A cycle of ashes and fire...

On page 59 of Callaso's 'The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony', Coronis, the beautiful daughter of King Phlegyas, is reduced to ashes.

The story of Coronis' perceived unfaithfulness to Apollo and his ensuing jealousy is a familiar one. Apollo, struck by the radiance of mortal Coronis as she bathed in Lake Boebis, swelled with desire and, as Calasso writes, 'descended upon (her) like the night.' It is a compulsiveness and lack of control that could be considered unusual for Apollo, and, perhaps as a result, sets into motion a string of events that is wholly unnatural, beginning first and foremost with Asclepius.
Pried out of his mother from her funeral pyre and coaxed into life by Apollo, Asclepius was tutored by the centaur Chiron, who had or would soon tutor Aristaeus, Ajax, Aeneas, Actaeon, Caeneus, Theseus, Achilles, Jason, Peleus, Telamon, Perseus, Heracles, Oileus, and Phoenix. The string of names Asclepius' tutelage by Chiron is shared in spans in some way every nook and corner of every classic myth ever set down. It's little wonder then, that with his knowledge would come the eventual ability to break the boundary of the living and dead through healing such as neither heaven or earth had ever witnessed before. It logically follows, too, that such power could not be allowed to stay in the hands of mortals. Hades, feeling slighted, convinces Zeus to vaporize Asclepius with a thunderbolt.
And Apollo weeps. His tears, as Calasso writes on page 59, fall as amber into (where else?) Eridanus, a river of both the mortal and divine, where Phaeton fell after being smote by Zeus for passing too close and setting the world on fire as he sped between the spheres of heaven and earth on his father's chariot.

And, as Calasso states on Page 59, the 'divine fire' hardly stops there. Semele, a mortal madly loved by Zeus and thus watched with simmering rage by Hera, is killed by lightning and fire when, as Ovid writes in his Metamorphosis, a disguised Hera whispers to her:

"Many, pretending to be gods, have found entrance into modest chambers. But to be Zeus is not enough; make him prove his love ... as great and glorious as he is when welcomed by Hera, so great and glorious, pray him grant you his embrace ..."

And she is toasted. And here, as with Apollo and Coronis, Zeus, filled with sudden realization of what is growing inside his mortal lover, snatches out the unborn child--here Dionysis--and saves his life.

Calasso writes, on page 59, that 'the divine fire devours those venturing outside the human sphere..."

At the beginning of page 59, A quote from Pindar is linked to Coronis, stating "The craziest type of people are those who scorn what they have around them and look elsewhere / vainly searching for what cannot exist." Coronis wasn't searching, however; she was retreating. Against her consent, she had been pulled out of her sphere and into the mouth of that divine fire. To be attracted to Ischys was to seek shelter from it, but as her coming doom would tell, and as Semele's doom before and her son Asclepius' doom after, there is no escape once the sphere has been broken. That fire crosses all boundaries and ducks under all logic to set right what has been tipped out of place.

The stealing of the light.

"A long, long time ago, when the earth was still so new it was soft, Raven lived. And, for the most part, the world was good, except there was no light.
And, in the dark, no one could see anyone, and the spirits could not see their bodies, and all the people and animals spent a great deal of time stumbling around sightlessly. It was through this dark that Raven was flying when he happened to see something strange.
A light.
It was coming through the window of the house of a jealous old man. The man was holding a large box, and through the cracks leaked out a pure, bright light. Raven knew at once he needed this light for the world, but he also knew the jealous old man would never let him into his house. But Raven was not troubled by this, because the old man had a daughter.

