The Sacrifice of Prometheus When Defiance Becomes a Gift Greek Myth

In a strange way, today's episode is about humanity's first tech revolution, which has nothing to do with Silicon Valley, nor steam, nor steel. It is about fire. In Greek thought, fire is technicraft, which has less to do with the warmth that it can provide and more to do with know-how, ingenuity, creation, knowledge, becoming. And in the story that we're covering today, the myth of Prometheus, that fire is stolen from the gods by a rebel titan willing to sacrifice himself to give this great gift to share fire with humanity. Sprinkle in some insane punishments, some heroic victories, as well as a woman that is created by all of the gods with a cursed jar that unleashes all the evil upon the world, and you have one of the greatest stories ever told, my personal favorite myth, which is why it is episode one of my new channel, Sharing Fire, a name that literally echoes the Promethean myth. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to deep dive into this story so that there's some grounding for my channel, for what I'm trying to accomplish here. If you want to jump straight to that story, there's a timestamp down below, but first I just want to welcome you to the new channel. I'm so excited about this endeavor. My tagline is igniting curiosity and illuminating truth. I hope to do so by sharing this fire with you, these embers and sparks of philosophy and psychology and history and mythology and art and science and so much more. Hopefully in doing so and sharing these things well, you too will be able to share that fire with those in your life. Maybe it's naive of me, but I'm hoping to just add a little bit of positivity and optimism and knowledge and wisdom into the world from all of the many things that I love and have learned about. Also, I apologize for the radio voice today. I'm a bit under the weather, but without further ado, let's dive in to the first episode of Sharing Fire, The Myth of Prometheus. Now, there's two main sources where we get this story in general, and the earliest tracks back to the 7th or 8th century BCE by a man named Hesiod. He himself has two works. First, Theogony. That's where we get the sacrifice trick, the stolen fire, and the punishment. Then, Works in Days, where we get the add-on story of Pandora and her jar. I don't have a copy of that work, but I do want to point out that in any classical mythology retelling or compilation like these two books here, you will get a clear version of Hesiod's tale. By the way, I'm going to be covering a lot of books on this channel. You can always check the description down below for a link to get your own. I will also have a recommended reading link in general that I'll be adding to every single time we cover a work here. But then you have the drama that made it all come alive a few centuries later. A Greek play by a man named Aeschylus called Prometheus Bound. This is what makes it all so visceral. There's also some added details like the taunting from Hermes, the staging of the actual torture, the encounter with Io, and Prometheus's catalog of human arts. So, these are the first two, and then they kind of go off in their own directions as other writers and thinkers pick them up. So that by today, we have many iterations and variants of this incredible myth. So, it's kind of hard to tell a univocal story here, but that's what I'm going to attempt to do. I'm going to stitch it all together and tell you the main parts of the myth, and I hope to bring you through even all of this mess, a clear depiction and a deeper dive than usual of this story of Prometheus. So, though it deserves its own episode, the beginning of all of this is a great fight, a battle between the titans of old and the new Olympian gods. In quite literally, a tale as old as time, it always boils down to a son trying to usurp his father. And in this case, it is Zeus trying to usurp his father, Kronos. And Zeus, along with the help of his siblings and some cyclops and the hundred handers, eventually overthrow the titans. But there were three titans that were not sent to Tartarus. You have Atlas, who was chosen to hold up the sky, and you have a set of brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus meaning forethought, and Epimetheus meaning afterthought. We'll see that played out in many different ways. Because of Prometheus' forethought, he saw that the gods would end up winning. Now, this is our first look at the character of Prometheus, and it's one that doesn't quite follow him through, other than his cunning. Why did he not fight with his own kind, the titans? Yes, the gods were the underdogs, but we don't see that as his motivation. We see him being able to see which is going to win out and joining the right side. He doesn't fight in the war, he acts more as just a support, a counselor, bringing his brother along with him. And so, the two are spared. This is where the story can kind of go in different directions about which event happens first, but they are essentially given the task of creating mankind. Not humankind, there will be no women yet. They are to make man and the animals. Now, I want you to be on the lookout for all the comparisons between this origin story of humanity and that of the Christian origin story in Genesis. There's many other parallels that we're going to cover at the end of this video, but man, there are some similarities here that are just too coincidental. And yes, keep in mind that the Prometheus story comes first by a few centuries. So, man and beast are created first. Now, we see where Epimetheus is going to get us in trouble with his afterthought. He is too quick to action all of the time, and he has all these great gifts at his disposal. They both do, but Prometheus is over in the corner