Myths of the Origin of Fire - An Essay

Sir James George Frazer OM FRS FRSE FBA (1854 - 1941), was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. He is often considered one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. The importance of myths as documents of human thought in the embryo is now generally recognized, and they are collected and compared, no longer for the sake of idle entertainment, but for the light they throw on the intellectual evolution of our species. In that work of collection and comparison much remains to be done before all the myths of the world can be classified and arranged in a Corpus Mythorum, in which, as in a museum, these fossils of the mind can be exhibited to illustrate an early stage in the progress of thought from its lowly beginnings to heights as yet unknown With my other writings I offer this essay as a contribution to that great palaeontology of the human mind which remains to be written.