The Theft of Fire

Summary

The theft of fire is the story of the fire that the gods held, or that lay hidden from people, and then reached them: who stole it, who brought it, who discovered it, and what price was paid. Its best-known telling is Hesiod's. After Prometheus tricked Zeus in the division of the sacrifice at Mecone, Zeus "would not give the power of unwearying fire to the Melian race of mortal men who live on the earth". Prometheus "stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk", and when Zeus saw the ray of fire among men he was stung in spirit and angered. In Works and Days Hesiod says Zeus hid fire, and Prometheus stole it again for men in the fennel stalk, and Zeus told him: "I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart"; the evil thing was Pandora. Theogony 561–569; Works and Days 47–58.

In Prometheus Bound, Power tells Hephaestus as they chain Prometheus: "your own flower, flashing fire, source of all arts, he has purloined and bestowed upon mortal creatures". Prometheus says of himself: "I hunted out and stored in fennel stalk the stolen source of fire that has proved a teacher to mortals in every art", then: "In addition, I gave them fire .. and from it they shall learn many arts", and goes on to list houses, number, writing, medicine and the reading of signs.

Other mythologies tell the story with other verbs. In India Mātariśvan brings the hidden fire "from far away, produced by friction, from the gods". In Sumer Lugalbanda, left sick in a mountain cave, gets up and strikes two stones together until they spark. In the Shahnameh King Hushang throws a stone at a dark serpent and misses; the stone strikes a larger stone, sparks fly, he kindles a great fire and founds the feast of Sada for it. In China the Han Feizi says that people ate raw food and fell sick, until a sage arose who "drilled with the fire-drill and drew out fire", and they called him Suiren, the man of the fire-drill, and made him king. In Japan Izanami gives birth to fire, Kagutsuchi, is burnt by it and dies.

The idea these stories turn on is that fire is a power held by something higher than man, or hidden from him in stone and wood, and that its reaching people is an event paid for or rewarded. The accounts differ in the road. Among the Greeks it is a theft for which both the thief and humans are punished: Prometheus is chained and his liver eaten, and people receive the woman and the evils. Among the Indians it is a messenger's coming from afar, with no punishment. Among the Sumerians, Persians and Chinese it is a discovery: a man alone in the wild, a king hunting a serpent, a sage rubbing wood, and the discovery becomes a feast or a kingship. Among the Japanese it is a birth that kills the mother, so that fire takes its price from the earth it came out of. What joins them all is that fire is the first of the crafts: bread for Lugalbanda, iron for Hushang, cooked food for Suiren, and "every art" for Aeschylus.

We read the words in the Arabic tongue like this. Arabic nār, fire, belongs to the consonants n-w-r together with nūr, light, as the Persian essay in this project reads it, and in the Aramaic of Daniel nūr is fire itself. The names of fire as a god are read by the sound of its blazing: the Indian essay reads Agni as ajja, the fire blazed with a sound, the Kagutsuchi page reads the Japanese fire's name from the same root, and the Persian essay reads Ātar as ʿatara and athar. The Greek essay reads Prometheus as barama, the mubrim who settles a matter firmly before it happens, which is his trick before the theft. And Arabic has the story's own words: qabas, a firebrand taken from a fire; zand, the stick with which fire is struck; and qadḥ, striking stone on stone.

Linguistic Root

Fire and light

The Persian essay in this project sets Arabic nār under n-w-r, together with nūr, light. Lane puts the two words under one root, lists nūr among the plurals of nār, and says the w is the original middle radical of nār, which is why its diminutive is nuwayra. In the Aramaic of Daniel nūr is fire, and BDB notes it many times in "the burning fiery furnace"; Daniel 3:22 has šəbîbā dî nūrā, "the flame of the fire". So Arabic separates fire and light by vowel pattern, and Aramaic names fire with the word that in Arabic is light.

The names of fire as a god

The Indian essay reads Agni as ajja once the n and the suffix are taken off agni, and Lane says ajjat al-nār, the fire blazed, or the sound of its blazing was heard. The Kagutsuchi page reads the element kagu of the Japanese fire's name from the same root, after removing the particle and the title. The Persian essay reads ātarš, once the nominative š drops, as ʿatara and athar: the ʿatīra is a sacrificial victim, and athar is what remains after a thing. We do not reread these names here; the detail is on their pages.