just thinking, how do I make the perfect creation? And while he is being careful and diligent, Epimetheus is over there just using all the gifts right away. He makes the lion and gives the lion speed and fur to keep him warm and sharp teeth. Birds have the power of flight and beautiful feathers and coloring, and on and on until he uses up all of the great gifts. He comes to his brother in a panic. He brings him to the workshop and he says, look at what I have done. So, Prometheus, left to create man with none of these gifts, wants to imbue him with at least something unique and special. And so, first he decides to build man in the image of God, to walk upright, to be like the Olympians. And so, he fashions man out of clay, and some versions have him breathing the breath of life into him. Others have the gods or Zeus imbuing that life. And presto, mankind is born, but naked, without shelter, without warmth, without tools, without know-how. And how does all of that get solved? Fire. But before we get to that, we need to introduce another scene, a great banquet at Makoni. It is clear that the gods demand sacrifice, but there was a negotiation. What kind of sacrifice exactly? And Prometheus, always looking out for his creation, whom he loves, his humans, sets up a bit of a trap for Zeus. He stages two portions for Zeus to choose from. The first is all the edible meat from the sacrifice, but it is hidden under a gross stomach and intestines. The second are just bare white bones, but they're hidden underneath glistening beautiful fat. Now, we don't know if Zeus falls for it or if he lets himself be tricked. The wording is really interesting in the original reading. If he does let himself be tricked, it seems to be to justify punishing the humans. But again, Hesiod's lines here could imply either. But yeah, Zeus chose the fat and the bones, which is why that is what was offered by the Greeks to their gods, leaving the meat, the sustenance, for mankind. So this is the first way in which Prometheus is working against the gods in favor of man. But Zeus didn't like that. And so Zeus hides fire, banishing mankind from having the tool of all tools, the tech of all tech. And this is when we get to the main part of the story that Prometheus is known for, stealing fire. Again, a few different iterations of where the fire is kept and what he does to steal it and what he carries it in. But the main one being that he uses a fennel stalk, which can hold a ember, which seems to be true to time that this was how fire was transferred as the narthex, as the Greeks called it, the fennel stalk, its pith would smolder slowly. But that's just an aside. The main point is, is that Prometheus goes up in some versions to Mount Olympus itself to steal this fire from the gods. Keep in mind, Prometheus is all about forethought. He knows what is going to happen, which makes his sacrifice here that much more special, that much more loving, that much more heroic. And there are two punishments that follow. You'll often get this in Greek myth. One action leads to two reactions. This is how all of Greek mythology spirals upward into this insane amalgamation of tale and division. Punishment one introduces Pandora and the jar, not the box. This is the first woman and Pandora actually means all gifts. So Zeus has a few different gods and goddesses work on her. Hephaestus is the one who actually molds her from the earth, creates her. Athena clothes her and teaches her weaving. Aphrodite bestows upon her charm and sexual allure. Hermes though goes the opposite and he implants a lying and deceitful heart in nature. And then the graces and persuasion adorn her. The way that Hesiod puts this is that she is beautiful, but treacherous. She's essentially a Trojan horse for the humans. And beside that, you have a pretty clear depiction here of how the Greeks thought about woman and what her role was, what her nature was. Again, keep in mind the parallels between Eve and Pandora. Even the fact that woman herself is an afterthought and a punishment and would bring about the fall of mankind. And it's spelled out pretty clearly because Prometheus forethought has warned his brother afterthought not to ever take any gifts from the gods as they are probably tricks. But hey, he's afterthought. He can't help it. He receives Pandora, but when she arrives, she arrives with a pithos, a large storage jar. Box, by the way, is a mistranslation that happens during the Renaissance era. But in this jar, Zeus has put all the horrible, terrible, evil things and they'll stay there as long as the jar is never opened. And for a while, the two of them actually resist opening the jar. And there's much that we could allude to there, but eventually they do. And countless plagues are unleashed as the text says. Disease, toil, death, sorrow. Very similar in wording to the same curses we see God place upon woman and man after Eve's temptation becomes too much. But there's one thing left in the very bottom of the jar. Maybe the most fascinating part of this side story to Prometheus, it's hope. But the Greek word there can also mean expectation, and it could be in a positive, neutral, or even an ominous sense. So there's great debate over why was hope left at the bottom? Was it the one redeeming gift from Zeus that even amongst all of this chaos and terror, he would give the humans something positive? Hope? Or is it the final torture? The thing that would make humans go on and continue in the face of so much evil and suffering and harm? Also, it's still in the jar. So is it withheld from humanity or is it preserved for humanity? Again, very different ways to read and interpret this and scholars are split, but it does drastically change the tone of the story. But Pandora works like each part of this myth as explanation. This is