The "Heavenly Fire": Kronos, Phaeton, Prometheus

di Andrew Casella
cover: Jean Delville, Prometheus, 1907)

[Continued fromย The astronomical significance of the Golden Age: Astrea and the "fall" of Phaeton]

In a Mongolian wedding prayer it is stated that: "Fire was born when Heaven and Earth separated": Therefore, before the celestial equator (Father Heaven) and the ecliptic (mother Earth) moved away (ie the inclination angle of about 23 ยฐ of the ecliptic with respect to the equator was recorded), the" Fire " did not exist. At the beginning, the Milky Way united heaven, earth and the world of the dead: the southern part of the Galaxy, in correspondence with Scorpio and Sagittarius, is, for many traditions, the place dedicated to the collection of souls waiting to reincarnate.

Divinity of the Underworld, the Afterlife and the Mysteries

di Marco Maculotti


We continue the discussion previously developed, taking it from the connection that we have seen to exist, in ancient traditions, between the period of the "solstitial crisis" and the belief in the return of the souls of the dead to the living. The connection with the underworld / underworld and with the Kingdom of the Dead seems, as we have seen, to be recurrent for these deities that we have defined as 'of the Winter Sun' [cf. Cernunno, Odin and other deities of the 'Winter Sun'], at the same time gods of fecundity and also linked to the underworld and, therefore, to the deceased.

We have already seen that the Celtic Cernunno, in addition to being a god of nature and time, is also considered an underworld deity, especially as regards his psychopomp function, as a companion of the dead in the afterlife: a mercurial aspect that in tradition Nordic is also found, as we have seen, in Odin / Wodan, from which in fact derives the day of the week which Latin belongs to Mercury (Wednesday= โ€œWodan's days"). Likewise, in many traditions from all over the world there are numinous figures connected both with fertility and with the Underworld and the Underworld, starting with the Mediterranean Lord of Hades Pluto, among whose symbols there is theย cornucopia (*krn), conveying abundance, fertility, wealth.