Ashes to ashes

Professor Roberto Hafez, Limerick University, Department of Applied Mythologies. Excerpt from his lecture of March 17, 1993, Symposium on "Urban and suburban mythologies".

is a very bad case of what I call a "tie-in" or "follower" myth. It is a purely intellectual construct, that feeds, or preys, on actual myths without adding any value whatsoever, cultural, social, you name it. The mythology works like those TV commercials: meaningful, sensible concepts are turned into chowder for mind-numbing mercantilism. Zeus is a high-efficiency, environment-friendly detergent. Buying this car is good karma. And so on. has it, it has everything, wholesale price: water, earth, air and fire. Fire? Let's talk about fire! I was not supposed to elaborate on this topic, but my predecessor on this lectern waxed lyrical about and the four elements, so that I cannot resist. So, we have been shown a map of all the so-called "-spottings"linked with fire. Here we have imaginative Dublinese who see large s drawn in the smouldering ashes left from the Howth catastrophe. In the Roraima state in Brazil, appears in the smoke layer that blots out the sky above the burning forest. In Queensland, Australia, kangaroo hunters shoot at, and obviously miss a flaming creature that was seen running ablaze in the bush. In India, several widows decline to throw themselves into the pyre and appeal to a new divinity called Zanesha : strangely, the pattern of these refusals is shaped like an inverted . Now, I must ask you, is this really a myth, or is it just world-class paranoia? Fire may ravage a country, but credulity seems to be an even worse scourge for the scientific mind. And if there is some remote possibility that should be in this room, please could he put an end to these childish games of his ? Or, I should say instead, please let us stop believing in him, so that he'll eventually go back to his big nowhere.