All-American Comics #16, cover-dated July 1940, introduced Scott, whose power flows from the Starheart, a mystical green flame. Nodell credited Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung and the sight of a trainman's green lantern as inspirations. Scott's ring required ritual recharging every 24 hours, touch ring to lantern, speak the oath, a liturgy in the mechanics.
The ring-and-lamp structure echoes Aladdin by way of the Ring of the Nibelung, and the oath, 'and I shall shed my light over dark evil,' functions as an incantation that unlocks the power. Comics scholarship treats Alan Scott as the clearest case of a magic hero filed under science fiction.
Symbolically minded readers note the full ritual kit: charged talisman, spoken formula, cyclical renewal, and a taboo weakness, exactly the structure of a grimoire-bound tool. The later Corps-era mythology buried the magic under alien technology, but the original instrument never stopped being a lamp genie in a ring.
A ring, a lamp, an oath, a single impossible weakness: is the first Green Lantern a superhero comic, or a fairy tale that wandered into a cape?