Fate & Fabled

The Greek gods are notorious for petty squabbling, brutal punishments, and meddling in people's love lives.

But in the myth of Prometheus, an immortal makes the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of humankind.

A wily Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, Prometheus represents risk, progress, and generally sticking it to the man, Zeus, who usually didn't take kindly to any of those things.

Across world myth, we find fire-seizing rebels who defy the defying order and ignite human potential.

Some are punished while some are praised.

But what's so shocking about stealing a little spark?

Prometheus is often portrayed as a trickster.

But is that a fair depiction?

I think, and I'll die on this cliff, when you look closer, Prometheus is a more complex character than you might expect.

[bright music] To understand the significance of Prometheus, we have to go way back to before the creation of humankind.

At this time, two groups of gods were battling for control of the cosmos.

The Titans, led by Cronos, were the divine children of heaven and Earth.

Shout out to the Gaia episode.

The Olympians, led by Zeus, were a younger generation of gods hungry for power.

These two mighty groups seemed equally matched.

But the Titan Prometheus, whose name means foresight, saw that the Olympians would eventually triumph.

He persuaded his brother Epimetheus to switch sides with him just in time.

Sure enough, Zeus defeated the Titans, casting them into eternal hell.

As a token of his thanks, Zeus gave the brothers an important task-- creating life on Earth.

Epimetheus formed the animals, while Prometheus shaped the first humans from mud.

He made them in the image of the gods, but their bodies were merely mortal.

Zeus saw these new-formed humans as puny, only good for worshiping gods from afar.

But Prometheus recognizes the dignity in his fragile creations, and he wanted to give them an advantage.

When Zeus decreed that humans should sacrifice half an animal to the gods, Prometheus killed an animal and presented it in two parts.

Zeus chose the meatier part, leaving the skin and bones for mortals.

But when he examined the meat, he saw that Prometheus had hidden the succulent flesh under the less attractive parts, leaving only gristle for the gods.

Furious, Zeus withheld fire from the Earth, leaving the first humans hungry and cold.

But this only made Prometheus more inclined to help us.

Scaling Mount Olympus, he lit a torch from the sun god Apollo's chariot, hid it in a hollow fennel stalk, and smuggled it back down to Earth.

With fire, Prometheus bestowed a powerful tool.

Now humans can nourish and care for themselves.

But it also meant they could forge weapons and wage war.

They learned new skills, lived longer, and traveled to faraway lands, ultimately ruling above all other living things.

Some on Olympus saw Prometheus as a triumphant trailblazer who gave mortals the ability to progress.

Others viewed him as a shadowy figure who unlocked humans' appetite for greed and conflict.

And others denounced him as a supreme troublemaker who needed to be taken down.

You can probably guess what camp Zeus was in.

As punishment, Zeus bound Prometheus to a remote cliff.

Every day, vultures swooped down on him and tore out his liver.

And every night, his liver grew back, ready to be devoured again.

In some versions, Prometheus is trapped for eternity.

In others, Zeus eventually allows Heracles to free him, but only because he needs Prometheus's help.

Despite his grizzly punishment, we rarely see Prometheus expressing remorse.

In Hesiod's "Theogony," he's a gleeful trickster who happily flouts Zeus's authority.

In a series of dramas usually ascribed to Aeschylus, he's a more cerebral figure who waxes philosophical about the boundary between heaven and Earth.

And in the poetry of Ovid, he's a visionary.

According to Ovid, Prometheus shaped humans with upturned faces so they could look towards the skies, and upright, raise their face to the stars.

Here, it's Prometheus that gives humanity our thirst for knowledge and the ability to advance civilization.

These myths imagine the transformation of fire from a divine or mysterious entity into something that can be hoarded, stolen, and shared.

But fire is never an ordinary resource.

Rather, it gives humans the power to light their own way.

Fire thieves are dangerous figures because they suggest that divine authority is not absolute.

It can be tricked, twisted, and in some cases, seized for ourselves.

For transgressing the boundary between heaven and Earth, several Promethean figures suffered grizzly fates.

Dating to the Bronze Age, a Georgian myth tells of the hero Amirani, known for outsmarting dragons and battling giants.

His downfall comes when he tells humans the secrets of metalwork, which had previously been reserved for the gods.

As punishment, Amirani is chained to a cliff in the Caucasus Mountains where an eagle devours his liver every day.

Amirani does have a trusty dog who gnaws at his chains, but every year, the gods come back to repair it.

The Vainakh people of the North Caucasus also told of a demigod Pkharmat, who stole fire from the heavens.

He pitied the humans, known as Narts, who had nothing but cold milk and raw food.

The only source of fire belonged to the god of skies and storms, Sela, who hoarded it in his chariot.

With the help of Sela's wife Sata, Pkharmat stole a blazing flame.

For all this, he was-- you guessed it-- chained to a cliff and eaten by scavenger birds.

Crucially, Pkharmat carried fire down to Earth in a hollow reed.

Eventually, the fire burned through its container and made tiny holes, creating the first reed pipe.

Thus, he brings not only fire but music to humanity.

In this example, a Promethean figure is associated with creativity as well as progress.

Although, while some people refuse to recognize it, Prometheus was a creative himself.

Potter, activist, artist, prankster, whatever you want to call him, it's hard to ignore his agency, and that agency inspires humanity.

The interpretation of Prometheus as an imaginative spirit was particularly popular with the Romantics, a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals who saw subjectivity, individualism, and emotional freedom as paramount during the 19th century.

Mary Shelley's husband Percy wrote the romantic drama "Prometheus Unbound," in which the Titan is a hero who spreads a message of love and empowerment.

His friend, the poet Lord Byron, also "stanned" Prometheus.

He wrote, "The godlike crime was to be kind and strengthen man with his own mind."

Mary Shelley imagined Prometheus as a more cautionary figure in "Frankenstein," in which the titular scientist makes a humanoid figure and just can't deal with his creation.

The novel is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus," suggesting the danger of tampering with the natural order and the disastrous results of misdirected human ambition.

To this day, Prometheus is a shorthand for progress.

A quick Google will tell you that a lot of companies like to reference the original disruptor.

But while billionaires who want to fly to the moon might market themselves as pathbreaking Prometheans, what sets them apart from the real deal is that Prometheus was always fighting for those less powerful than himself.

In their ancient mythical forms, Promethean figures imbue humans with the potential to reach new heights.

But they also stand in for our hopes and anxieties about what humans do with their power.

Many also remind us that with great power comes great responsibility.

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