that the gods sent Agni down (RV 1. 36. 10, cf. 10. 63. 7). The bringing of fire
is thus connected with the beginnings of sacrificial ritual and of mankind.
The Prometheus myth, though dissimilar in detail, likewise associates the
theft of fire with the institution of sacrifice, when gods and men were first
coming to a settlement and defining their relations (Hes. Th. 535–70). It is
further bound up in Hesiod, not with the creation of mankind, but with that
of the first woman. In other sources Prometheus is the father of Deucalion
who, as the only male survivor of the Flood, became the progenitor of man-
kind, or at any rate of a major division of it; or Prometheus fashions mankind
out of clay. In Argive myth Phoroneus was both the bringer of fire and ‘the
father of mortal men’ (Phoronis fr. 1). So there is a similar nexus in India and
Greece. We seem to be dealing with remnants of a Graeco-Aryan fire myth
that had its place within a larger construct.^127
THE WATERSA wide range of evidence attests the holy status of terrestrial (potable) waters
among Indo-European peoples. Sometimes they are venerated collectively, as
‘the Waters’ or divided into ‘Rivers and Springs’; sometimes individual rivers
or fountains are worshipped under their own names.
The Indo-European animate word for water, *a ̄p-, became assigned to the
feminine gender, probably because of water’s fostering properties. In the
Indo-Iranian tradition we find it developed as an individualizing (non-
collective) plural, ‘the Waters’, Vedic A ̄pah
̇
, Avestan A ̄po ̄. In the case of rivers
the assignation of gender was not straightforward. As fosterers they might be
considered female; as fructifiers and fertilizers they might be seen as male.
If they were large and fast-flowing, their strong and forceful nature might
also favour this choice. In south-eastern Europe (Greece, the Balkans, Italy)
rivers are generally masculine, but in Iran and India they are generally
feminine. Elsewhere the picture is more mixed. In the Germanic and Celtic
areas feminine names have come to predominate more widely than they did
in antiquity.^128 Some names fluctuate; for example, the Danube is masculine
in Latin and Slavonic, but feminine in German and Romanian (and in Dante,
Inferno 32. 26), while the Rhine is masculine in Latin and German, feminine
in Old Norse.
(^127) Cf. Müller (1897), 810–13.
(^128) On the gender of rivers see P. Kretschmer in Mélanges linguistiques offerts à M. Holger
Pedersen (Acta Jutlandica 9, Copenhagen 1937), 76–87; P. Arumaa, Annales Societatis Litterarum
Estonicae in Svecia 5 (1965–9), 16–34; Schramm (1973), 26 f.
274 6. Storm and Stream