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,

[prader]

To say it another way- common wisdom states that at some point we became less like animals. I am saying that at some point we became more like the animals than we once were. And our recorded history is basically a study of events since.

[polaris93]

Ah, but why fire?

[prader]

Because even in our diminished state, we were singularly capable of recognizing its value to us.

[polaris93]

I don't mean that. Why would any creature which had good reason to fear fire suddenly decide to carry some of that scary stuff back to its home camp, where it could do who knows what mischief? The Norse have the best handle on fire I've ever run across -- Loki is fire; Loki makes wonderful toys and all manner of useful things; but Loki is also mischievous and can be horribly destructive. It's that "horribly destructive" that is at once so evident when it comes to fire, especially big wildfires. Either a creature would have to lack all capacity for fear to try to capture it, or be the sort of pervert that routinely sets unwanted fires today. Either tendency is contra-survival, and yet somebody, at some point, had to have one or both characteristics in order to capture fire and then tame it. The original Class Clown who, however, ultimately came up with something way too useful to pass up.