Fire stolen in hollow reed.
Mythological motifs. · Creation and ordering of human life. · Acquisition of culture. · Acquisition of livable environment. · view the constellation · filed as A1415.1
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Attested across traditions
On our shelf — the index’s citations, resolved to served chapters
The motif on our shelf
— written from the served texts; every claim cited receiptThis sub-address is about the container, and on our shelf the container gets more scholarship than the theft. The served text spends six words on it: Prometheus gave men fire "hidden in a stalk of fennel" [The Library (Bibliotheca), BOOK I, ch. VII]. Frazer's note is a small botany of fire-carriage: the giant fennel's dry pith "catches fire just like a wick", so that Greeks still "use this plant to carry fire from one place to another" — Tournefort's sailors laid in a supply of it [ibid., editor's note]. The note even adjudicates the label's "hollow reed": Bent saw Lesbians carrying coals in what he took for a reed, still called nartheka, "a survival of the old word for the reed" — and Frazer adds drily, "Perhaps Bent mistook fennel for a reed" [ibid., editor's note]. The theft and its penalty belong to the parent address, written in the pilot; what this sub-address contributes is the credible object — a real plant, in living use, whose slow-burning pith makes the divine smuggling merely practical. A page where the editorial apparatus is the dossier: the motif's realism is a footnote's discovery.
Witnesses: The Library (Bibliotheca), BOOK I, ch. VII