Fire: origin stories

[polaris93]

Fire is so central to human existence that it would be impossible to find a living culture today that is without it. And every culture seems to have its origin stories about fire, how it came into the world, and what happened because of that.

For example, the Greeks told the story of Prometheus, the Titan who brought fire to Earth and gave it to

Comments

[prader]

My suspicion is that common wisdom has our origin story wrong. Science class tells us that we have been "evolving" on a gradual slope from the simple to the complex, from primordial soup to single celled organisms to some ape-like common ancestor to modern humanity. I think we went from being advanced in a way that might look like "magic" to us now and then stumbled somehow into an era of chaos where we lost much of our understanding of the world and universe and are only slowly beginning to regain some of the knowledge we once held by our new use of technology.

The idea of the tree of knowledge being a metaphor for sex (and therefore "bad") sounds plausible until you realize that God commanded Adam (mankind) to "be fruitful, and multiply."

The idea of sex wasn't exactly a surprise to God.

He invented it.

But what might have happened in the story of the Serpent is that sex began to be used outside of the framework God intended it to be used for... in other words, God intended mankind to have sex with each other, male and female, not talking serpents.

:)

(Actually, I don't think the being under discussion was a literal talking snake- I think it is a literary device used by the Hebrew author to ascribe a certain unsavoryness of character to the being in question, which a Hebrew audience would have understood, and a fundamentalist Christian... apparently... would not.)

[polaris93]

You could be right. :-) Especially as to that last, which is very likely.

But I am curious as to why, of all the histories of humanity that any human culture has ever come up with, the Bible has no origin story about the human taming of fire. Any ideas as to why?

[prader]

My idea is that if the Bible is truth, the origin story contained within it predates the others... with mankind already being assumed to understand fire, so it isn't worthy of mention. If these other stories occurred after the Bible (OT) was "authored" (keep in mind it was passed down orally through the "great art of memory"... which has also been largely lost... for only God knows how many thousands of years before it was ever written down) then they take place after the "fall" I speak of in the first of my comment and highlight RE-discovery of things we didn't even know we once knew.

I'm not shitting you- I think some sort of fundamental transition of our very nature may have occurred as a result of the judgment contained in the Genesis story. In other words, I don't think we are the same now as we once were, even going so far as the physicality that is now our nature. (Just to give an example to give you an idea of the kind of transformation I'm talking about- this is NOT necessarily what I believe happened- but perhaps pre-fall we were bathed in something like light that represented a more spiritually based nature that we lost once we became more physically oriented.

Again- not saying "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED!", just trying to give you an idea of what our transformation could have been like.

IF I'm even right.

Which I don't know for sure either.

This is all a hunch based on some reading, observation, and a little thought.

[polaris93]

Well, it could be.

One thing we do know is that no other species has ever acquired fire, and used it as we do. There are no traces of the use of fire by any other species anywhere on Earth. And humans have a peculiarity with respect to fire, in that there is a potential in us to become pyromaniacs, i.e., creatures that get turned on by setting fires. We thus have a very peculiar psychology, without which we could never have harnessed and used fire as we have. We resemble our close genetic kin, chimps and bonobos, in a lot of ways, but when it comes to the use of fire, we are unique on Earth. Just how and why we began to use fire is unknown. But that we did -- and that no other species did -- is certain. So that transition, from creatures that ran from wildfires and lightning to creatures that captured and tamed and began to use fire in a controlled way, is where we might start looking for what you envision.

[prader]

Well, it could be.

It would explain a great many things we simply don't have any other answer for. Like how the pyramids got here- which I'm not even sure we could construct today with the same precision, or the carvings on the Earth that can only be viewed from space. Among other oddities that make no sense whatsoever given a linear evolutionary framework.

