Prometheus

Prometheus — the Titan whose name means forethought — is the mythic figure of the fire-bringer who, in Hesiod and Aeschylus, steals fire from the gods for the sake of mortals and endures the prolonged punishment of having his liver devoured daily by an eagle on the rock of the Caucasus. The myth survives in two principal classical strata: the didactic account of [[works-and-days|Hesiod’s Works and Days]] and Theogony, and the tragic elaboration of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.

In the archaic structure the Prometheus story is paired with the story of Pandora: the Titan’s gift of fire is met, at the level of the gods, by the gift of the first woman with her jar of evils, and the two together define the double-edged character of the human condition under Zeus. The figure enters the depth-psychological tradition as one of the principal images of culture-hero and rebel: the consciousness-principle that steals the divine fire for ego-development, whose gift is simultaneously a theft and whose punishment is the eternally recurring wound. For Jungians working in the Greek materials, the Promethean is the shadow-brother of the heroic attitude — the mode in which the ego overreaches its own ground. See pandora-anodos and hubris.

Relationships

• pandora-anodos
• works-and-days
• hubris