“Archetypal Image of Human Existence” Is a Methodological Claim Before It Is a Title

Kerényi’s Prometheus opened the Bollingen group of studies published as Archetypal Images of Greek Religion, and its Introduction states with unusual care what the governing term does and does not mean. “Archetypal” and “ectypal” come to Kerényi not from Jung’s psychology but from the language of the English Platonists: archetypal for the original and timeless, ectypal for its correspondence in the temporal world. He acknowledges the connection his term establishes with modern psychology and immediately restricts it. He speaks of archetypal images “not on the basis of any explanatory theory but phenomenologically,” and adds that his “existence” is not existentialism’s term either; both words are taken from the common language of Western civilization. The ground of the method is ethnological. Malinowski had defined living myth among the Trobriand Islanders as “a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality” by which present life and fate are determined, and Kerényi’s cogent Greek example of exactly this correspondence is the Prometheus mythologem, whose story supplied historical Greece with the theme and the instructions of its most important sacrificial action. The meaning the myth states—a meaning that could not have been formulated as doctrine—is severe: “the sacrifice offered up by men is a sacrifice of foolhardy thieves, stealers of the divinity round about them,” since the natural world surrounding man is divine and every human taking is a taking-from. The earlier German version of 1946 was titled the Greek mythologem of human existence; the English title of 1963 makes the claim explicit. Prometheus is not a god who has something to say about humanity. He is the image in which Greek religion stated what human existence is.

Hesiod Stages the Founding of the Human Condition at Mekone

The chapters on the Theogony read the primordial sacrifice as the founding scene of the human mode of being. “For when the gods and mortal men disputed at Mekone,” Hesiod’s narrative begins, it was Prometheus—not men—who divided the great ox, dressing the white bones in shining fat for Zeus and hiding the flesh in the paunch; and it was men who suffered the consequences of his defeat. Kerényi dwells on the strangenesses Hesiod preserves: an original undivided state in which gods and men were not yet absolutely different; a de-cision, in the literal sense of a cutting-apart, located at the Place of Poppies near Sikyon in the realm of Demeter and Persephone; and the tacit identification of Prometheus’ cause with the cause of men. Then Zeus withheld fire, Prometheus stole it in the hollow fennel stalk, and the punishments followed: for men, Pandora, the “beautiful evil,” whom Kerényi expressly sets aside as requiring separate treatment; for Prometheus, the bonds, the shaft driven through his middle, and the eagle. Two details carry the interpretation. Geographically, baleful Atlas at the western edge of the world and the chained Prometheus at the eastern edge “supply a frame to the sphere of temporal human existence”—images of hardship bounding the human world on both sides. Structurally, the sacrifice presupposes two sacrileges, the slaying of the beast and the taking of fire, incursions into a living and divine environment that strike “wounds indispensable to human existence”; the sacrifice itself is the act that reunites the wounder with the offended gods. The founder of the sacrifice is a cheat and a thief because the human position in a divine world is the position of a thief.

The Theft Defines the Thief: Existence as Inherent Deficiency

The pivotal chapter is brief and total. “The theft of the fire—because it is theft—characterizes the thief as one whose existence is inherently deficient.” Kerényi builds the point by contrast with the other fire-gods. Hermes had no need to steal fire; the Homeric hymn shows him discovering it by his own inventiveness, in his own mind as it were. Hephaistos possesses fire so essentially that his name designates it, and his gifts to men expressed wealth, not want. Only Prometheus must steal, because only Prometheus lacks; and in obtaining for man the higher form of being that fire makes possible, he “shows himself to be man’s double, an eternal image of man’s basically imperfect form of being.” The theft, moreover, was inevitable. Without fire mankind would have perished—this, the Desmotes says expressly, was the design of Zeus—yet power over fire belonged to the ruler of the world, so the necessary act was a crime. Kerényi draws the consequence for the lost first play of the Aeschylean trilogy: the Pyrphoros lays the foundation for what follows by “showing how man as typified by Prometheus is compelled to do wrong, so that inevitable wrongdoing is a fundamental trait of his existence.” Here is the center of the book’s anthropology. Human existence is not deficient because it transgresses; it must take because it is deficient, and the taking is experienced as desecration. Fire, sacrifice, the arts Prometheus attempted to bring—culture itself is founded on necessary sacrilege, and the guilt attaching to it is constitutive, not moral.