The words of the Greek story

The Greek essay in this project reads Prometheus's name from barama once the Greek ending is removed; the detail is on his page. The two words of the story, πῦρ, fire, and νάρθηξ, giant fennel, are not read by the essays, and we propose no reading for them. Liddell and Scott give νάρθηξ as the giant fennel, citing Theogony 567, then list uses of its stalk: the Bacchants' wand, the schoolmaster's cane, the splint for a broken limb, and then the casket in which unguents were kept. The hollow stalk in which Prometheus carried fire is a household object, one that keeps an ember inside without burning on the outside.

Firebrand, fire-stick and striking

Arabic has words for the three roads by which fire reaches people. Whoever fetches fire from where it burns brings a qabas: Lane gives it as a firebrand taken from the main mass of fire, and qabasa nāran as "he took fire"; in the Qur'an Moses tells his family, "I have perceived a fire; perhaps I may bring you a brand from it." Whoever draws fire out of wood draws it with the zand, which Lane gives as the upper of the two sticks with which fire is produced, the zanda being the lower one with the notch; in the Rigveda they are the stick that is turned and the stick that receives, and in Chinese the tool is 燧 suì. Whoever strikes stone on stone qadaḥa, and the Qur'an has "those that strike sparks of fire"; this is what Lugalbanda and Hushang do.

Mātariśvan

Hymn 3.29 says that Mātariśvan is the name of fire "formed in its mother", and the dictionary gives the mother as the kindling stick. We read the second part of the name, śvan, as shabba once the n is removed: shabba al-ghulām, the boy became a youth; shabba al-nār, he kindled the fire; shabbat al-nār, the fire blazed; and Hebrew šābîb and Aramaic šəbîb mean flame. This is a reading proposed on the method; the detail is on the Mātariśvan page.

Attestations by Culture

Greece: the theft and its price

Hesiod ties the theft of fire to the division of the sacrifice: Prometheus tricked Zeus, Zeus withheld fire, Prometheus stole it, and Zeus gave men "as the price for fire" the woman Hephaestus made from earth, and chained Prometheus and sent an eagle to eat his liver. Each step in the story is answered by a step: trick for trick, gift for gift. Aeschylus makes fire the "flower" of Hephaestus, the smith god the Romans called Vulcan, so the theft is from another god's craft, and he makes fire "a teacher in every art".

India: the fire that came from far away

In the Rigveda fire disappears and hides, and Mātariśvan, envoy of Vivasvat, brings it from heaven, kindles it far from the Bhṛgus, and it comes into every house. Hymn 1.93 sets beside him the falcon that tore soma from the rock, so fire and drink both came down from above. Hymn 3.29 then describes the kindling tools, makes fire an embryo in two sticks, and calls it Mātariśvan when it is formed in its mother. So Indian fire comes from heaven and is born from wood at the same time.

Sumer: the youth who struck fire alone

Lugalbanda is left sick in a cave in the mountains, then recovers, comes out and eats of the plants of life. The text says: "He took hold of the stones. Repeatedly he struck them together. He laid the glowing coals on the open ground. The fine flintstone caused a spark. Its fire shone out for him over the waste land like the sun." Then, "not knowing how to bake bread or a cake, not knowing an oven", he bakes his dough on seven coals, hunts, sacrifices and invites the great gods to the banquet. Fire here is stolen from no one and brought by no one; the abandoned man discovers it alone and then makes an offering with it.

Iran: Hushang and the feast of Sada

Ferdowsi says that Hushang, grandson of Gayomart, was the first to win iron from the rock and make axes and saws, to dig canals, and "first showed the fire within the stone". Then he tells how: on a mountain he saw a long swift dusky serpent, with eyes like pools of blood and jaws whose smoke bedimmed the world; he hurled a stone at it, the serpent escaped, the stone struck a larger one and both were shivered, and sparks came out. The king gave thanks for the gift, made fire a focus of worship, and that night made a great blaze, stood round it with his men, "and held the feast called Sada". Biruni, in The Chronology of Ancient Nations, says that on the night of Sadhak in the month of Bahman fires are lit, and that it became a custom of kings to light fires that night and make them blaze, to drive wild beasts into them and send birds flying through the flames. From Hushang's line came Jamshid; Warner notes that Hushang is the Haoshyangha of the Avesta, the first Shah of the Pishdadian line in the older authorities, and fire is worshipped there as Ātar.

