Hestia – Personification of the Sacred Fire Archetype
The Fires of Purification
The element of fire is associated with the color red, the summer, and the heart; also the passion, the spirit, and the intuitive knowledge. In both the Old and the New Testament, the fire element purifies and cleans, becoming the vehicle that separates impurity from purity, which is consistent with a shared vision with alchemy. Fire, since the beginning of time, is adored for eliminating impurities, contamination, and has been regarded as an essential element that regenerates and renews.
The importance of Hestia in one’s psychological life comes from its ability to mediate the soul, giving the individual a place to gather, a junction point where the soul and the world are meeting. It is through the psychic presence of Hestia that houses the world of man’s psychological life. The act of imagining, a psychological activity par excellence, is not separate from the world. The villas we create are where they live within dreams and fantasies. Outwardly, they manifest an aspect of our soul. The house is more than the landscape: it is a psychic state.
The soul, from the perspective of Hestia, reveals itself in terms of spatial metaphors. So the pathology manifested by the language of the goddess of the hearth contains phrases relating to space: off-base, off-center, unable to settle, distanced without a carpet underfoot, demonstrating that without Hestia’s values and their power integration, the soul is unable to find a place to live and grow.
