Prometheus

Prometheus was a Greek god.

He was one of many gods in the Greek religion.

The Greek religion is best understood as an intermediate one in the feminist/masculinist spectrum. It is neither so feminist as the American Indian religion nor so masculinist as Judaism. It is masculinist in so far as the chief god is a male, Zeus, and therefor projects masculine values. It is feminist in that it is polytheistic, identifying a god/goddess as epitomizing every significant feature of life.

In the Greek system there are five stages from the beginning to the arrival of mankind. In the first stage chaos reigns and all is undifferentiated, as in Judaism. In the second stage heaven (Uranus) and earth (Gaia) appear. In the third stage these two gods are made to produce children, known as titans. But, they are unwilling accomplices in this act and Kronos, the time titan has to kill Uranus to remain alive.

In the next stage further discrimination occurs when Kronos gives unwilling birth to Zeus and the rest of the Olympian gods. Zeus is most closely identified with the God of Judaism and Allah of Islam, but he has to share the stage with many other gods and goddesses which gives him a very different flavor. He is not always moral but is all powerful. In the final stage man appears, who Zeus is content to see remain in a prehuman condition and die out, but Zeus' brother gods, Prometheus and Epimetheus have other plans.

Prometheus is the son of the titans Iapetus and Klymene and aids Zeus in the destruction of Kronos.

Kronos (time, who consumes his young) is the titan father of Zeus and the son of Uranus and Gaia.

Zeus is married to his sister, Hera.

Prometheus’ name means forethought.

Prometheus tried to minimize his gifts to Zeus and instead, keep the good stuff for himself.

Prometheus' gifts to mortals were language and arts.

At this point we realize what the Greeks are referring to when they invent Prometheus. They are trying in retrospect to represent what actually happened when man captured fire and turned it to his own uses. We can imagine the actual events. A tree, struck by lightning and falling on a stag, burns part of it and when discovered by humans, they find that cooked food is better tasting than raw. Or, some such event occurs in winter and they find that they can avoid freezing by remaining close by during the night. They then determine to take a burning branch back to their cave and to keep it burning as long as possible by adding new fuel from time to time.

This involved an act of directed thought. Analyzing the situation and determining how it can be turned to advantage. That event is named by the Greeks, Prometheus. Once used, directed thought is used more and more frequently and eventually leads to all the arts and sciences, but, it also leads to a new form of suffering. Having discovered causality: fire applied to raw meat produces cooked meat, it became inescapable that individual humans sometimes cause pain and death for their relatives and that knowledge produces guilt feelings.

So, since causality had just been discovered, and masculine orderliness demanded that causality be universally applicable, it follows that since pain ensues, enslaving fire must have been an affront to god.

This is exactly equivalent to the original sin of Christianity. In that case Eve ate the forbidden apple and knew she was naked. Since the knowledge of her own nakedness resulted in pain, (shame), and since causality had just been discovered, eating the apple produced awareness, the act must have been an affront to god (a sin), since in a causal world pain cannot come from nowhere.

In a feminist theology, no such logic problems arise and therefore no identification of original sin occurs. In a feminist theology, the gods need no excuses for imposing pain on humans. For them, when fire becomes their servant, they accept it as a gift from god and it never occurs to them that an explanatory principle lies there with it. Prometheus never makes an appearance.

Causality turns out to be a powerful explanatory principle and eventually leads to the development of science and all of western culture, the bad and the good.

The gift of fire was viewed as a theft from Zeus.

Zeus punished Prometheus by shackling him.

This recognition of sin has the immediate effect of causing humans to view creativity with some suspicion, as an affront to god. Thus many will avoid it and creativity goes into a period of dormancy. Mankind, fearful of offending the gods, can be said to be tormented by fear, every time a new idea occurs to him.

Hepheistos, God of the forge shackles Prometheus at Zeus’ demand.

The shackling occurred in the Caucasus.

While shackled Prometheus was tormented by Zeus.

As a result of this affair Zeus introduced Pandora into life. Pandora is the source of evil and is too sexually attractive to resist.

Having identified sin, torment becomes a familiar feature of life and any pain that arises is traced back to it. This occurs first in sex, since sex is unequaled in its ability to impose pain on mankind. Since sex is also the invention that allows life to adopt new shapes as it continually adapts to environmental change, which includes snakes and black widows, for example, one can easily imagine that these things are flying forth from the womb of Pandora and that she is the punishment imposed on man for his great violation of god's will.

Afterwards, hope remained with Pandora.

After many generations, Prometheus is freed by Hercules.

So, eventually man learns to live with sin, makes a place for it and a system that provides at least a theoretical means of avoiding it and this frees man's creativity, Prometheus, for further adventures and leads eventually to the events in Athens. Athens leads to Rome, Rome leads to Paris and London and they lead to America and the hydrogen bomb.

Conclusions

So, where did they go wrong here? Causality is universally applicable, in the universe of time, at least. But, you have to identify the correct cause to get any value from it. Otherwise you are likely to go astray. Is the theft of fire, or the eating of the apple the actual cause of suffering? In a sense, yes. Awareness, as we have all experienced does result in immediate pain if that awareness succeeds in identifying us as the producers of pain in others when we had other options.

However, pain obviously exists to warn us away from actions and activities that work towards our own destruction. For example we burn our fingers and are warned to be careful with fire because it has the power to destroy our bodies. That is the meaning of physical pain. This brings us to mental pain. Does that operate similarly?

Well, if we kill our child, from all reports, we can expect to experience severe mental anquish. This seems consistent with pain as a warning against destructive behavior. However there is a difference. Our own lives are not threatened, but the life of our family is. So, apparently we can expect to experience pain when we do that which works against the best interests of our family and this can be expected to extend to the species. However, which acts work to the advantage of the species and which do not is a question of such great complexity, involving as it does predictions about the future, it is generally beyond the competence of man. Thus, in the absence of our feelings, how could we proceed?

The recognition of causality has led to the Hydrogen Bomb, thus, we can expect that we have followed this path as far as we reasonably can, since to follow it further would probably lead to the discovery of something even more deadly than that and eventually one of these tools would surely be used to destroy us. Man is capable of defying his feelings and sometimes feelings come into conflict when they are consulted at different levels of reality. For instance, having committed a crime, we could be assailed with both the desire to survive individually and self destructive feelings relative to our significance for the species.

This should provide understanding regarding why we find ourselves emphasizing feminism at this stage in our history.

The question then arises: How can we become more feminist?

Well, obviously, appreciation of causality has had the effect of emphasizing our masculinity. Also, a high evaluation of the truth has come into being. This is no doubt due to the afore mentioned need to identify the correct cause, not easy to do in complex situations. So, by truth, we mean causally connected. Other connections, subjective association for example, since untrue causally, are valued much less and in fact are actively repressed when masculinism is dominant. Astrology is a good example.

We can identify ill fortune as associated with black cats by the simple recognition of the coincidental arrival of both on the scene. Is this system intrinsically worse than causality? That is hard to say. It certainly leads to conflict and perhaps competition and death, but this is the nature of life and causality isn’t effective in shielding us from conflict because of the extreme complexity of life. If we say that the black cat didn’t cause a sewer stoppage, that it was a weed instead, our feminist friend would reply that the weed didn’t cause it, the black cat just used that as his technique. Who is right? Who can say.

In summary, the purpose of this analysis is to make clear how and why we came to worship masculinism and where it has led. From this perhaps we can understand how and why to set our future course.