Who are the fire-tamers?

From remote farmhouses to oncology clinics, a secret world of French healers works in parallel with conventional medicine

by Susanna Crossman  BIO

Photos by the author/Aeon

is an Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist whose latest books include the memoir Home Is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream (2024) and the novel The Orange Notebooks (2025). Her recent work has also appeared in The Guardian, Vogue, The Paris Review, and more. When she’s not writing, she works internationally as a lecturer, mentor and clinical arts therapist.

Edited byMarina Benjamin

‘When do we get to the fire-tamers?’ my 10-year-old daughter asks from the backseat. Rain splatters against the windscreen. As we drive across salt marshes, a chill sea wind blows over the north-westerly French peninsula where we live; the tide is rising. By the road, in flooded fields, trees mirror in rippling water. The world doubles. ‘Soon,’ I say.

Ten minutes later, inside a lost farmhouse ringed by red geraniums, an elderly Breton woman whispers to a stone. In her gloomy kitchen, the French version of the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? murmurs from a flickering screen. The woman rubs the stone up and down my daughter’s fingers, whispering unintelligible words.

Finally, she points to a large wart: ‘That one is the queen.’ My daughter has dozens of growths on her hands. For a year, we’ve tried chemists’ kits and dermatologist treatments. Nothing has worked. Recently, a nurse colleague of mine suggested that we consult a fire-tamer, giving me Madame Abgrall’s address.

‘The queen will go first,’ Mme Abgrall says when she’s finished, ‘then the others will disappear.’ Without speaking, I slide a €10 note on to her table. As a fire-tamer, Mme Abgrall can’t ask for money, my colleague warned me, or her ‘gift’ would disappear.

When we get home, I tell my husband: ‘I hope it will work but I don’t know if I believe it can…’ My voice falters. ‘It’s ancient power,’ he tries to convince me.

British-born, we’ve lived in Brittany for nearly 15 years; my husband is drawn to Breton culture, especially the ‘land of legends’ and the Celtic otherworld, and owns academic books on Druidry. But he’s had a suburban upbringing, whereas I spent my childhood in a commune surrounded by hippies and performative quackery. Possibly in consequence, I favour hard science. I work in hospitals, train doctors, and work with treatment plans and protocols.

Yet, after our visit, I can’t stop thinking about the woman, her humility. The quiet power that enveloped the kitchen scene. Within weeks, the warts have gone and my daughter’s skin is clear; they never reappear. Questions inundate my mind: was it real? Did Mme Abgrall cure the warts? And who are the fire-tamers anyway?

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Fast-forward a decade: according to a documentary by Radio France, there are more than 5,000 traditional healers in France today, and at least two-thirds of the French population have consulted such a practitioner. However, there are no official statistics about fire-taming, no organisation or diploma to validate or regulate this treatment. Instead, fire-tamers – women and men predominantly based in rural areas – are known to have a ‘gift’. Contacted by word-of-mouth, they help with shingles, burns, eczema, teething, skin complaints – pathologies associated with excessive redness or swelling, that is to say, with inflammation, a word stemming from the Latin for igniting a fire. Using their hands, the fire-tamers ‘cut’, ‘channel’, ‘block’ and ‘pass’ the fire, taking it away from an inflamed zone. As a result, they are also known as fire-cutters, fire-soothers, fire-touchers, fire-passers or fire-charmers.

Gathering data on their proceedings is like catching a whisper in the wind. As the French doctor Valentina Vidano writes in her 2018 study, fire-tamers work in secret and often without payment, meaning there is no paper trail. It is both intriguing and disconcerting. The annals of fire-taming have been chronicled in oral history, transmitted between generations in gestures and rituals as safely guarded secrets.

A healer in Le Pouldu, Brittany. Courtesy the Departmental Archives of Finistère

In the rugged coastal region of Brittany where we live, fire-tamers are prevalent. A sacred Celtic place, the land is populated with thousands of menhirs and dolmens – ancient stone structures – alongside Calvary crosses and shrines with healing legends. Republican France had forced Breton culture underground. During the 19th and 20th centuries Bretons were characterised as ‘stubborn and ignorant, rooted in superstition, irrationality’, writes the historian Michael Orwicz. Until the 1950s, the population’s first languages were Breton or Gallo, but these were banned in French schools until the late 1970s. Yet, the Bretons never relinquished their identity – their music, buckwheat crepes, spirit of revolt, and healing practices. What Walter Benjamin called the ‘red thread of experience’, the passing-on of stories, has travelled on parallel byways.

Fire-tamers are ‘drugless healers’ who lay their hands over the ‘flaming’ area, never making physical contact

As a result, consulting a fire-tamer in Brittany today is an ordinary – albeit dissident – experience. When I tell Breton hospital colleagues that I’m writing about fire-tamers, the only bewildered staff member is myself. Everyone has a fire-taming tale. A pregnant occupational therapist tells me: ‘My dad, a headmaster, can fire-tame. He wants to give the gift. But I don’t have the time.’ A nurse recounts how his brother, a dairy farmer, discovered he was a fire-tamer by accident, curing his entire cow herd of mastitis. There are anecdotes about burns that required no skin graft, pain relief from radiotherapy, teething babies calmed. Even the non-believers join in, and a chic senior hospital lecturer tells me: ‘I am very Cartesian but my best friend tamed fire through knowing the “secret”.’

As a treatment practice, where are its origins? Fire-tamers are ‘drugless healers’ who lay their hands over the ‘flaming’ area, never making physical contact with the patient’s skin. Medical references to healing hands span from Greek Asclepieia temples through to the Bible and Native American techniques all the way to current studies on the clinical effectiveness of healing touch. But how do hands cure? And if, as Susan Sontag writes, illness is metaphor, what is........

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