Aeschylus Makes Suffering the Signature of the Human Mode of Being

In Prometheus Bound Kerényi finds the tragic poet bolder than the philosophers. The world of Zeus is the real world in which man is compelled to live, and the tragedy calls that order into question on the strength of Prometheus’ suffering. Man shares bodily pain with the animals; what he does not share is that his mode of existence requires him to “suffer with a sense of injustice.” The animals, whose existence in pleasure and pain accords perfectly with the order of Zeus, feel no such thing; the fire-possessing being cannot submit. “Thus it was Prometheus who made human existence human”: man remained vulnerable, suffering, and mortal like the animals, but he did not remain submissive like them. The suffering of injustice—nameless, incomprehensible, the incommensurable consequence of a fault committed with a clear conscience—is, in the sentence that concentrates the chapter, “man’s punishment for being a man.” Kerényi is exact about the theological geometry. Goethe’s Prometheus, treated in the book’s opening chapter, puts himself in the place of the gods; the Aeschylean Prometheus is a god who takes the standpoint of man, and his avowal that he erred gladly, for men’s benefit, confirms his destiny as “self-chosen human existence.” The fragmentary Prometheus Delivered then adds the second suffering: bodily pain, at which the immortal for the first time clamors for death. Once existence is subjected to injustice and pain together, immortality itself becomes meaningless, and the Promethean mode of being demands, by its own law, the one conclusion given to man.

The Wound, the Chiron Exchange, and Redemption by Substitution

Prometheus is, in Kerényi’s phrase, a god “wounded, in need of redemption, and also redeemed”—the only Greek god of whom all three can be said. The wound is read archaically: the dark liver, the organ in which hepatoscopy found the picture of the world legible in the night sky, is devoured by day—the eagle of Zeus—and restored each night, so that the god of darkness suffers the daily triumph of light. The deliverance comes through substitution. Herakles slays the eagle, but the freedom of Prometheus is bought by Chiron, the centaur-healer whom Herakles’ hydra-poisoned arrow had incurably wounded, an immortal who longed to die and who was offered to Zeus in the Titan’s stead: “it was his very nature to be a healer afflicted with pain, an immortal who suffered for others.” For Kerényi the possibility of the exchange is the proof of the book’s thesis, for the suffering is “not identified with any one person but inherent in existence”—and only where suffering is existential in this sense does he permit the word redemption. The memorial of the redemption was Greek custom itself: men wore wreaths in Prometheus’ honor and in exchange for his fetters, and “the wearing of wreaths would seem to mean: to bear human existence in the Greek way.” The book’s final image, a third-century Etruscan mirror, seats the freed Titan between Athene and Asklepios the healer, and draws the line Kerényi had marked from the first pages against the Christian parallel: “The Titan was no redeemer, but was himself in need of redemption.”

Within the Archetypal Images series, Prometheus stands as the counterpole to Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life: where Dionysos images zoē, the life that cannot experience its own end, Prometheus images existence—the bounded, deficient, suffering mode of being that must steal, must transgress, and must be redeemed. The book also displays, more openly than anywhere else in Kerényi’s work, the phenomenological method he kept distinct from Jung’s psychology even after their collaboration in Essays on a Science of Mythology. Read beside Edinger’s Ego and Archetype, the mythologem gives ontological form to what Edinger describes developmentally—the ego’s necessary crime and its long repair; read beside Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, the wound that cannot heal anticipates the claim that pathologizing belongs to the soul’s constitution rather than to its failures. And the frame of Goethe, with which the study opens and closes—the young poet who said of the myth, “I cut the old Titan robe to my own size”—carries the book’s other lesson: the mythologem of human existence keeps working wherever human beings must found an existence on what they do not possess.