Les Virginiens adorent le feu et se rejouissent apres avoir ete delivres de quelque danger considerable.

This engraving, Les Virginiens adorent le feu..., was published in Bernard’s monumental multivolume work Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, printed in Amsterdam between 1723 and 1737. The image ultimately derives from Theodor de Bry’s Americae Pars Prima (1590), which illustrated the first English attempt at settlement in North America through scenes based on John White’s watercolors from the Roanoke voyages.

The plate depicts a ceremonial gathering of Virginia Algonquian people worshiping fire in gratitude after escaping a great peril. The figures are shown in a semicircle around a central blaze, raising their arms and performing ritual gestures. Though rooted in de Bry’s original ethnographic imagery, this 18th-century re-engraving reflects Enlightenment Europe’s fascination with indigenous rituals and comparative religion, serving Bernard’s broader aim to catalogue the diversity of human spiritual practice across the globe.