Prometheus Ascending

 

Prometheus watches Athena endow his creation with reason (painting by Christian Griepenkerl, 1877).

    Here in this painting by Christian Griepenkeri is an encapsulation of Western man's psychological, spiritual, religious, and intellectual journey.  It's millions of novels written in one beautiful image.  For me this strikes directly at the center of what I've been aiming at for most of my life.  What exactly is going on here?  This is a good depiction of my spiritual mother and father.  It's two figures breaking the binary of above and below and birthing a third factor.  There are plenty of ways to look at this act of creation by a Titan and an Olympian.  This is two separate races of gods coming together to create humankind, the third factor.  Athena and Prometheus are both exceptions to the gods in their own rights.  Prometheus's origin is by no means clear as it goes back beyond writing, but we first pick up his trail with Hesiod's Theogony dated between 730-700 BC.  Here we hear about the "Trick at Mecone," whereby Prometheus tricks Zeus.  The point of the meeting was for humankind to come to agreement with the gods on how to settle their accounts.  That is, how should we make proper sacrifice to the gods.  Prometheus tricks Zeus into accepting bones wrapped in fat rather than beef hidden inside an ox's stomach.  Since Zeus accepts the bones smeared in fat as an offering, man got to keep the meat for himself.  This angered Zeus, so he took fire away from man and hid it.  Prometheus steals back the divine fire and returns it to man and is punished by being chained to a rock.  An eagle, Zeus's bird, comes everyday to eat out Prometheus' liver, it regenerates, and so on.  The Greeks believed the liver was the seat for human emotions.  This trick is also how Pandora comes to be, as she is created, at the behest of Zeus, by Hephaestus with the aid of the other Olympians as further means of punishing man for his insolence.   We are punished for accepting the divine fire which was not meant for us, but which Prometheus steals and gives to us.  This is symbolized in another way in the above painting.  In it Prometheus and Athena conspire together to give us the divine fire.  But Pandora is just the Greek telling of a similar story in Genesis.  Have you heard that one?  That story features a tree, an apple, a snake, and a woman.      

    Who created humankind according to the Greeks?  Prometheus and Epimetheus?  Zeus?  Deucalion and Pyrrha (son and daughter of Prometheus and Epimetheus)?   Hephaestus and Athena?  Athena and Prometheus?  All of the above?  Whoever created us, Zeus definitely decided to punish us, and Prometheus took it upon himself to help us and that is what makes him so interesting to me (and all of Western man since at least Hesiod's time).  

    Briefly, as an aside, I like the way "man" sounds there as "Western man", and so I use it rather than "humankind" which I will divert to when it flows better.  I am a male.  Maybe it's as simple as that.  I'm primarily in service to a female deity however, and that would be Athena.  Albeit she was born from the womb of a masculine deities head, but still she was and is a female god, or a goddess.  I ask that you not get your knickers all in a bunch around your genitals over my use of this masculine designating noun.  I mean I could use "woman" instead, but we are all adults (if you aren't you should pretend to be for purposes of reading my blog), and I am a biological man, as in I have XY chromosomes.  I'm progressive and feel that gender is a separate issue from sex.  That is gender in humankind is something other than sex.  Obviously this is a touchy subject, and it's not my intention to go into that now, but this issue comes up a lot in Greek myth.  Where I stand on this issue is that reality manifest itself for humanity as a polarity.  That polarity is expressed in the human form (mostly it's just a biological form) as male and female.  Spiritually we can see this as positive and negative, but then who is the negative?  Well obviously it's the female in Greek myth as Pandora is sent by Zeus as a punishment for accepting the divine fire from Prometheus.  And yet, well...negative doesn't have to be negative in a less than sense of the term.  It can be just 1 and 0, and even here we can see a reflection of the sexes in the symbol we use for the first number "1" (which the Platonist didn't recognize as a number as the first number was 3 to them, but I won't get into that here).  "1" is phallic no?  And well "0" is a bit vaginal.  I wonder if that is a coincidence?  Oh my, in order to stop the endless digression I will just ask the reader to bear with the confusing appearance of my toxic masculinity.  It's an illusion as I am not toxically masculine...I just like the way "man" sounds better in referring to "western man" than does the term "wester human," which was the alternative I considered.  Nothing to see here, and here she is, letting out all of the spites.

Pandora by John William Waterhouse, 1896

        She's so curious.  Well, at least there is hope?  It really was not my intention to deal so in depth with this issue of the denigration of the female throughout the past 2500 years or so.  What happened to goddess worship?  This patriarchal attitude actually started with the Hellenistic Greeks.  Just look at how Zeus treated Hera, how rapey Greek myth is, or Iphigenia being sacrificed to Artemis so that the Greeks could make their way to Troy to get vengeance for the action of another trifflin' ass bi...I mean the lovely Helen of Troy 😁😈  Actually the triffliness award goes to Aphrodite in that story, as she is the one who awarded Helen to Paris to win the celestial beauty contest, and this despite the fact that Helen was already Menelaus's wife.  All aboard the digression train, next stop Cancelville, where my work will never be read again.  I mean no disrespect to Aphrodite, Iphigenia (one of my favorite female Greek names by the way, right up there with Ariadne), or Helen.  They are all adult godesses, divine humans, and mythic figures who I believe are capable of handling a little nuanced nerdy adult humor.   

