god of fire was concealed in it.  Tan is called lohe, or flame, in Germany.  This primitive mode of kindling a fire was known to the Aryans before their dispersion, and friction with this object was equivalent to the birth of the fire-god, constraining him to come down to earth from the air, from thunder, etc.; indeed fire was also called dueta, the messenger between heaven and earth.  The question arose who had drawn fire from heaven, and developed it in the arani.  A resemblance was also traced between the instruments for kindling fire and the organs of generation, a reciprocal interchange of various myths, as we have before observed. Agni is concealed in arani, like the embryo in the womb (Rig-Veda).  Thus pramantha is the masculine instrument, arani the feminine, and the act of uniting them is copulation.

Agni had disappeared from earth and was concealed in a cavern, whence it was drawn by a divine person; that is, fire had disappeared and was concealed within the arani, whence it was extracted by the pramantha and bestowed upon man. Mataricvan, the divine deliverer, is therefore only the personification of the male organ.

In virtue of the idea that the soul is a spark, and that the production of fire resembles generation, Bhrigu, lightning, is a creator.  The son of Bhrigu marries the daughter of Manu, and they have a son who at his birth breaks his mother’s thigh, and therefore takes the name of Aurva (from uru a thigh).  This is only the lightning which rends the clouds asunder.

Many Graeco-Latin myths, beginning with that of Prometheus must be referred to Mataricvan and to the Bhrigu, and we can trace in the name of Prometheus the equivalent of a Sanscrit form pramathyus, one who obtains fire by friction.  Prometheus is, in fact, the ravisher of celestial fire (a phase of the polytheistic myth in a perfectly human form); he is a divine pramantha.  It is Prometheus who in one version of the myth cleaves open the head of Zeus, and causes Athene, the goddess who uses the lightning as her spear, to issue from it.  The Greeks afterwards carried on the evolution of myth in its transition from the physical to the moral phenomenon, and, forgetful of his origin, they made Prometheus into a seer.  As Bhrigu, he created man of earth and water, and breathed into him the spark of life.  Villemarque tells us that in Celtic antiquity there was an analogous myth, as we might naturally expect, since the Celts belong to the Aryan stock; Gwenn-Aran (albus superus) was a supernatural being which issued like lightning from a cloud.

The more thoughtful Greeks did not limit the Promethean myth to the idol and to anthropomorphic fancies, but it passed into a moral conception, and we have a proof of this transition in AEschylus.