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The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2 [[Vol. 2, Page]] 519 THE "FATHER OF MORTALS." § XX. PROMETHEUS, THE TITAN. H IS O RIGIN IN A NCIENT I NDIA. I N our modern day there does not exist 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 Deukalion, whom the Boeotians 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 Grece Antique remarks: "Thus Prometheus is something more than the archetype of humanity; he is its generator. In the same way that we saw Hephaestus 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" ( Apollodorus, I., 7, 1). After the Flood of Deukalion, Zeus, it was taught, had commanded Prometheus and Athena to call forth a new race of men from the mire left by the waters of the deluge ( Ovid , Metam. 1, 81. Etym. M. v . [[ Prometheus ]]); and in the day of Pausanias the slime which the hero had used for this purpose was still shown in Phocea ( Paus. x, 4, 4). "On several archaic monuments one still sees Prometheus modelling a human body, either alone or with Athena's help" ( Myth. Grece Ant. 246 ) . The same authors remind the world 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 Phoronidae. 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 ( Pausanias, 11, 19, 5; Cf. 20 , 3.) A benefactor of men as Prometheus was, he had made them participators of every bliss on earth. Plato ( Timaeus, p. 22) , and Clemens Alexandrinus ( Strom. 1 , p. 380) say that Phoroneus was the first man, or "the father of mortals." His genealogy, which assigns to him as his father Inachos, the river, reminds one 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. Melia, Decharme thinks, is the personification of the ash-tree, whence, [[Vol. 2, Page]] 520 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. according to Hesiod, issued the race of the age of Bronze* ( Opera et Dies, 142-145); and which with the Greeks is the celestial tree common to every Aryan mythology. This ash is the Yggdrasil of the 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 Fate ( Karma, Orlog ) , but men are conscious only of the Present. But when Gultweig comes (the golden ore) "the bewitching enchantress who, thrice cast into the fire, arises each time more beautiful, and fills the souls of gods and men with unapproachable 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 K ARMA ( See "Asgard and the Gods," p. 10-12) . 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 any 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 better than fire by friction, the learned author of the "Mythologie de la Grece Antique" perceives in this "fruit" a trifle more than an allusion to terrestrial 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 Palaeolithic men; -- but something more mysterious this time, though still as earthly. . . . "A divine bird, nestled in the boughs 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 [[ Phoroneus ]] 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 Aryan Hindus) into the Greek Prometheus. Phoroneus is the [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * According to the Occult teaching, three yugas passed away during the time of the Third Root-Race, i.e ., the Satya, the Treta, and the Dvapara yuga, answering to the golden age of its early innocence: to the silver -- when it reached its maturity: and to the Bronze age, when, separating into sexes, they became the mighty demi-gods of old. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 521 THE POETRY OF MODERN ORIENTALISTS. (personified) bird, that brings the heavenly lightning to the Earth. Traditions relating to the birth and origin of the race of Bronze, and those which made of Phoroneus the father of the Argians, are an evidence to us that this thunderbolt (or lightning), as in the legends of Hephaestus or Prometheus, was the origin of the human race" (266). This still affords us no more than the external meaning of the symbols and the allegory.