[polaris93]

The carvings that can be seen from space were likely created for ritual dances that took the dancers step by step throughout the carvings so that they could experience the forms. You draw the image on parchment or etch it into a tablet, then transfer it to the ground, expanding as you go. They build large buildings this way, floor by floor. You multiply each line of the original image by whatever factor is needed to expand it, and reproduce the angles in the drawing in the carved form (angles stay the same no matter how big the result gets, and all you have to do is make a transfer of segments of the two lines that come together to make the angle in the same relationship to each other that they are in the image, lay it down next to the end of one of the lines of the carving, and lay down the other line parallel to the other line segment of the transferred angle. I've done this in geometry classes. That those big carvings can be seen from space is just a nice spin-off, but the people who made them saw them from the beginning in the orginal images on clay or parchment or papyrus used in the planning stages for them.

As for the pyramids, there's a way to build them from the inside, stone by stone, entering internal chambers to do that, then sealing off each chamber once it is no longer needed for that. And one line of research strongly suggests that those stones were poured in place, made from a type of concrete that we don't use in the modern world, a superior type that a company in France is now on the verge of making and selling. And there are other ways they could have been made. The main thing is that the making of those pyramids began as a way to keep laborers who were hired to help plant, tend, harvest, and put away produce employed during the fallow season so that they'll be around when needed. So somebody dreamed up making those monuments as a sacred task. They paid the workers for their labor in grain and edible oil, and housed them and took care of their other needs. Later, they might have used slaves. But in the beginning it was a kind sort of WPA project, and it worked.

Now: the one that is still a mystery is the thing that was found in 180 million-year-old rock that had once been part of an ocean floor, something that for all the world is a spark plug of the sort that any car from the 1950s might have had in it. How it got into that rock, of that age, and how it came to exist in the first place, are total mysteries. (Courtesy of Pauwels & Bergier)

[prader]

Either that, or "Aliens did it."

[polaris93]

"Aliens did it" is too much like some perpetrator, maybe an arsonist, giving "the Devil made me do it" as an excuse for his horrible behavior. ;-) We do know that there are caves in Africa in which there is a great layer of fossilized, splintered, gnawed-on bones that includes hominid bones, capped by a layer of charcoal, and above the charcoal, another layer of bones, these cut by a tool and cooked, none of them hominid. That layer of charcoal has been dated to about 1.8 million years ago. The bones in the layer of bones below the charcoal are broken and chewed by teeth and jaws clearly belonging to hyenas. The top layer of bones contains cooked, cut hyena bones. Conclusion: about 1.8 million years ago, some bright bulb got the idea to use fire to keep the hyenas away -- and then to cook the meat of those hyenas too stupid to take the hint. Fire is an even more potent weapon than any spear or knife, a terrible one, and it was our first great power-tool. It was almost certainly acquired by us at the beginning in the form of the burning remains of a branch thrown out by a wildfire, but we went from there to actually creating fire at will, using bow-drill firemakers and other means to do so. And once we had done that, the road to mastery of the whole world was ours. (Refernce: Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History) I'll go with inspiration by God, but not with aliens -- ET would have too many good reasons not to do any such thing for us.

[level_head]

A number of such things, including the spark plug, are discussed here. For the most part, these are just mentions, not analyses.

I'm not convinced at all, especially as I've been involved in past years debunking things like the Paluxy River "human footprints."

===|==============/ Level Head

[polaris93]

I know. But both the building of the pyramids and the making of the Nazca Lines can be explained in terms of engineering techniques of which the people around at those times were perfectly capable. As I said, I've done transfers of small drawings to larger-scale projects in geometry classes and other contexts, and it works quite well. And there are all sorts of ways the pyramids could have been built. The question, in the case of the pyramids, is why, and that "WPA porject" type of thing sounds quite reasonable -- though of course it waits to be confirmed by archaeologists.

[level_head]

I met a woman, perhaps a decade ago, who was involved in building giant kites to demonstrate their feasibility in pyramid-building. It seemed unlikely to me, but she apparently had some success at it.

We know of some engineering feats that were miraculous until we figured them out -- like the transport of those giant monoliths onto boats: they built the boats around the monoliths, then removed the sand.

===|==============/ Level Head

[polaris93]

Yep. My favorite scenario about the Pyramids involves the making of a really good grade of concrete and pouring it into molds in place, then removing the molds when the concrete cured -- it would be relatively easy to do, compared to dragging those huge stones for miles, anyway, and as I said, there's that French company that's about to start selling what they claim is concrete made the way the pyramid-builders made it. And the Nazca Lines wouldn't have been particularly hard to make, given transfers of the original drawings for them to much larger scales and then digging them out. It's things like that spark plug, or whatever the hell it really is, embedded in a 180-megayear old concretion that defy explanation (until it's proven that somebody salted the dig, or something of the sort -- you know, a journal entry by him describing how he planted it there, ending with "Ah-HAH -- the fools BELIEVED IT!!!" ).

[level_head]

I'm inclined, after the first hundreds of hoaxes or mistakes have been revealed, not to give much credence to subsequent revelations. Certainly I don't count them as true-until-debunked.

I was amused at the Tampa UFO story and how dearly it was clung to -- even after the son of the hoaxer hauled the original "UFO" down from the attic. He was accused of building it to resemble the real UFO seen in the photos -- and when they took the papier mache model apart and found that it was old newspapers dating from before the first "sighting" -- they accused the son of specifically finding the old newspapers so that he could make a believable model.

When you want something to be true, it tends to distort your view of the evidence. And even very convincing evidence must be approached skeptically -- which is tough to do through a pre-convinced worldview.

===|==============/ Level Head

[polaris93]

Yep. Which is why the sciences encourage or insist on peer review and the back-and-forth of scientific debate, which at times can become utterly vicious. But in the end, the trash gets hauled away and what's left is, by and large, pure gold. Not so with communities of believers, whose main interest is in clinging to the things they want to be true, whether they really are or not, and rejecting anything that might contradict those "revealed truths," which turn out in the end to be either something written up on the back of some con-artist's restaurant napkin, or "received" during an extended trip courtesy of Jack Daniels or some weird little 'shrooms.

This is the first I've heard of the Tampa UFO story, but it sounds like so many other such. I feel sorry for the people who need those stories to be true, and can't let go of them even in the face of tons of evidence proving they aren't. They have emotional needs that apparently can only be satisfied with such cultish ideas, and without them they fall apart. But that doesn't justify clinging to a cult or its core ideas, which strongly tend to have a vampiric effect on their followers, draining them of wealth and strength and health and, in some cases, killing them, such as, e.g., the mass suicide of the members of the Heaven's Gate community in 1997.

Religion in one form or another seems to be needed by most people. It satisfies needs that can't be met by the rigorous intellectual process of science. Which is fine, but whereas the scientific process may take years or decades to be completed, tests of the veracity, or, at any rate, healthiness of a given religion can take millennia, and even then in many cases you can't be sure.

I gave up on UFO reports from non-scientists years ago. The only reason I believe my late friend's story about the project he worked on and certain other incidents is because I knew him well, knew he knew what he was talking about, and could tell when he was telling a tall one and when he was telling the straight truth. UFO contactees and believers tend to be scientifically ignorant, credulous, and desperate for a belief-system that supports their emotional needs, poor things. Which isn't my bag at all.

[prader]

Oh, count me in the skeptic camp as well.

[polaris93]

The problem, as always, is that there's a tremendous amount of wish-fulfillment invested in many such claims, evidence of which is that in the face of competent scientific investigation and testing, the claim almost always falls apart. Some cryptophenomena, such as the mega-squid and collosal squid that were finally determined to be real marine animals and not just phantasms of some drunk sailor's imagination, ultimately withstand the tests and prove to be real. But the bulk of them turn out to be either deliberate hoaxes or something ordinary and explicable taken to be otherwise by someone who really didn't know better.