Table of Contents
Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire for humanity, interests me less as a rebel than as a father: in the Greek flood story it is his warning that lets a human couple survive. These are the pages where I wrote about him.
The Titan of forethought
The Olympian Gods makes Prometheus a son of the Titan Iapetus, brother of Epimetheus, Atlas and Menoetius, and sometimes counted a Titan himself, known for his intelligence and for stealing fire from the gods to give to humanity. On The world’s beginnings I note how Gurdjieff might read the myth through his three forces: Prometheus’s wish to bring fire is the affirming force, Zeus’s opposition the denying force, and the spread of knowledge among humans the reconciling force.
The warning before the flood
On Ovid’s Four Ages I set Ovid beside Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca, which gives the flood in plain words:
But Zeus, wishing to destroy the race of men, sent a flood upon the earth. By Prometheus’s advice, Deucalion built an ark, and putting in it provisions, he embarked in it with Pyrrha.
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca
Flood Stories from Around the World tells the same story: Prometheus, who had already stolen fire for humanity, warns his son, and Deucalion builds a chest, a larnax, and stocks it with food. The Deluge Legends (I) sums it up as Deucalion, advised by Prometheus, surviving with his wife in a chest and repopulating the earth. Ignatius Donnelly, on The Deluge Legends of Other Nations, quotes an account of the Thessalian legend in which Deucalion builds his coffer on the advice of Prometheus, his father, after Zeus resolves to destroy the men of the bronze age.
A fire-bringer in China
On Pangu Creation Story the source I follow calls Sui-Jen, the fire-man, the Chinese Prometheus who brought fire down from heaven and taught its uses, and argues that the Prometheus myth is not native to Greece, which only gave it its classical form.
Prometheus and Atlas
On The Philosophers of Atlantis with Jason Reza Jorjani I note that Jorjani wrote Prometheus and Atlas, which won the 2016 Book Award of the Parapsychological Association.
Related pages
- The Olympian Gods
- The world’s beginnings
- Ovid’s Four Ages
- Flood Stories from Around the World
- The Deluge Legends (I)
- The Deluge Legends of Other Nations
- Pangu Creation Story
- The Philosophers of Atlantis with Jason Reza Jorjani
For every page I tagged with Prometheus, see the Prometheus tag archive.