why women are the way that they are, which reflects early Greek patriarchy pretty well, that women are essential and dangerous. They are beautiful, but treacherous. Let's move into the second punishment, the one that is better known, at least when we're talking about the story of Prometheus, which is his chaining. Hesiod describes Prometheus bound in unbreakable bonds, grievous chains by the will of Zeus. A great winged eagle, which was the bird of Zeus, devours his liver every single day, peck by peck, just for it to regenerate in the skin to heal over overnight. So it can all happen again, onward forever. By the way, he is chained to a great rock as it is called, or you can picture the side of a mountain in the Caucasus. Now, Hesiod's version, the torment seems to be eternal, just truly the ultimate sacrifice for mankind. But in later myths and retellings, you'll actually have Heracles himself during his 12 labors come upon Prometheus and use a bow, I think, to take down the great eagle. I personally like that second version, but again, it's not found in our earliest. The eagle is symbolic for a few reasons. One, we need to know that this punishment is not random. This is a direct act from Zeus. You cannot go against the gods and get away with it. And again, to the Greeks, Zeus's eagle represented kind of the all-seeing eye. The gods were always watching. They would know and they will punish. Many people then ask, well, why the liver? It seems kind of random. Why not just eating the body or pecking out the eyes or something else? Again, getting into Greek thoughts, going into the context, the liver was the seat of life. It was a vital organ tied to vitality, passion. Livers were also used for divination, the tablet of destiny, as they were called. So having this eagle gnaw on it daily was symbolically destroying Prometheus's fate and vitality again and again. Also, going back to show just how amazing the Greeks were in their studies and their sciences, and it came from pretty barbaric ritual sacrifices, but they studied the organs a lot and they knew that the liver was the only organ that could regenerate to any degree, which is correct, making the torment kind of scientifically uncanny. But in general, it's about the same thing hell is about, the psychological torment of it never ending. Since the liver can regenerate, he is doomed to suffer forever. As for where this is happening, again, I mentioned the Caucasus. To the Greeks, that was the end of the world. Maybe I'm drawing it on too long here, but I think that this punishment is so much of what the story is. I want to kind of cover the version in Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. You have Zeus who orders Kratos and Bea, power and force, to drag Prometheus to this rock. Hephaestus is reluctantly hammering him in. The eagle is not yet present, but it's been foretold in the play, so the audience gets to dread its coming. And here we see more the character and nature of Prometheus. He never begs for his life or to be free. In fact, he taunts Zeus and he insists upon the justice of what he did. Here is where the suffering becomes heroic. It's resistance. It's defying tyranny. It's sacrifice to ensure the well-being of the least of these. Also here, there's something else going on and I don't want to muddy the waters. You can actually see this and it was Netflix, I think, that had chaos all about the story about Zeus and side story of Prometheus. And it comes straight from Prometheus Bound where Prometheus knows something. Again, forethought, a prophecy, some secret knowledge that could topple Zeus, that one of his sons will overtake him just as Zeus did to his father. But Zeus is pretty promiscuous, so he doesn't know which son to look out for. But he thinks Prometheus knows. This is also sometimes why we're thought that Zeus doesn't just destroy him because he is still hoping to get this information. But Prometheus never gives it up, which is why in the version where Heracles rescues him, Zeus seems to allow it, maybe hoping that it would lead to him telling. Now again, we're getting into other variations because sometimes it's a centaur that actually rescues him. Sometimes we aren't sure if Prometheus ever tells Zeus the secret. But one thing is for sure, in the version where he gets released, there's a cosmic order that still has to be delivered. And so a ring is made for Prometheus out of his own chains and a bit of the rock from the Caucasus. And so in this way, he is still bound to Zeus. There's some interesting ideas that this ring that binds you to another is actually where we get the concept of engagement or wedding rings. But who knows? It'd be a pretty messed up beginning for what we consider the purpose to be now. There's some other things that happen while he's chained. We're going to leave those for another time. But essentially, it just becomes a web of fates intersecting across who knows how many generations. One of my favorite scenes comes from Circe, or if we were being accurate, be Kirky in the Greek by Madeline Miller. And though it's focused on Circe, we get so many different looks into Greek mythology and certain Greek myths. And her encounter with Prometheus is such a cool envisioning of this story. If you have not read this, please do. But again, the web of fates, I think is the best way to think about the Prometheus story because it goes on for so long. There's so many different cast and characters that can get introduced or have encounters or other things that are happening at the same time. By the way, in later myths through a long series of things, the offspring that becomes stronger is Achilles, which leads into the whole Trojan War thing and Homer's epic. It's really cool. Again, the connections are insane. So that's the story. Now I want to