was also a perpetual ardent coal. It burned without being consumed, and its redness, which passed from vivid to dark, was not a deceptive symbol. Visible Fire: at its approach all hands, including those of the most pious, became profane. One could no more grasp it than a firebrand. It was intangible, like flame, lightning and mystery. A religious quality, for our corporeal person. And such an object can sustain astonishment better that fetishes of wood or stone. It has not always required as much for people to make of something a god.”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1903