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,

[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

[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.

[brezhnev]

The way I read the Genesis story, it portrays society as going from a Golden Age type caveman society to the modern society (modern for the ancient world, anyway). It makes a metaphor for human evolution as that of two kids growing up. They're all at home where everything is provided for them, then they turn into teenagers and rebel, then they have to leave home and take on adult responsibilities.

As for the origin of fire, that apparently didn't make it into the Bible. The story did get trimmed down over the centuries somewhat. Maybe there's an earlier document out there that describes this -- perhaps the Ugaritic Texts or Near Eastern documents might shed some light on it.

[level_head]

And that transition in Genesis is fairly abrupt-they go from the ideal life in Eden to kicked out and raising crops (involving, it seems, fire-created tools) immediately

[polaris93]

Then, too, Genesis seems to comprise at least two different documents, from two different sources and two different times, that were combined into Genesis much later than either. The story of the creation of the world and all its life, ending with "and God found it very good," comes from one document, and that of the fall of humankind comes from another -- the two styles and the attitudes behind them are clearly different, and they don't synch well with each other, as if they were just thrown together without any attempt being made to make them seem as if they were part of one longer narrative. (Though that last is understandable -- the original editors who put together the Old Testament, like those who finally wrote down the Greek oral traditions about the Gods and Heroes and stories such as the fall of Troy, wanted to make sure they didn't omit something important, so they just gathered it all in and let the chips fall where they might, for a later generation to try to unravel and interpret.) Since old legends from Babylon and

[brezhnev]

The Jewish manuscripts are pretty much the same, even the original Hebrew version before the Septuagint came out. So the editing happened long before the Roman days.