The Theft of Fire

When gods and mortals settled accounts at Mekone, Prometheus the fore-thinker tricked Zeus over the sacrificial portions — bones dressed in shining fat for the gods, the good meat hidden in the ox's stomach for men — and Zeus in his anger withheld fire from humankind: let them eat their meat raw in the cold dark. Prometheus stole it back. He went up secretly and carried the far-seen flame away hidden in the pith of a giant fennel stalk, where it smoulders slow, and brought it down to men; and the sight of fires blooming among mortals again stung Zeus to the heart. The punishments were two. For men, the gods fashioned Pandora, the beautiful evil, from whose jar troubles filled the world. For the thief, an axle of adamant on the Caucasus: chained there, a long-winged eagle came each day and ate his liver, and each night the liver grew whole again for the morning — until, generations later, Heracles shot the eagle and set the Titan free, with Zeus's leave, for the glory of his son.

Māui, youngest and most insolent of his brothers, put out every cooking fire in the village at night simply to find out what would happen — and what happened was that someone had to go to Mahuika, the ancestress of fire, in her burning cave at the world's edge. Māui went himself. Mahuika greeted her descendant kindly, and when he asked for fire she pulled out one of her fingernails, in which fire lives, and gave it to him. Out of sight, Māui doused it in a stream and came back: the fire had gone out, might he have another? Nail by nail he drained her — eight fingers, then a thumbnail dropped hissing into the water — until Mahuika understood the game. In her fury she tore out her last nail and dashed it to the ground, and the world caught fire; Māui fled before the burning, calling on his ancestors, and rain fell in floods that nearly drowned fire out of the world entirely. Mahuika's last sparks flew for refuge into the kaikōmako and other trees, where fire hides to this day — which is why, when the people rub the wood of those trees together, fire comes out to them, and no one need visit the burning cave again.

In the beginning there was no fire and the world was cold, until the Thunders sent lightning into the bottom of a hollow sycamore on an island. The animals could see the smoke across the water, and council was held: who would fetch it? Raven went first, proud and strong; while he perched considering, the heat scorched all his feathers black, and he came back afraid. The little screech owl looked down into the hollow and a hot blast near burned out his eyes, red to this day. Hooting owl and horned owl got ash in their eyes, and the white rings there remain. The black racer snake swam over, darted into the burning stump, scorched black; the great blacksnake climbed and fell in, scorched black. Every animal marked, and still no fire. Then the water spider — the little one that runs on top of the water — said she would go. 'But how will you carry it?' 'I shall manage that,' she said, and spun thread from her body and wove it into a tusti bowl, and fastened the bowl on her back. She ran across the water, put one burning coal into her bowl, and brought it home; and ever since, the world has had fire, and the water spider keeps her bowl.

In the beginning the world was dark, for an old chief at the head of the Nass kept the light — and in many tellings the fire too — shut in a nest of carved boxes in his house. Raven, who was white as gull-down in those days and could not bear a closed box anywhere in the world, turned himself into a hemlock needle and floated on the spring where the chief's daughter drank. She swallowed him, and bore him: a black-eyed boy who was Raven, crying in the old man's house. And what the grandchild cried for, doting age could not refuse. Box within box within box the treasures came out — until the boy had the ball of light itself in his hands, and became Raven, and was through the smokehole and gone. The smokehole's rim was hung with soot; Raven's white feathers were scorched black in the squeeze, and black they remain. He flung the light into the sky — sun, and moon, and the stars from the last box's fragments — and where he dropped fire, or where the people snatched brands from his beak's burden, the world's hearths were lit. The frog people and the fish people paid him nothing for it; that is another story, and Raven remembers.

Agni is a god who runs away. Born of the waters, kindled in the sky as lightning and the sun, he wearied of the office of carrying men's offerings and hid — in the waters, in the hollows of plants and trees, dispersed and secret. The world went cold between gods and men: no fire, no sacrifice, no bridge. It was Mātariśvan — a name of obscure depth, messenger or double of the wind, in some hymns a name of Agni's own hidden self — who found him afar and brought him from concealment to the clan of the Bhrigus, the ancient fire-priests, who established him in the homes of men. And because Agni had hidden in the plants, he dwells in wood still: the fire-drill's two sticks are called his parents, and when the priest churns them at dawn, Agni is born again from the wood in which he once took refuge — the theft, or the retrieval, re-enacted at every altar in every village at every sunrise.