Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

204 MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN XATIOXS.
•
BOOK yearly its triple harvests in the islands of the blessed by the
T -—' deep eddying ocean.
The Pro- In contrast with this gloomier belief, the Promethean
-Skchylos!
m } 7 th exhibits mankind in a scale ascending from the savage
state in which they knew the nse neither of fire nor of metals
to that high civilisation in which Zens fears that men may
become like the gods in wisdom and thus share their power.
Tor this myth, as related by JEschylos, knows nothing of a
previous knowledge of fire, which, according to the Hesiodic
version, Zeus took away from men in revenge for the cheat
which left only the fat and bones of victims as the j)or-
tion of the gods. This explanation, which is not altogether
consistent with other passages in the Hesiodic Theogony,
completely excludes the idea which lies at the very root of
the iEschylean tradition, for Prometheus expressly speaks
of men not as having lost high powers and the fruits of
great results achieved by those powers, but as never having
been awakened to the consciousness of the senses with
which they were endowed. Prom the first, until he came to
their aid, they were beings to whom sight and hearing were
wholly useless, and for whom life presented only the confused
shapes of a dream. The sunless caves, in which they lived
like ants, were not wrought into shape by their hands. Por
them there were no distinctions of seasons, no knowledge of
the rising and setting of the stars. For this state of un-
speakable misery there was no remedy until men could be
roused to a knowledge of their own powers and be placed in
the conditions indispensable for their exercise—a result to
be achieved only by bestowing on them the boon of fire.
But this very idea involves the fact that till then fire was a
thing unknown to men upon the earth. They might see it
in the cloven thunderclouds, or tremble at the fiery streams
hurled into the air from the heaving volcano, but to them
fire was at the least a thing which they dared not approach
with the thought of mastering and turning it to use. Some
wiser being than they must therefore bring it to them in a
form which shall deprive it of its terrors and make it the
servant, not the destroyer of man. That being is Prometheus,
who, ascending to the palace of Zeus, fills a ferule with fire,