    So, back to the script, Prometheus and Athena...aside from Hesiod's telling, we have the Greek playwright Aeschylus who gives us more information about Prometheus in four plays of which we do not have all of.  That is there were four tragedies written by Aeschylus, and they were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus the Fire Bringer, and Prometheus the Fire Kindler.  Apparently, according to Wikipedia, the last two parts have been lost to antiquity, but they also refer to it as a trilogy.  What I've pieced together is that Aeschylus adds to the story that Prometheus's mother Themis (Gaia) tells him of a marriage that would produce a child that would overthrow Zeus.  That child is Heracles, who goes on to free Prometheus from his Zeus induced torture.  

    There is another 8th century BC work, lost to antiquity, called the Titanomachy, which tells the story of the war between the Titans and the Olympians.  This is supposed to be the original source of the Prometheus lore that Aeschylus had access to and was able to reference.  We don't have it, so we don't know what all was relayed in it, but we know that Aeschylus had it.  There are supposedly differences between the account of Prometheus in the Titanomachy and Hesiod's works of Theogony and Works and Days.  Part of what makes Prometheus such an exception is that he somehow managed to not fight against the Olympians during the War of the Titans.  This was the war by which Cronos (astrological Saturn) was defeated by Zeus who was Cronos's youngest son.  Prometheus is said to have helped Zeus overthrow his father's rule.  Yet later on, Prometheus sides with humankind (see I'm not a complete bigot) and is punished by Zeus.  

Prometheus (1909) by Otto Greiner

    It's just so fascinating to me!  That fascination is captured in the above painting.  Here is Prometheus protecting the nascent and delicate human being from the threat of the angry god Zeus.  This is the act of rebellion that Prometheus is really known for, and this is his gift to man.  Why does he take up for us?  Why does he go against his own kind, the Titans, and help the Olympians to oust Cronos?  Why is he so associated with the astrological Uranus, and what about Ouranos (the original God, Saturn's father, who the planet Uranus is named after)?  Simply put, Prometheus makes man godlike by giving us fire.  That's literally true and metaphorically true.  As the Greek philosopher Sallust put it, "Myths are things that never happened, but always are."  The literal truth is that our control of fire did make us godlike.  It's the ability to control fire that gave us power over nature, at least to the extent that we have been able to buffet ourselves against the daily indiscriminate fury of the red tooth and claw.  From fire we got charcoal, and from charcoal we got metallurgy, and from there we went to the moon and are about to download our consciousnesses into the collective singularity neuralink musk bunghole (well I won't be crawling up that particular hole, but you get the reference).  From fire to Frankenchinchillas.  That all started, metaphorically, and mythically with Prometheus.   Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was subtitled "the modern Prometheus."  She wrote that in 1818 at the age of 18, and somehow was able to foretell the aforementioned Muskhole.  That is, it's about technology gone to far in the wrong direction.  A.I. anyone?  Which gets us back to the previous blog post about Pluto in Aquarius and what that will mean for mankind (there he goes again with that toxic masculinity).  

    What is the antidote to all of this out of control technowizardry?  Is artificial intelligence a bad thing?  Is the internet a bad thing?  Should we all just kill ourselves before we destroy the planet with CAFO cattle farts (CAFO is "concentrated animal feeding operations"...what big Ag industry calls the production of hamburger along with how your thanksgiving turkey was likely produced)?  Am I already a relic in thought at the ancient age of 44 years old?  What exactly is my problem with A.I. and screens anyway?  It's just a feeling, nothing much more.  It seems that these screens are impowering humankind with endless knowledge, and with the ability to communicate with any mind on the planet anytime and anywhere.  Yet our children just google the answers, and their teachers just google the grade, and google just googles us from behind, and we wonder what the slight pressure is.  No worries, it's just growing pains right, just a little stretching of the flesh?  We're just going to feel a little pressure while they slip that consumer prison straight up our Muskholes.  It won't hurt though cause it will be virtual you see, and we won't remember it either because you can't google your own damn lack of attention span back into something like a workable memory.  If we can't remember anything cause we just google the answer than what's to stop us from truly knowing anything?  Memory is like a muscle.  People who can't write can click an apple button and instantly attain Faulkner in a routine email to their boss.  I've seen the commercial.  Why is this a good idea?  If you can't write it's because you haven't practiced.  That's okay.  We can't all be great at everything.  

    Well this is where that antidote I asked about earlier in this essay comes in.  I think I know the answer from myth, and her name is Athena, goddess of Wisdom, warefare, and handicraft.  I do, or have done, in the case of the second one (war), all of the above.  Prometheus, Hephaestus, and Athena are all linked together in ancient Athens.  They were all worshiped there, and only there, together.  There is some thought that Hephaestus is Prometheus, and the two are mixed up in myth.  There is a telling where it was Prometheus who split Zeus's head open and freed Athena.  Hephaestus was married to Athena in some tellings, and he was born of Hera without the help of Zeus (or any other male deity...which is also the case for Ares).  These intersections in myth are pointing in some interesting directions.  One of which are an ancient mystery cult known as the Kabiri, who were chthonic and amphibious deities with crab pinchers for hands, they were also called Karkinoi (crabs) by Hesychius of Alexandria.  The Kabiri were associated with the mother goddess.  I don't think it's an accident that in astrology, the sign ruled by the moon, Cancer, is the crab.  I'll continue that thread next time on The Serpent Drawn Chariot.   

Prometheus Bound by Thomas Cole (1847)