Ancient Greece & Rome
When Hera, wife of Greek Godfather Zeus, caught first glimpse of her newborn, crippled son Hephaistos she was so appalled by his utter ugliness that she instantly threw him from Mount Olympus right into the Sea.
Although he survived this brutal act and later returned as the God of Fire, he had to live the life of an underdog.
His forge was thought to lie beneath the volcanoes in Greece. Clad in a huge apron, clumsy and lame with a soot-blackened face, he always carried a hammer and a pair of pincers with him. Nevertheless this patron of all craftsmen married Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, thus combining his enormous creative skills with her elegance and grace.
Most of the time Hephaistos was working hard in his blazing hot workshop where he and his companions, the giant Cyclops, wedged all of the divine weaponry as well as Zeus's dreaded thunderbolts.
Later, he moved west and became the Roman god of fire, called Vulcanus. The Romans thought he lived underneath Vesuvius and Aetna, and who knows? He might still be there, with his forge burning, hammering away creating thunderbolts..
Kamchatka
Like Earth itself, Kamchatka was born of fire, But while the violence of creation ended long ago for most of the Earth, Kamchatka has never seen quiet -- its history is one of continuous, violent rebirth.
The native people of Kamchatka have always feared the volcanoes: They believe the peaks to be inhabited by mountain spirits called gomuls.
At night, the gomuls go out and hunt whales in the ocean. They grab the whales with their enormous hands and impale them on their fingers.
Then, they return to the volcano and light up large fires to roast the whales. From far away, fire and smoke can be seen in the crater, and boiling whale fat pours down the mountains. The earth shakes and the whale bones whirl through the air.
When the whales are eaten, the fires go out and the volcano falls back into brooding silence.