The augurs, who, upon meeting each other, have to thrust their tongues into their cheeks to suppress a fit of laughter, may be more numerous in our own age than they ever were in the day of Sylla.
Section VI. Prometheus, the Titan.
His Origin In Ancient India.
In our modern day there is not the slightest doubt in the minds of the best European symbologists that the name Prometheus possessed the greatest and most mysterious significance in antiquity. While giving the history of Deucalion, whom the Bœotians regarded as the ancestor of the human races, and who was the son of Prometheus, according to the significant legend, the author of the Mythologie de la Grèce Antique remarks:
Thus Prometheus is something more than the archetype of humanity; he is its generator. In the same way that we saw Hephæstus moulding the first woman [Pandora] and endowing her with life, so Prometheus kneads the moist clay, of which he fashions the body of the first man whom he will endow with the soul-spark.[1193]After the flood of Deucalion, Zeus, they said, had commanded Prometheus and Athena to call forth a new race of men from the mire left by the waters of the deluge,[1194] and, in the day of Pausanias, the slime which the hero had used for this purpose was still shown in Phocis.[1195] On several archaic monuments we still see Prometheus modelling a human body, either alone or with Athena's help.[1196]
The same author reminds us of another equally mysterious personage, though one less generally known than Prometheus, whose legend offers remarkable analogies with that of the Titan. The name of this second ancestor and generator is Phoroneus, the hero of an ancient poem, now unfortunately no longer extant, the Phoroneidæ. His legend was localized in Argolis, where a perpetual flame was preserved on his altar as a reminder that he was the bringer of fire upon earth.[1197] A benefactor of men, like Prometheus, he had made them participators [pg 547] of every bliss on earth. Plato[1198] and Clemens Alexandrinus[1199] say that Phoroneus was the first man, or the “father of mortals.” His genealogy, which assigns to him the river Inachos as his father, reminds us of that of Prometheus, which makes that Titan the son of the Oceanid Clymene. But the mother of Phoroneus was the nymph Melia: a significant descent which distinguishes him from Prometheus.[1200]
Melia, Decharme thinks, is the personification of the “Ash-tree,” whence, according to Hesiod, issued the race of the age of Bronze,[1201] and which with the Greeks is the celestial tree common to every Âryan mythology. This Ash is the Yggdrasil of Norse antiquity, which the Norns sprinkle daily with the waters from the fountain of Urd, that it may not wither. It remains verdant till the last days of the Golden Age. Then the Norns—the three sisters who gaze respectively into the Past, the Present, and the Future—make known the decree of Orlog or Fate (Karma), but men are conscious only of the Present.