Fire Walking in different parts of the World.

Fire-walking is the act of walking barefoot over a bed of hot coals.

Fire-walking is practiced

• by fakirs and similar persons,
• by Eastern Orthodox Christians in parts of and Bulgaria during some popular religious feasts (see nestinarstvo).
• !Kung Bushmen of the African Kalahari desert have firewalked since their tribal beginnings. The !Kung use fire in their powerful healing ceremonies.
• by Japanese Taoists and Buddhists
• as a rite of purification, healing, initiation and transcendence, which have been threads in the cultural tapestry of our planet.

Organizers of firewalking ceremonies sometimes claim that in order to prevent one's feet from burning, meditation, calling on spirits/gods or other supernatural intervention is necessary.

The oldest recorded firewalk occurred over 4,000 years ago in India. Two Brahmin priests were competing to see who could walk farther over hot coals. The victor's triumph was recorded in writing surviving to this day. In a 17th century letter, Father Le Jeune, a Jesuit priest, wrote to his superior, telling of a healing firewalk he witnessed among the North American Indians. He reports of a sick woman walking through two or three hundred fires with bare legs and feet, not only without burning, but all the while commenting on that she could feel no uncomfortable heat. Some 30 years later, Father Marquette reported similar firewalks among the Ottawa Indians and Jonathan Carver writes in his 1802 book, Travels in North America that one of the most astounding sights he saw was the parade of warriors who would "walk naked through a fire...with apparent immunity."

The Science behind FireWalking

David Willey is a physics instructor and an expert on the science of fire walking at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. He said people are able to walk across a bed of burning coals because "wood is a lousy conductor."

"There're three ways heat can get transmitted: conduction, convection, and radiation," he said.

Conduction is the transfer of heat from one substance to another via direct contact. In convection heat is transferred through air or fluid circulation. In radiation it is transmitted as if spreading out in straight lines from a central source (think of the sun or a heat lamp).

Conduction is the main way heat is transmitted to a person's feet during a fire walk.

In fire walking, a person's feet, which Willey said are also poor conductors, touch ash-covered coals.

Since the fire walker is indeed walking, the time of contact between feet and coals is minimal—too quick for the coals to burn or char the feet, Willey said.