[But when] Gultweig (gold-ore) comes, the bewitching enchantress ... who, thrice cast into the fire, arises each time more beautiful than before and fills the souls of gods and men with unappeasable longing, then the Norns ... enter into being, and the blessed peace of childhood's dreams passes away, and sin comes into existence with all its evil consequences [and Karma].[1202]
The thrice-purified Gold is—Manas, the Conscious Soul.
With the Greeks, the Ash-tree represented the same idea. Its luxuriant boughs are the Sidereal Heaven, golden by day and studded with stars by night—the fruits of Melia and Yggdrasil, under whose protecting shadow humanity lived during the Golden Age without desire as without fear. “That tree had a fruit, or an inflamed bough, which was lightning”—Decharme guesses.
And here steps in the killing Materialism of the age, that peculiar twist in the modern mind, which, like a Northern blast, bends all on its way, and freezes every intuition, allowing it no hand in the physical speculations of the day. After having seen in Prometheus no more than “fire by friction,” the learned author of the Mythologie de la Grèce Antique perceives in this “fruit” a trifle more than an allusion to terrestrial [pg 548] fire and its discovery. It is no longer fire, owing to the fall of lightning setting some dry fuel in a blaze, and thus revealing all its priceless benefits to palæolithic men—but something more mysterious this time, though still as earthly!
A divine bird, nestled in the branches [of the celestial Ash-tree], stole that bough [or the fruit] and carried it down on the earth in its bill. Now the Greek word Φορώνευς is the rigid equivalent of the Sanskrit word bhuranyu, “the rapid,” an epithet of Agni, considered as the carrier of the divine spark. Phoroneus, son of Melia or of the celestial ash, thus corresponds to a conception far more ancient, probably, than that one which transformed the pramantha [of the old Âryan Hindûs] into the Greek Prometheus. Phoroneus is the [personified] bird, that brings the heavenly lightning to the earth. Traditions relating to the birth of the race of Bronze, and those which made of Phoroneus the father of the Argolians, are an evidence to us that this thunderbolt [or lightning], as in the legend of Hephæstus or Prometheus, was the origin of the human race.[1203]
This still affords us no more than the external meaning of the symbols and the allegory. It is now supposed that the name of Prometheus has been unriddled. But the modern Mythologists and Orientalists see in it no longer what their fathers saw on the authority of the whole of classical antiquity. They only find therein something far more appropriate to the spirit of the age, namely, a phallic element. But the name of Phoroneus, as well as that of Prometheus, bears not one, nor even two, but a series of esoteric meanings. Both relate to the seven Celestial Fires; to Agni Abhimânin, his three sons, and their forty-five sons, constituting the Forty-nine Fires. Do all these numbers relate only to the terrestrial mode of fire and to the flame of sexual passion? Did the Hindû Âryan mind never soar above such purely sensual conceptions; that mind which is declared by Prof. Max Müller to be the most spiritual and mystically inclined on the whole globe? The number of those fires alone ought to have suggested an inkling of the truth.
We are told that one is no longer permitted, in this age of rational thought, to explain the name of Pro-metheus as the old Greeks did. The latter, it seems:
Basing themselves on the apparent analogy of προμηθεύς with the verb προμανθύνειν, saw in him the type of the “foreseeing” man, to whom, for the sake of symmetry, a brother was added—Epi-metheus, or “he who takes counsel after the event.”[1204]
But now the Orientalists have decided otherwise. They know the real meaning of the two names better than those who invented them. [pg 549] The legend is based upon an event of universal importance. It was built to commemorate
A great event which must have strongly impressed itself upon the imagination of the first witnesses, and its remembrance has never since faded out from popular memory.[1205]