By night a sea-goddess lays her newborn in the coals, meaning to scorch away everything in him that can die. The one witness wired to served text for immortality won by burning is the Greek mythographer Apollodorus, whose The Library (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE) tells it of the sea-nymph Thetis and the infant who would become Achilles. Having borne a son to the mortal Peleus, Thetis meant to "make it immortal": she would "hide it in the fire by night" to burn out "the mortal element which the child inherited" from his human father, while "by day she anointed him with ambrosia", the deathless salve of the gods. The rite turns on secrecy and nerve, and it fails on both. Peleus, watching, sees the infant "writhing on the fire" and cries out; Thetis, her purpose broken, abandons "her infant son and departed to the Nereids", her sisters of the sea, and the work is left half done. The child stays mortal. Chiron took him and "named him Achilles", though before that "his name was Ligyron".

The fire here is not a weapon but a sieve — a way of parting, within one body, what must perish from what need not. James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish anthropologist who translated and annotated this Apollodorus, records in a note a harsher telling: that Thetis bore seven sons and tried each in the flame, and that Achilles too "would have perished in like manner" had Peleus not snatched him back with only the ankle burnt. Frazer's note files the same gesture under another Greek name, "Demeter and the infant son of Celeus" — a goddess once more holding a mortal child to the hearth to burn the death out of him.

Only this Greek witness is wired to served text; the record's other authorities — Roscher's Lexikon, and Carl-Martin Edsman's Ignis Divinus (1949), a whole study of fire as the means of rejuvenation and immortality — wait unread beneath the address. What did the old tellers hear in fire, rather than in water or breath, that made it the one element able to burn a body down to whatever in it cannot die?