This process, such as it is minutely described in the Vedic Sûtras, consists in rapidly turning a stick in a socket made in the centre of a piece of wood. The friction develops intense heat and ends by setting on fire the particles of wood in contact. The motion of the stick is not a continuous rotation, but a series of motions in contrary senses, by means of a cord fixed to the stick in its middle; the operator holds one of the ends in each hand and pulls them alternately.... The full process is designated in Sanskrit by the verb manthâmi, mathnáni, which means “to rub, agitate, shake and obtain by rubbing,” and is especially applied to rotatory friction, as is proved by its derivative mandala, which signifies a circle.... The pieces of wood serving for the production of fire have each their name in Sanskrit. The stick which turns is called pramantha; the discus which receives it is called arani and aranî: “the two aranis” designating the ensemble of the instrument.[1212]
It remains to be seen what the Brâhmans will say to this. But even supposing that Prometheus, in one of the aspects of his myth, was conceived as the producer of fire by means of the Pramantha, or as an animate and divine Pramantha, would this imply that the symbolism had no other than the phallic meaning attributed to it by modern symbologists? Decharme, at any rate, seems to have a correct glimmering of the truth; for he unconsciously corroborates all that the Occult Sciences teach with regard to the Mânasa Devas, who have endowed man with the consciousness of his immortal soul—that consciousness which hinders man “from foreseeing death,” and makes him know he is immortal.[1213] “How did Prometheus come into possession of the [divine] spark?” he asks.
Fire having its abode in heaven, it is there he must have gone to find it before he could carry it down to men, and, to approach the gods, he must have been a god himself.[1214]
The Greeks held that he was of the Divine Race, “the son of the Titan Iapetos”;[1215] the Hindûs, that he was a Deva.
But celestial fire belonged in the beginning to the gods alone; it was a treasure they reserved for themselves ... over which they jealously watched.... “The prudent son of Iapetus,” says Hesiod, “deceived Jupiter by stealing and concealing in the cavity of a narthex, the indefatigable fire of the resplendent glow.”[1216] ... Thus the gift made by Prometheus to men was a conquest made from heaven. Now according to Greek ideas [in this identical with those of the Occultists], this possession forced from Jupiter, this human trespassing upon the property of the gods, had to be followed by an expiation.... Prometheus, moreover, belongs to that race of Titans who had rebelled[1217] against the gods, and whom the master of Olympus had hurled down into Tartarus; like them, he is the genius of evil, doomed to cruel suffering.[1218]
What is most revolting in the explanations that follow, is the one-sided view taken of this grandest of all myths. The most intuitional among modern writers cannot, or will not, rise in their conceptions above the level of the Earth and cosmic phenomena. It is not denied that the moral idea in the myth, as presented in the Theogony of Hesiod, plays a certain part in the primitive Greek conception. The Titan is more than a thief of the celestial fire. He is the representation of humanity—active, industrious, intelligent, but at the same time ambitious, which aims at equalling divine powers. Therefore it is humanity punished in the person of Prometheus, but it is only so with the Greeks. With them, Prometheus is not a criminal, save in the eyes of the Gods. In his relation with the Earth, he is, on the contrary, a God himself, a friend of mankind (φιλάνθρωπος), which he has raised to civilization and initiated into the knowledge of all the arts; a conception which found its most poetical expounder in Æschylus. But with all other nations Prometheus is—what? The Fallen Angel, Satan, as the Church would have it? Not at all. He is simply the image of the pernicious and dreaded effects of lightning. He is the “evil fire” (mal feu)[1219] and the symbol of the divine reproductive male organ.
Reduced to its simple expression, the myth we are trying to explain is then simply a [cosmic] genius of fire.[1220]
It is the former idea (the phallic) which was preëminently Âryan, if we believe Adalbert Kuhn[1221] and F. Baudry. For:
The fire used by man being the result of the action of pramantha in the arani, the Âryas must have ascribed [?] the same origin to celestial fire, and they must have[1222] imagined [?] that a god armed with the pramantha, or a divine pramantha, caused a violent friction in the bosom of the clouds, which gave birth to lightning and thunderbolts.[1223]
This idea is supported by the fact that, according to Plutarch's testimony,[1224] the Stoics thought that thunder was the result of the struggle of storm-clouds, and lightning a conflagration due to friction; while Aristotle saw in the thunderbolt only the action of clouds which clashed with each other. What was this theory, if not the scientific translation of the production of fire by friction?... Everything leads us to think that, from the highest antiquity, and before the dispersion of the Âryas, it was believed that the pramantha lighted the fire in the storm-cloud as well as in the aranis.[1225]