This is the exoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory, though a sectarian version, is suggestive, and seems true to life. It is the natural deduction from the dead‐letter text of Chapter iii of _Genesis_. Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the Divine Fire so as to allow men to proceed consciously on the path of Spiritual Evolution, thus transforming the most perfect of _animals_ on Earth into a potential God, and making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Hence, also, the _curse_ pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah‐ Ilda‐baoth against his “rebellious son,” Satan. The cold, pure snows of the Caucasian mountain and the never‐dying, singeing fire and flames of an inextinguishable Hell, two poles, yet the same idea, the dual aspect of a refined torture; a “Fire‐producer”—the personified emblem of Φωσφόρος (_Phósphoros_), of the Astral Fire and Light in the Anima Mundi (that Element of which the German materialist philosopher Moleschott said: “ohne _Phosphor_ kein Gedanke,” or “without phosphorus no thought”)—burning in the fierce Flames of his terrestrial Passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought, discerning as it now does good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart—a Prometheus indeed, because a _conscious_, and hence a _responsible_ entity.(562) The curse of life is great, yet, with the exception of some Hindû and Sufi mystics, how few are those who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive (objectively) _incorporeal_ Being, or even the universal static Inertia personified in Brahmâ during his “Night’s” Rest. For, to quote from an able article by one(563) who, confusing the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim thereto: