Prometheus Symbolism Deep-Dive

Rebel against heaven. Champion of humanity. Prisoner of Zeus. Failed initiate.

Prometheus.

The mythical Titan who stole fire from the gods to gift it to humanity, thereby incurring the wrath of the king of Olympus and suffering terribly, has long captivated the Western imagination.

In recent centuries he has come to represent Enlightenment reason insurgent against religious superstition, republican and democratic emancipation mobilized against monarchy and religious institutions. And the terrors of the modern age—from the guillotine to the Gulag, bloody revolution, war on an industrial scale, the ‘mass man,’ materialism—these have all been dubbed Promethean.

But let’s start at the beginning and outline the myth: Prometheus belonged to the old Titanic race. A cousin to Kronos (Saturn), he defied Zeus by stealing fire (and, in some tellings, certain arts, technologies) from the gods and bestowing it upon humanity. As punishment Zeus chained him to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains, where an eagle daily devoured his liver, which regenerated each night that his agony might be replenished.

For millenia he endured this torment until one Heracles shot the eagle and broke the ancient Titan’s chains. Zeus consented to the release only on condition that Prometheus disclose a prophecy given him by his mother Themis (who is the Earth, in some versions): who is it that will one day overthrow Zeus, even as Zeus overthrew Kronos/Saturn? It was to be the son of the Olympian monarch by a woman called Thetis. He would one day prove greater than his father and replace him as king of the gods. Forewarned, Zeus abandoned his pursuit of Thetis. Therefore she married the mortal Peleus instead, and bore Achilles, who was no threat to cosmic government:

“A prediction about Thetis was that her son would be greater than his father. Since no one but Prometheus knew this and Jove wished to lie with her, Prometheus promised Jove that he would give him timely warning if he would free him from his chains. And so when the promise was given, he advised Jove not to lie with Thetis. For if one greater than he were born, he might drive Jo from his kingdom, as he himself had done to Saturn. And so Thetis was given in marriage to Pelus. And Hercules was sent to kill the eagle which was eating out Prometheus’s heart. When it was killed, Prometheus after 30,000 years was freed from Mount Caucasus.”

—Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabuli, XIII

In Hesiod’s Works and Days the gods had already hidden the means of life from mortals by the time Prometheus steals the fire. Indeed, the rebel had prompted Zeus to withhold fire in the first place, whereafter the Titan stole it back, concealing the flame in a hollow fennel stalk. This time, Zeus retaliated by fashioning Pandora:

“For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working. Soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke and the field worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste. But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it because Prometheus the crafty deceived him. Therefore he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He hid fire, but that the noble son of Iapetus stole again for men from Zeus the counselor in a hollow fennel stalk, so that Zeus, who delights in thunder, did not see it. But afterward Zeus, who gathers the clouds, said to him in anger, ‘Son of Iapetus, surpassing all in cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire. A great plague to you yourself, and to men that shall be glad. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.’ So said the father of men and gods and laughed aloud. And he bade famous Hephaestus, ‘Make haste and mix earth with water and to put in the voice and strength of humankind and fashion a sweet lovely maiden shape like to the immortal goddesses in face.’ And Athena to teach her needlework and the weaving of the varied web and golden Aphrodite to shed grace upon her head and cruel longing and cares that weary the limbs. And he charged Hermes to put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature. So he ordered and they obeyed. Forthwith the famous lame god molded clay in the likeness of a modest maid as the son of Kronos proposed, and the goddess bright-eyed Athena girded and clothed her and divine Graces and queenly Persuasion put necklaces of gold upon her and Pallas Athena bedecked her form with all manners of finery. Also the guide Hermes contrived within her lies and crafty words and a deceitful nature at the will of loud-thundering Zeus. And the herald of the gods put speech in her, and he called this woman Pandora, all-endowed, because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men.”

—Hesiod, Works and Days

Pandora, formed of earth and water, is the counter to fire: fire eases existence, woman introduces hardship (such is the Hesiodic myth’s fundamentally anti-woman perspective). Hesiod’s Theogony gives us context for that often overlooked phrase in Works and Days according to which

“Zeus in the anger of his heart hid [fire from mortals] because Prometheus the crafty deceived him.”

—Hesiod, Works and Days

Prior to the events usually recounted as the reason for Prometheus’ punishment, the gods had called for a feast at a place called Mecone over which meal the Titan was put in charge. He was to divide up the sacrificial ox, assigning some portions to Olympians and some to humans:

“For Zeus, he put the white bones dressed up with cunning art and covered with shining fat. Smiling softly and not forgetting his cunning trick, he said, ‘Zeus, most glorious and greatest of the eternal gods, take whichever of these portions your heart within you bids.’”

—Hesiod, Theogony

This was Prometheus’ first act of defiance: an inversion of sacrificial order—the lowering of the gods, whose king received an ignoble portion, and the corresponding elevation of humans. Zeus, therefore, in hiding fire away from man, meant to diminish his status, which makes Prometheus’ later theft not so much a pure transgression but the restoration of what humanity had been meant to possess (and which had precisely been taken away on his account).

Prometheus is often cast as a Lucifer or Satan figure, yet, in a sense, he is the precise opposite of the Abrahamic Satan. In tradition, the beings above man in the great ‘chain of being’—devas, angels, gods—are also somehow subordinate to humanity, because we are the centre of creation. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that human devotees of the One God surpass the station of the devas; Early Buddhist scripture has the devas themselves hoping for human birth, as that is the state from which liberation becomes possible; St. Paul teaches that the saints will judge angels; and the Quran, like certain Jewish apocrypha, recounts that the angels were commanded to bow to Adam, a command Satan precisely refused.

Satan asserts angelic supremacy over man, then, whereas Prometheus seeks to raise man above the gods. Indeed, in the Hesiodic telling, it is Zeus who more closely resembles the satanic archetype. Let’s hear from the Titan himself, as Aeschylus presents him in Prometheus Bound:

“When first the heavenly powers were moved to wrath, and mutual dissension was stirred up among them —some bent on casting Cronus from his seat so Zeus, in truth, might reign; others, eager for the contrary end, that Zeus might never win mastery over the gods—it was then that I, although advising them for the best, was unable to persuade the Titans, children of Heaven and Earth; but they, disdaining counsels of craft, in the pride of their strength thought to gain the mastery without a struggle and by force. Often my mother Themis, or Earth (though one form, she had many names), had foretold to me the way in which the future was fated to come to pass. That it was not by brute strength nor through violence, but by guile that those who should gain the upper hand were destined to prevail. And though I argued all this to them, they did not pay any attention to my words. With all that before me, it seemed best that, joining with my mother, I should place myself, a welcome volunteer, on the side of Zeus; and it is by reason of my counsel that the cavernous gloom of Tartarus now hides ancient Cronus and his allies within it. Thus I helped the tyrant of the gods and with this foul payment he has responded; for it is a disease that is somehow inherent in tyranny to have no faith in friends.”

—Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

In these early versions of the myth, the higher god, Zeus, appears as a tyrant. It is a reverse Gnosticism, in a sense, where the lower demiurge involved in the world is interested in liberating man, whereas the higher god wants man enslaved.

Prometheus prizes cunning over strength, per his advice to the Titans, and is a trickster who inverts the order of the feast. He raises gods over Titans and humans over gods. He belongs to the lowly. And ultimately, he does succeed in sparing humanity from annihilation, giving us fire, and, eventually, by revealing the prophecy concerning the son of Thetis, helps bring the cycle of heavenly violence in which younger gods replace older ones as cosmic monarch to a close. He is, finally, a pacifier.

Platonic Prometheanism

Plato’s Protagoras offers builds on his positive aspects.

The gods fashion mortals from earth and fire. Epimetheus, one of Prometheus’ brothers, distributes qualities to the animals but forgets man. Prometheus, seeing the naked, defenseless creature, steals the mechanical arts of Hephaestus and Athena together with fire itself and bestows them upon humanity. Political wisdom, however, remains guarded by Zeus. Socrates himself approves:

“I prefer your Prometheus to your Epimetheus, for of him I make use whenever I am busy about these questions in Promethean care of my own life.”

—Plato, Protagoras

In Plato, the highest god is no longer the fearful Zeus of myth but the philosophical principle beyond time and the succession of gods.

And yet, Prometheus’ action is still described as a theft: certain goods are not freely given and must be actively seized. Man, already partly fire, reclaims what belongs to the completion of his own nature; political wisdom, by contrast, must come as grace.

Later Roman accounts preserve this craftsman motif. Ovid writes that Prometheus

“moulds earth tempered with water into a human form which is animated by Minerva”

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

We have several retellings and interpretations, one of the most insightful of which was penned by one Zosimos of Panopolis, the late antique alchemist, who reads the myth esoterically. As summarized by the scholar Shannon Grimes:

“He identifies the spiritual man with Prometheus who brought heavenly fire to humankind and warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept the gifts of Zeus or fate. Epimetheus who accepts fate’s gift of Pandora and thus indirectly brings evil into the world is the man of flesh. Zosimos says that by the allegorical method Prometheus and Epimetheus are to be understood as a single man that is soul and body.”

—Shannon Grimes, on Zosimos of Panopolis’ On Apparatus and Furnaces

Here Zeus is not the high god or his word (creative action the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus, the good craftsman who makes the world). Rather the Zeus of the Prometheus myth who is concerned with being replaced is a lower principle, the principle of fate. And yet, that doesn’t mean Prometheus and Epimetheus are guiltless. Prometheus is the soul, but darkened by spiritual ignorance, and Epimetheus is the body, but untamed, given over to appetites, addicted to desires, conditioned by sensual stimuli.

Prometheus experiences physical life as a prison. Emotions, often represented by the liver, are continually devoured and renewed because he possesses no detachment and no inner peace.

Evola, in the hermetic tradition, writes:

“Here the body is equivalent to the sepulcher and prison, the symbolic rock to which Prometheus has been chained in order to purge the unfortunate failure of the titanic audacity.”

—Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition

In later versions, Prometheus’s liberation requires a sacrifice: Heracles had accidentally wounded the centaur Chiron with a poisoned arrow dipped in the blood of the Hydra, which wound proved incurable, causing the centaur endless agony, for Chiron was immortal and could not die, being a son of Kronos.

The centaur—hybrid of human and animal—represents an incoherent marriage of mind and body. He’s a mix, an unnatural union of human and animal parts, the incorrect or incoherent relationship of mind and body. Where Prometheus experiences physical existence as torture, Epimetheus, who is connected to animals in Plato’s version of the myth, is obsessed by the curses of Pandora’s box, fixated on external reality and its multiplicity. So, the centaur is sort of a symbol for the improper coordination of mind and body: precisely Prometheus and Epimetheus. Chiron is also described as knowledgeable, but knowledge in the sense of information isn’t how we liberate ourselves. We have to give up the path of the centaur in order to free the mind Prometheus. Heracles, the true self, causes the centaur pain until it renounces its immortality.

The Romantic Demogorgon

But what if Zeus had

Heracles, the true self, forces the centaur to renounce its spurious immortality and thereby frees Prometheus.

What if Thetis had birthed one destines to replace his father, as the original prophecy warned might happen? That’s what Shelley imagines in his sequel to Aeschylus, many centuries later, Prometheus Unbound.

He calls the son of Zeus and Thetus the Demogorgon. In a sense, he’s the Demos, the ‘people,’ us, humanity. And he preaches forgiveness. He’s a kind of alternative Jesus that rejects God the Father and replaces him, realizing the Promethean rebellion and ending the previous age of the gods:

“To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and bear. To hope till hope creates from its own wreck the things it contemplates. Neither to change nor falter nor repent. This. like thy glory, Titan, is to be good, great and joyous, beautiful and free. This is alone life, joy, empire and victory.”

—Percy B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Again, forgiveness defeats tyranny. But on behalf of what? Who is replacing Zeus? Who is overthrowing the transcendent idea of god, in this case understood as a kind of tyrannical presence? The Demos, the people. At least that’s one reading of this character in Shelly. That’s the offspring of Zeus, mightier than he, if only Hesiod and Aeschylus’ Prometheus had stayed true, defied Heracles, and never confessed his mother’s prophecy.

You have good ideas in the Romantics, but you also have them mixed up with a certain rejection of the true, transcendence proper. (As an aside, Byron and Goethe only engage with Prometheus in short poems that exalt his rebellion, so I won’t dig into these as they’re less interesting than Shelley’s treatment.)

Rudolf Steiner, for his part, considered Prometheus to be the patron of the current age. He viewed the “fifth humanity” as having been founded by Prometheus. We can make sense of this by noting that the development of the intellectual or analytical faculty defines our age through mastery over natural forces, particularly fire, which corresponds to invention, innovation, and the use of fuels. Yet this pursuit can also become bondage. The constant drive for mastery over natural forces or technological innovation can produce technologies of imprisonment, obsession.

Ego and Instinct

Carl Jung discussed Prometheus and Epimetheus in the work of the Swiss poet Carl Spitteler. Jung admired Spitteler’s version of the myth, which presents a poetic reworking of the myth in which Prometheus and Epimetheus are offered dominion over the earth. Prometheus would have had to renounce his inner vocation and loyalty to his own soul—his own direction of conscience, but refused and was therefore banished, forced to live in poverty. Epimetheus accepted dominion but proved an ineffective ruler. Jung interprets Prometheus as the inner aspect of the personality that remains loyal to itself and refuses to submit to social convention. His is a psychologized version of what Zosimos had already seen.

The name Prometheus means forethought, in contrast to afterthought, which the meaning of his brother’s name, Epimetheus. In this sense, Prometheus represents the inner self or mind that projects itself into the future and thinks before acting. The biblical parallel would be Jacob, who is subtle and hairless, set against Esau, who acts without reflection and is hairy, outwardly coarse. Introvert and extrovert, they may also be understood as mind and body, or ego and instinct. The Promethean, inwardly turned mental part, if it is not purified and disciplined, will not know what to do with spiritual principles or esoteric knowledge.

The Failed Initiate

Upon entering the fire of contemplation, it encounters a reaction and experiences itself as having committed a transgression. When the mind is not properly disciplined and meditation is attempted, backlash eventually appears in the form of physical discomfort, intrusive thoughts, or a sharp reaction from the mind, because the body-mind resists the suspension of its usual activity.

To the degree that the ego or body-mind is habituated to strong passional and disordered activity, contemplation feels like death, since the ordinary movements of these faculties are being suspended. This is why Christ fasted for forty days before the cross. The mind must be disciplined and the body mortified before one can undergo the ordeal of ritual death. Otherwise, instead of overcoming that ordeal, one remains like Prometheus in a state of perpetual death. In alchemical terms, the white work (albedo) cannot be accomplished without the black work (nigredo). In Christian terms, theoria cannot occur without katharsis. Illumination must follow Purification.

Direct pursuit of illumination without prior purification results in being burned. Prometheus is close to Jesus symbolically (side wound, the chaining or nailing, compassion for mankind, punishment for sharing heavenly fire, that is, higher truth). Yet Jesus is punished by a false god. The Sanhedrin, who enlist the Romans, represent a parody of the divine. This is the god in whom Prometheus believes. The Zeus with whom he interacts is a tyrant.

Prometheus requires rescue because he cannot die into eternal life; he remains locked in a cycle of torture. He believes in that false Zeus and the unjust order imposed upon the world. He does not invoke a higher principle, as Jesus does on the cross. He does not allow the experience to transform him. He does not permit himself to die and resurrect. He resists because he does not believe in anything beyond the experience. Unlike Christ, Prometheus cannot commend himself to a higher God of mercy whose love will carry him through. The god Prometheus believes in is a tyrant who hates him. He is not metaphysical; he is merely a powerful being. It is as though Christ rebelled against the Pharisees but still believed their idea of god to be correct.

Prometheus is not wrong to desire heavenly fire and to wish to share it with humanity. He is simply unqualified. Like Adam, he ate the fruit of knowledge too soon (some early Christians held that God intended to give Adam and Eve the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, but only once they were prepared for it).

Promethean symbolism therefore functions both as a call to rebellion and as a warning. It calls for rebellion against the tyrant Zeus, the false god. Reality is not up for grabs without stable truths or metaphysical principles, where only the struggle for power and violence remains. Without connection to truth, rebellion against untruth cannot end, must linger in limbo as punishment. We need to discover Being within, anchoring in what abides. If the tyrant Zeus is rejected, yet no connection is made to God in the full sense, suffering follows. The Grail King in the Holy Grail stories, who reaches for the Grail while unworthy and is wounded in the side by the Holy Lance presents the same idea. He is a Promethean type. His throne or bed has become a prison. While the mind or ego remains in this state, the body and instinct are governed by appetite. Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus becomes entangled with Pandora and releases all the curses from her box—the multitude of sense impressions that constantly distract the body and maintain a state of thirst, desire, distraction, and passion.

The true self is neither mind nor body, neither Prometheus nor Epimetheus, neither ego nor instinct. It is the one who purifies himself through difficult trials. Heracles, by undergoing the twelve labors, finally releases Prometheus in the myth. This figure corresponds to Galahad in the Holy Grail stories—the good knight who heals his ancestor by becoming worthy of the Grail.

Holy Grail, Holy Lance

The true initiate gains both the Holy Lance and the Grail. The lance corresponds to the eagle or the lightning bolt from an angry sky-father, the flaming sword that bars Adam from returning to paradise. The Grail corresponds to the mountain or cavern.

Odin descends into a cavern in the form of a snake, then becoming an eagle to carry off the mead of wisdom. This provides an example of proper initiation. He obtains the mead of wisdom, equivalent to the Holy Grail, sacred libation. Odin is wounded on the side, like Prometheus, when hanging on the world tree, but this is an ordeal he chooses. The eagle is one of Odin’s forms; he is not tortured by it as Prometheus is.

In contrast to Odin’s succesfully stolen Mead of Wisdom, Pandora’s Box is a parody of the feminine Holy Grail. The profane man experiences the world as Pandora’s box rather than as the Holy Grail. His masculine instinct—his virility, the lance, the eagle, the lightning bolt—turns against him and pierces him. He wastes his energy and is dominated by desire, in a sense violating himself. Instead of concentrating his energies, whether sexually or in terms of mental activity, he maintains a wandering, distracted, energy-wasting mind and constant thought. The fire for which one is unprepared because of weakness becomes the very lance or eagle that strikes one down. Writes Evola:

“This vulture…is the stolen…fire…converted into the principle of thirst that consumes man in his fall when he finds himself chained to the rock or stone that is fixed in the body and deprived of the living water.”

—Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition

One might say “Grail” or “mead of wisdom.” The vulture that shrieks from the mountaintop appears frequently as an allegory in alchemical texts. Symbolically, the mountain expresses the highest state attainable while remaining on earth—elevation toward heaven, usually containing an opening or cavern that descends deep. Mountains are both cavernous and elevated; they unite the above and the below. The vulture of the mountain aspires to fly into the air and promises the supreme prize to one who is worthy.

Jesus experiences the Promethean torture—the state of fallen man—when crucified and pierced in the side, yet he forgives and thereby overcomes that state. The angry Zeus, afraid of being replaced by a future son who had himself replaced his father Kronos, represents the masculine sky-father as parody: punisher, insecure, jealous. He is a false god arising from a spiritually ignorant mind—Prometheus’. The eagle has turned against us. Shelley was right to have his Prometheus and Demogorgon forgive the tyrant Zeus in order to overcome him, because the judging and punishing ‘god’ depends upon resistance (in the sense of giving it attention, wasting psychic energy on it). One may view it as a disordered, hypertrophic, overdeveloped superego.

What one resists persists, as Jung observed, and as Paul paraphrases Jesus, one should “resist not evil, but overcome evil with good.” The tyrant Zeus is an image of the divine perceived by the profane mind, which experiences reality not as the manifestation of stable metaphysical principles but as something chaotic, to be dominated by the strongest or most cunning.

Prometheus’s mistake lies in believing he possesses a genuine prophecy about who will overtake God, because his god can be overtaken. He perceives a vast tyrant ruling the world. The Zeus rejected by Plato and the pagan philosophical tradition is itself a parody, just as Pandora is a parody of the feminine. The jealous Juno/Hera who torments Heracles is, like Pandora, an image of wrathful nature—nature as chaos. By overcoming this perception and purifying himself through trials, Heracles becomes central to the philosophical tradition as paradigmatic hero.

Pandora’s box is the parody of the Holy Grail, just as the tyrant Zeus’s eagle is the parody of the Holy Lance perceived by one who lacks spiritual knowledge of it.

The activity of the mind or ego—Prometheus—remains extremely useful nonetheless. It can receive great inspiration. The arts of Vulcan and Minerva (Hephaestus and Athena) in Plato’s version of the myth, illustrate this. The fact that something is invented for the wrong reasons or without proper spiritual understanding does not prevent it from being used for good. The sciences given to humanity by fallen angels in Genesis 6 are later employed for constructive purposes by other biblical figures. Prometheus resembles the fallen angels in this respect. The Bible frequently shows innovation arising from sinners; musical instruments and city walls, for example, appear among the descendants of Cain, the first murderer. Throughout history the wheat and the chaff grow together, as they must, so that those who are righteous and possess discernment may carry away the good as “spoils of war” (per the language of Genesis). They benefit from innovation even when it originates from a perverse civilization. Similarly, the fire Prometheus obtained for humanity remains with humanity. Heracles even restores Prometheus himself to heaven. Nothing is ultimately lost, even if it arose imperfectly; it can later be perfected.

