Prometheus the ancient Greek god of fire defied Zeus and brought the gift of fire to humanity. Prometheus’s punishment was to be chained and pinned to a rock where a giant eagle descended every day to eat his liver. Being immortal, Prometheus’s wounds healed every night only to undergo the same torment each day for eternity. Prometheus’s only solitude was knowing that he had angered the gods by bestowing such a gift to humanity. Eventually after Prometheus helped Heracles with one of his labors, Zeus’s anger waned, and he released Prometheus who spent his days a bit more behaved. The deed, however, was done.
This is the ancient Greek mythological explanation for man’s mastery over fire. This achievement deserves a myth. Arguably it is the mastery of fire that has allowed the human species to dominate the globe. The ability to master fire provided light, warmth, defense against the elements, and predators. It also facilitated early engineering feats. It allowed man to fashion the environment to suit his needs.
Long before the Greco Roman pantheon, there existed a domestic religion, out of which, laws, private property rights, and many of the institutions that eventually gave rise to city states in the Mediterranean arose. The ancient Greeks and ancient pre–Roman Italians worshipped their ancestors as localized deities. Families had their own unique deities. The father was the priest and in charge of the domestic religion. It was the worship of entombed ancestors that gave rise to private property rights as land was passed down to the eldest son. One of the greatest fears was that there would be nobody around to place offerings for a person after they died, as they believed this sustenance was necessary to survive in the next world.
Even as this domestic religion evolved into cities, the private laws emanating from the domestic religion had precedent over the early city laws. Even as the more commonly known Greco Roman pantheon developed each city had its own version of these common deities. This religion developed spontaneously from the bottom up.
The ancient Greeks, Italians, and Hindus were all different branches of the ancient Indo-European peoples and shared a basic worship of the sacred fire, which was embedded in the domestic religion. Each family kept and maintained a sacred fire of the hearth that was maintained at all times in their homes. This was the center of early worship. Later, it was extinguished and reignited on March first each year using the rays of the sun or rubbing certain special twigs together to reignite it. The fire could only be reignited with these specific methods as it was holy.
Later, it was the sacred fire of Vesta that was kept lit by the Vestal Virgins for over a thousand years in Rome. Sylvia a priestess of the temple of Vesta was said to have been impregnated by Mars before giving birth to Romulus and Remus. In the few reported incidents of the fire extinguishing from storms or neglect, it was it was immediately reignited using mirrors to harness the pure rays of the sun. The sacred fire of Vesta was permanently extinguished in A.D. 391 when Emperor Theodosius I had the fire extinguished to stamp out pagan worship. Less than a hundred years later, Rome fell.
In The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Gibbons uses a few more words to explain this process, but why mess with tradition?
As Western civilization evolved it was private property rights that gave birth to the more modern conceptions of individual liberty, and unalienable Natural Rights that preexist and transcend government. While people may no longer engage in a domestic religion or literally worship the sacred fire of the family hearth, the sacred fire has become symbolic of human liberty. The flame of liberty or the torch of liberty are metaphors often used to give meaning to the power, importance, and fragility of human liberty. Fire, if neglected, can easily be extinguished. It needs to be fed and nourished.
The men that fought and won the American Revolution epitomize the strength, power, and fragility of human liberty. The flame of liberty was kindled and nurtured, until it became a torch. The torch of liberty was passed on from James Otis to John and Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington, to name a few of the revolutionaries, until it became a brushfire that spread wildly.
Through greed, apathy, ignorance, corruption, cowardice, and neglect, the flame of liberty, that sacred fire, has dwindled to a mere flickering light, that may be extinguished in America, and across the globe.