China: the man of the fire-drill

The Han Feizi, in the chapter "The Five Vermin", says: in the most ancient age people were few and beasts many, and a sage arose who built nests of wood to shelter people, and they called him the Nest-Builder and made him king. People ate fruit and shellfish, whose raw stench hurt their stomachs and made them sick, and a sage arose who "drilled with the fire-drill and drew out fire to transform the rank and raw"; the people rejoiced, made him king and called him 燧人氏 Suiren-shi, the man of the fire-drill. In China fire is a discovery rewarded with kingship, not a theft punished. The Huainanzi, after the story of the archer Yi whose drug of immortality was stolen, says: "So begging for fire is not as good as owning a fire-drill, and borrowing water is not as good as digging a well." Han Feizi 49, text on Wikisource; Huainanzi 6.

Japan: the birth that kills

The Kojiki says that Izanami bore with Izanagi the islands and the powers of sea, rivers, mountains and trees, then bore fire, and "through giving birth to this child her august private parts were burnt, and she sickened and lay down", and then died. Izanagi killed his son with his sword, and new powers arose from his blood on the rocks. Then he went down after her to Yomi, the land of the dead, broke off an end-tooth of his comb, "lit one light and went in and looked", and saw the maggots in her body. In the Japanese story fire kills its mother at birth, and then reveals death when it is lit in the dark.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Greek myths reads the theft of fire as the discovery of kindling: the move from depending on fire brought by lightning and volcanoes to lighting it by friction, which it calls the greatest technical revolution in human history; for the essay "the gods" are the forces of nature, the theft is wresting a secret from them, and the punishment of the liver is the price of progress. The Persian essay reads the sacred fire as a symbol of energy and technique: cooking, smelting metal, heating and purifying. The Indian essay reads Agni as the reaction of combustion, and the Japanese essay reads Izanami's death in giving birth to fire as a volcano coming out of the earth and destroying it.

The texts themselves support the technical reading in most versions, because they name the tool: the fennel stalk that keeps the ember, the two sticks rubbed one in the other, the stone that strikes the stone, the drill that bores. Then they name what comes out of fire: bread for Lugalbanda, iron and canals for Hushang, cooked food for Suiren, all the arts for Aeschylus. Yet the stories differ on who holds fire before man. Only the Greeks make it a possession that is withheld and stolen; the Sumerians, Persians and Chinese put it in stone and wood waiting for someone to draw it out; the Indians put it in heaven and in the stick at once; and the Japanese in the body of the mother earth.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The bringers of fire belong to the culture heroes, and fire is the first of their gifts; Prometheus alone among them takes it by a trick, and so joins the tricksters. In the North no one steals fire, but the trickster Loki is beaten in the hall of Útgarða-Loki in an eating contest by a man named Logi, who ate the meat, the bones and the trough, and in the morning it is learned that Logi was fire itself.

In India fire goes with drink: Mātariśvan comes down with fire in the same verse in which the falcon comes down with soma, as the drink of immortality is carried from heaven on the food of immortality; and in the same Chinese passage in which the drug of immortality is stolen, the Huainanzi says that owning a fire-drill is better than begging for fire.

The fire that comes out of the mother earth and kills her in Japan answers Prometheus, who makes people from earth in the later accounts: in both stories earth is the matter of creation and fire what changes it. In Sumer Enki gives the crafts to people from his house and no one needs to steal them, and in the very poem in which Lugalbanda strikes fire, Enki is invited to the banquet.

Hushang's serpent, missed by the stone that strikes out sparks, answers the dragon Aži Dahāka who wants to put out Ātar in the Zamyad Yasht: in the Iranian accounts fire and serpent are enemies, and in the Shahnameh fire is found while hunting the serpent.

In China fire has a god other than its discoverer: Zhurong, lord of fire at the court of the first emperors, just as Hephaestus owns the fire Prometheus steals. Both accounts separate the owner of fire from the one who brought it to people. In Works and Days this fire is paid for with Pandora; in the Han Feizi its finder is paid with a kingship.