The ego is not inherently bad.

Loki, who resembles Prometheus in many ways and suffers a comparable punishment, is likewise ambiguous. He is the source of much innovation that the gods later put to good use. The eight-legged horse of Odin, Sleipnir, for example, comes from Loki. The task is therefore to purify the products of the Promethean mind’s desire for knowledge, innovation, and emancipation rather than to reject these outright.

For one may desire the fruits and the authority of spiritual mastery, but not be prepared for these. Julius Evola notes concerning a passage in the Corpus Hermeticum that one cannot experience beauty in the abstract; a particular beautiful thing must be contemplated:

“We can thus return to the Corpus Hermeticum, wherein it is said that man, once awakened to a will to create, wants to bypass the limits of the circles of necessity and master the power residing in fire. This is clearly a variation on the Promethean myth, which also ends in a fall. The man who is superior to harmony—that is, to the universal order, the unity of the various laws and natural conditions—becomes a slave to harmony.”

—Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition

A principle cannot be manifested without particularity. Rejecting order and metaphysics in favor of a Jorjani-style Promethean, ‘Satanic,’ ‘Spectral revolution’ is therefore mistaken. At the same time, rigid traditionalism that rejects the Promethean impulse altogether—the impulse to reach for and bring down heavenly fire—is equally mistaken.

Purification is necessary, and one is then called to reach upward. Heracles becomes a god, he takes Hebe, the Grail maiden, heavenly cub-bearer, as his wife, and guards the gates of Olympus after completing the twelve labors.

The trials resemble the forty-day fast, and the trial of the cross consists in experiencing chaotic forces, fears, and desires without engaging them or being drawn into them, thereby overcoming them. Once these forces are exhausted, they are destroyed. The worthy seeker is not struck down; those who seek his destruction are. One may think of Zeus striking down the Titans who consume Zagreus (a form of Dionysus) who is then reborn, or of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 after the crucifixion. Once the holy fire of contemplation is attained, one becomes that fire, and the darkness that reaches for one becomes the object of heaven’s lightning bolts rather than oneself.

Warhammer 40K’s Emperor of Man

One of the most compelling Promethean figures in modern fiction is the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40,000. He is a powerful immortal human, a “perpetual,” who leads humanity away from old religions. He initially rebels against the concept of God—Hesiod’s Zeus, one might say—and eventually becomes sovereign over all humanity. In a sense he is both Prometheus and the Demogorgon in Shelley’s terms: the collective personality of an emancipated, post-religious humanity.

And, crucially, he is a fire-thief.

In the Warhammer universe there exists a dimension called the Warp, a chaotic realm inhabited by many entities, but principally by four Chaos Gods—demonic beings that were probably once not demonic, not chaotic at all. According to one theory, the immense suffering generated by the universe’s wars warped this realm, which responds to the psychic character of the beings who inhabit the universe, like an imaginal realm that can be polluted, a collective unconscious. Its presiding deities or archetypes, then, can have their psychic manifestations (the forms in which they appear to mortal creatures) skewed terribly, turned monstrous, if enough pain and perversity is experienced by the universe’s intelligent races.

These four chaotic gods correspond to demiurgic divinities equivalent to a Zeus turned evil—the vengeful, fearful Zeus who refuses replacement and acts cruelly, precisely the image of the divine formed by a spiritually ignorant mind, by the “poets” Plato so condemned. In the case of the Warp, spiritual ignorance and suffering have produced exactly this kind of deity.

But the Emperor is able to steal the fire of that realm. He is Prometheus. And he uses that fire to create the so-called Primarchs, clones of himself who are, in a sense, his children. And it is the Primarchs who ultimately cause his downfall. One of them in particular, Horus, wounds him terribly and leaves him paralyzed. The Emperor then becomes a shell upon a throne, kept alive while the Empire is run by his subordinates. He thus becomes the successor to the old gods and to Prometheus, yet he is in turn injured by his own son.