just talk about what the ancients were doing with the story, how it tied into society, some of the iterations that are important, and then how future thinkers and writers incorporated this and what they thought and then what we can learn from it. So we're going to go through all this pretty quickly. The first thing to understand is kind of the political theology, if you will. As this fifth century telling Prometheus bound is really just a work about power. Maybe a debate about power is a better way to put it. Zeus is behaving like the new tyrant. He is consolidating power, and then Prometheus is our conscientious dissenter. And for all the different things that happen in the play and all the different ways that this can go, there are a few really consistent themes. Obedience versus justice and mercy versus the law. Taking into context what was going on in the fifth century in Greece at this time, we see the importance of this story. This is what Greek plays were for. They weren't just for entertainment. They weren't just to explain origins. They were for educating the common man, a use of free speech to make an intelligent population. And we see that free speech being fought for in the character of Prometheus. It really is so very cool. And like I'd mentioned, many different thinkers have touched on Prometheus and taken different things from it. The first one I'll mention quickly is Plato. It's just a short version of it in one of his dialogues, but it's kind of working as a political anthropology. Plato uses the story as an explanation for why politics belong to all citizens, unlike the technical arts. It's a pretty cool distinction being made by Plato. There's also many that have seen Prometheus as problematic, not a hero, or at least not just a hero. After all, consider from Zeus's point of view, Prometheus is breaking cosmic law. He destabilizes the entire sacrifice system. He arms mortals with tech that maybe they're not ready for. And we see that they don't wield it wisely. The fire is used for harm as much as it is used for good, maybe more so. There's a great warning in Prometheus that we really don't see fleshed out until Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Is innovation always good? Are we not ready for certain innovations because of our own hubris? By the way, what is the subtitle of Frankenstein? The Modern Prometheus. The great tension between technology and humanity. Now consider that Mary Shelley was married to who? Percy Shelley, who wrote Prometheus Unbound, another play, but he has a very different idea than his wife. Prometheus here is pure rebel. He refuses to bow to tyranny or to even reconcile at all. Shelley calls him a more poetical character than Satan because in Prometheus is lacking envy or revenge. Now, that's a common understanding of Satan then at that time. But what's hilarious are the parallels that are made biblically with Prometheus are sometimes Satan, this trickster deity, sometimes God himself as the maker of mankind, and sometimes Jesus as ultimate sacrifice. A few other different nods to Prometheus. Lord Byron has an amazing poem called Prometheus. Let me read you just a few lines. Titan to whose immortal eyes the suffering of mortality seen in their sad reality were not as things that gods despise. What was the pity's recompense? A silent suffering and intense. The rock, the vulture, and the chain. All that proud can feel of pain. The agony they do not show. The suffocating sense of woe which speaks but in its loneliness and then is jealous lest the sky should have a listener nor will sigh until its voice is echo-less. And then you have Nietzsche who loved Prometheus and honestly was probably the first place that I remember hearing about Prometheus. He covers it in a few of his works, but mainly in The Birth of Tragedy. Again, all books will be listed in the description. Nietzsche calls Prometheus the noblest symbol of the human will. He does his own biblical comparing. He looks at symbols of guilt like Adam or those that are passive to tyranny like Job and says no, not Prometheus, quite the opposite. This is Nietzsche's perfect example of heroic defiance. And maybe Nietzsche saw Prometheus as a bit of himself because we also see comparisons where he alludes to Prometheus being a tragic artist or even a philosopher. The artist or philosopher to Nietzsche, like Prometheus, has to steal dangerous knowledge or beauty from the but seeing such beauty or such knowledge brings only suffering. And so in a way, the artist, the philosopher, they sacrifice themselves to bring something important to the rest of humanity. I can't even begin to tell you how much I love all of that. And again, it is what inspired this channel, sharing fire, paying it forward. Humanity has had too many beautiful ideas, too many amazing stories, too much wisdom and knowledge to not talk about it constantly, to not share it with others so that we can all utilize it, to not forget it, to not become apathetic. And in a day of so much slop, as we look at the new Frankenstein technology of AI, are there still real meaningful things we can hold on to and remember and share? That's the fire. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed this first episode. If you did, and if you have not, would you please subscribe right now? Would you turn on notifications? Would leave a like and a comment? If you don't know what to comment, let me know what other kinds of episodes you would like to see. If it ignites curiosity or illuminates the truth, I want to talk about it. Also, I would love to hear from you guys for a good sign off. Should I end by saying until next time, share the fire, keep the flame alive, stay curious, seek truth, you tell me. But in the meantime, do all of those things and I'll see you soon for episode two.