The flaming chalice is a drinking vessel surmounted by a flame, and it is the emblem of Unitarian Universalism. The design originated in the Second World War: the artist Hans Deutsch, an Austrian refugee who had drawn anti-Nazi cartoons in Vienna before fleeing through Paris and Portugal, drew it in 1941 for the Unitarian Service Committee, the American relief agency that helped people flee Nazi-occupied Europe.
Deutsch had joined the Committee's staff in Lisbon, working as secretary and assistant to its executive director, the Reverend Charles Joy, who wanted a mark to place on the committee's papers to give them the appearance of official documents that might keep a bearer out of jail or secure passage to safety. Joy described the chalice with its burning oil as a symbol of helpfulness and sacrifice, recalling the lamps set on ancient altars, and asked Deutsch, in his spare time alongside the relief work itself, to design something that would give the papers dignity and could be recognised across languages and borders.
The man who gave Unitarianism its enduring symbol therefore designed it while himself a refugee, dependent on precisely the kind of papers the mark was meant to lend authority to. The agency he drew it for outlived the war and the emblem outgrew it: the Unitarian Service Committee continues today as the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, still working on human rights and disaster relief, while the chalice it commissioned for a bureaucratic purpose became the sign of a whole religious movement.