'Raven Steals the Light' by Bill Reid

Raven transformed himself into a grain of sand, and flung himself into the river from which the man and his daughter drank every day. When the daughter scooped some of the cold water into her mouth, Raven was there, and slid down her throat with ease, and settled into her stomach.
Over the coming months the man's daughter found herself inexplicably with child. When she gave birth, it was not to a raven, or a human, but a Raven Child, with feathers and fingers and a beak and claws. But of course no one could see this because everything was dark.
The old man was very fond of this Raven Child, and couldn't deny him anything. The Raven Child begged every day to play with the box that contained the light, and the man gave it to him, but the man was not as foolish as Raven had originally thought. The light was in a box, but the box was in another box, which was in another box, in another box, in another box... and the Raven Child could only manage to pry off the outermost box before the old man would snatch the rest away and stow them up high were even the tricky Raven Child could not reach them.
Finally, many many days later, the Raven Child knew he was on the last box. It was small, but it was warm and heavy in his hands. He pried it open, but no sooner had he caught the light than the jealous old man pounced after him, seeing at last the Raven Child's trickery.
But the Raven Child was too quick for him. At once he was Raven in his original form again, and he fled away with the light up the chimney pipe and into the open sky.
But now that the light was in the sky, every wandering body of beast and man, and every lost soul that had been floating around in the dark, raced towards the light with a mothlike desperation. And Raven tried to outfly them, but the light was so heavy, and soon Eagle—fastest of them all— was right on his tail-feathers, snatching at him, and Raven dropped the light, and it fell to the ground and shattered into two pieces, and the smaller piece and all the shards bounced back up into the night, and Raven, acting fast, took the larger piece and threw it into the day.
He threw it so high that no one could ever reach it, but he also threw it so high that no one could ever take it away again.

And from then on, the night and the day were never without light.

The Unbroken Web...

I'm wondering if this is how it begins.

I have an old, yellowed book of folktales retold by Richard Adams called 'The Unbroken Web', which I originally bought less for the actual stories and more for the colorful illustrations. I never looked too deeply into the stories before, but now, reading over them, I'm aware of how deeply mythological they are. I feel like someone entering into a room in the dark and only realizing with the light of dawn that the walls are filled with windows.
Richard Adam's explanation of the title in the introduction to this collection struck me especially; this passage from that introduction reminds me of the parallels and layers that are always coming up in our lectures between our own stories and the myths of the past. It's a little long, but it's worth it!
Plus, I've added pictures.
Adams writes:

'The Woodpecker' by Yvonne Gilbert

 

"I see in fancy — I have a vision of — the world as the astronauts saw it – a shining globe, poised in space and rotating on its polar axis. Round it, enveloping it entirely, as one Chinese carved ivory ball closes another within it, is a second, incorporeal, gossamer like sphere — the unbroken web – rotating freely and independently of the rotation of the earth. It is something like a soap bubble, for although it is in rotation, real things are reflected on the surface, which imparts to them glowing, lambent colors...

'The Boy and his Horse' by Yvonne Gilbert

 

"Within this outer web we live. It soaks up, transmutes and is charged with human experience, exuded from the world within like steam or an aroma from cooking food. The storyteller is he who reaches up, grasps that part of the web which happens to be above his head at the moment and draws it down—it is, of course, elastic and unbreakable—to touch the earth. When he has told his story—its story—he releases it and it springs back and continues in rotation. The web moves continually above us, so that in time every point on its interior surface passes directly above every point on the surface passes directly above every point on the surface of the world. This is why the same stories are found all over the world, among different people who have had little or no communication with each other...

'The Mice in the Corn' by Yvonne Gilbert

"And the meaning (of the stories in this web)? One can become too preoccupied with meaning. What is the meaning of a rose? These stories are very old. In times past they have no doubt meant many different things to different people. Some meanings may well have disappeared for ever, together with the vanished circumstances of lives gone by. Today some of us, in our turn, perceive meanings in terms of the unconscious and its symbolism. In centuries to come the tales will still be there, but what they will then seem to mean we cannot tell. For the unbroken web has one other property, which I forgot to mention. It is impenetrable."

As way of closing, I should admit I have absolutely no idea what Adams means with the last line of this passage. That line is also where his introduction ends. The meaning of it feels to be right near the surface, yet it doesn't quite click for me.
If anyone has any ideas, I'd be eager to hear them.