In one of the notes to my book Civilization and its Discontents I mentioned—though only incidentally—the conjecture which might be drawn from psycho-analytical material on the subject of primitive man's acquisition of power over fire. I am led to resume this theme by Albrecht Schaeffer's opposition (Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung, Jahrgang II, 1930, p. 201), and by Erlenmeyer's1 striking citation of the Mongolian law which prohibits urination upon ashes.2

Now I conjectured that, in order to possess himself of fire, it was necessary for man to renounce the homosexually tinged desire to extinguish it by a stream of urine. I think that this conjecture can be confirmed by the interpretation of the Greek myth of Prometheus, provided that we bear in mind the distortions to be expected in the transition from fact to the content of a myth. These are of the same nature as and no more strained than those which we recognize every