He becomes the new Zeus. Like the old Zeus, he is removed, and the Empire is now governed by subordinates. In a certain sense he achieves what he wanted: the emancipation of humanity is complete, yet it has produced a terrible tyranny. The fact that his son is called Horus makes the Emperor equivalent to Osiris, who is himself an image of the Grail King destined for restoration. But being hs clone, Horus is also a brother, alike Set, who dismembered Osiris. The symbolism converges here.

All the elements of the romantic and mythical Prometheus appear here, together with the tragic cyclical pattern: one replaces the old gods only to become a tyrant oneself and eventually be replaced in turn. There is a theory according to which the Emperor exists in spirit within the Warp, though his body is broken and comatose. He has astral-projected out in search of something that will restore him and possibly redeem his son Horus. We may imagine his eventual return and the rectification of the Imperium. A speculative version of this narrative would have him discover that, beyond the corruption of the Warp produced by psychic pollution and universal suffering, the original benevolent aspect of the Chaos Gods still subsists, drawing on what is beyond the universe’s collective unconscious, for beyond them lie the heavenly realms from which the Emperor could learn of true divinity and thereby restore himself while rectifying the Imperium.

(And the fact that the Emperor seems to have originally been of Persian descent would perhaps dovetail with some of Jason Jorjani’s theories concerning Zarathustra, albeit the Emperor seems to be something like Nietzsche’s re-imagined Iranic prophet.)

Jorjani

Jason Jorjani, who is popular in certain circles and prominent in the field of UFOlogy, is the author of Prometheus and Atlas as well as the manifesto Prometheism and numerous other works.

In his thought, Prometheus occupies a central position, although Jorjani has also stated that Satan represents a more complete embodiment of the thoroughgoing rebellion he envisions. Prometheus, by whatever name, serves as figurehead for what he calls the Spectral Revolution. It is ‘spectral’ because all categories are to be understood as occurring on a spectrum rather than as instantiating metaphysical realities. Thus, one finds the farther limits of male and female, yet also the spectral range of gender between them; or humanity shading into cyborgs and further possible sentient organoids in the future. This represents a dissolution of form, the old gods being displaced by Promethean rebellion against stable categories and forms.

The etymology of Prometheus—forethought—is significant, for he anticipates the future and represents the faculty within us that generates the future, thinks ahead, innovates, and imagines, while also embodying rebellion against established structures. Jorjani regards virtually all structures around us, including the after-death experience, as products of tyrannical influences. He posits entities—probably future or past humans who appear Nordic—that administer the afterlife and control souls and their post-mortem destinations. Liberation therefore requires a literal overturning of the afterlife and the gods who administer it, perhaps in alliance with a rebellious faction of Nordics (mythology’s asuras, Titans, etc.). Gray aliens, for the most part, would function as drones serving these Nordic administrators. Jorjani draws upon obscure accounts of abduction experiences and the alien abduction phenomenon to support his case, as well as thoroughly embellishing and misquoting 'remote viewers’ like Ingo Swan. He sets aside near-death experiences and mystical experiences that point in other directions, does not properly account for arguments for a Necessary Being, maintaining that there is no essence, no truth as such, only co-arising of phenomena. He appears to construct and maintain a narrative of a thoroughgoing tyrannical superstructure of control in order to justify a thoroughgoing transhumanist rebellion against it.

But the “Spectral” in “Spectral Revolution” carries an additional meaning in his writings: the phenomenon of high-strangeness association with certain supposed alien encounters and similar phenomena is hypothesized by Jorjani as the work of an entity wanting to jar humanity into becoming something it might find interesting. To this end, our formal existence would have to be disturbed into disintegration.

Conclusion

Prometheus’ true rebellion is against the image of the divine misperceived as tyrannical, and must ultimately fulfil itself by realizing the true divine. The figure of Heracles is needed—the one who has undergone his trials and reconciles one to Zeus, now understood as the Platonic God, the true God of metaphysics, rather than a satanic figure who replaces the old god only to fear replacement in turn.

Prometheus is the failed initiate. He reaches for a genuine prize—spiritual insight, the fire—yet reaches without adequate preparation because he perceives the divine incorrectly. The result is a state of perpetual suffering from which he must be rescued.

With spiritual, philosophical discernment, his story may be read as an attempt to place man above the gods understood as devas or angels, overthrow of the tyrant, false god, and discovery of God, by way of the true initate, the Heraclean self.

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