Prometheus, the artist who unchained humanity
by Jon Rappoport
December 28, 2012
Through what mirror are we looking at ourselves in these ancient tales?
The Prometheus story makes absolutely no sense unless we acknowledge there is a reason for rebellion. But not just any rebellion. One man assaulting the supernatural mountain of the Olympians to steal fire, escape, and bring it back to man is more than audacious, if the Greek poets invented the pantheon of gods and their aerie in the first place.
In that case, the theft of fire is an acknowledgment that power is returned home.
“We invented the gods. Now we re-invent ourselves.”
Down through blood-soaked history, the priest class has said, “No, that is too much. That is hubris. Pride goeth before a fall. Don’t think too much of yourselves. Be humble. Submit. Through us, you can connect to the greatest force in the universe, but you must do it in the prescribed ways.”
PS: “Drop a few coins in the basket for the privilege.”
What is the fire Prometheus stole? What power does it signify? The power of money? Of position? Of control over others? Of domination? Is it the power to hypnotize? To make binding and cruel laws? To deceive? To claim divine right? To enslave? To impose limits? To blind the masses?
What Prometheus retrieved was what had been forgotten and surrendered by humans: their own power to imagine and create. The true fire.
We are the artists.
Imagine what might have happened if Freud had plumbed the Promethean myth for his nascent psychology, instead of the Oedipal tale.
“No, no, no,” our leaders say. “We can show you example after example of what happens when humans believe they have power. It always ends in horror. There is no way out except through obedience to the external Truth we peddle.”
Religion is frozen poetry. The poets began by writing outside the boundaries of the tribe, and the priests appointed themselves the sacking editors.
They hammered and cut and polished the wild free poems into tablets and catechisms and manuals of stern disapproval. They gathered up workers to build the temples where the new laws would be preached and taught. They established the penalties for defection. They staked an exclusive claim to revelation.
Prometheus wasn’t a thief. The priest-class were the thieves.
They established the false and synthetic universal centrality of myth disguised as revelation, and they sold it, and they enforced it, and they prepared a list of enemies who were threatening the Law of Laws.
And all that raw material, which they stole? It came from the poets. It came from the free and boundless creation of artists.
So Prometheus was setting the record straight. He was cracking the system like an egg. He was bringing imagination back where it belonged.
Of course, in the ancient myth, he paid a high price for his actions. But that’s merely more propaganda. The high priests write that retribution-ending on every story springing from freedom. They call the punishment by various names, and they naturally claim it is brought down by hammer from the Highest Authority. They work this angle with desperate devotion.
Prometheus was the liberator. He was the Chinese painters of the Dun Huang, the Yoruba bead artists, the Michelangelo of David, the Piero della Francesca of Legend of the True Cross, the Velazquez of The Maids of Honour, the Van Gogh of Irises and lamp-lit Arles, the Gauguin of Who Are We, the Yeats of Song of the Wandering Aengus, the Dylan Thomas of Fern Hill, the Walt Whitman of The Open Road, the Henry Miller of Remember to Remember, the Orson Welles of Citizen Kane, the Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet, the de Kooning of Gotham News.
He was Tesla and Rife and Dr. William Koch.
Wherever individual human imagination was launched as the fire, Prometheus was there.
Of course, he wasn’t. He was the story we told ourselves about what we could do. That story is meant to remind us that all centralized collective vision is a fraud. It may not begin that way, but sooner or later, it becomes a gargantuan slippage into narcosis of the soul.
Prometheus is the story we tell ourselves to remember the line between what the individual can learn and what he can create, and how many horses have been pulled up to that line and refuse to cross it and drink from the wells of imagination.
Prometheus is the story of a recapture of what we are. We may have buried the understanding deep in our psyches, but it is there. How many ways we try to refuse it!
We huddle in groups and pretend all progress flows from the mass. We diddle and fiddle with this limit and that limit. We adjust and make more room for the Average. We build machines to think at a higher level than we can. We watch theatrical spectacles of “new hybrid humans.” We proclaim healing virtues and forget about what the healing of the spirit might actually entail, what revolution, what vital energies, what leaps of imagination, what assertions of our inherent power.
We keep thinking of peace, when peace means, as defined by the “wise ones,” the death of the soul. Their peace is what is left over after the war of the creative human has been surrendered without a single burst of energy being fired.
Their peace is syrup poured over the possibility of dynamic action. Their peace is submission to some Glob of “universal consciousness.” Their peace is a column of grinning idiots guarding a self-appointed tower of learning. Their peace is the survival and organization of damaged goods. Their peace is: “if it is meant to happen, it will.” Their peace is: the universe decides, we oblige. Their peace is a cosmic junk-heap.
Followers, little messianic morons, throng to their temples. Candles are lit, ceremonies are enacted, glazed-over joy is celebrated.
From this mob of singing castrati, Prometheus emerged, untangling himself from wet strands of delusion, resignation, and fear. He soared. He advanced. He took back our basic and vital character. He breathed crackling energy into bloodstreams. He tore away Central Authority from its perch.
From the Promethean perspective, Reality is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.
This is not an invitation to manipulate and tinker. On the contrary, it’s a call to make Dream into Fact, again and again, without end.
Beyond systems. Beyond structures. Beyond authoritative teaching.
For most, imagination lifts the outer layers of desire and expresses a minor operation in a minor field of engagement. A flicker of a breath here, a struck spark there, and it’s done.
At that point, exhaustion sets in. People lean back and resume their precious expectation of 24 frames per second of emotional rescue from a vacuum.
Hope clings to, and is managed by, what happens on a screen.
But under massive boredom, energies churn in subterranean caverns. Where will those rivers run for the next thousand years or thousand incarnations?
What would create an internal revolution?
What would start the water wheels spinning and the torrents surfacing?
How would creation begin?
On that Promethean question rests the fate of every civilization, past, present, and future.
Every thread, atom, quark, and wavicle of this Matrix is imbued with the impression that “what already exists” is superior to what the individual can now invent. The causal chains of history seem to produce the present and the present seems to produce the future. Somewhere, we are told, there is an ultimate state of mind to which we can attain: a house we can move into. Once we take up residence, everything is settled. We have won.
These are the grand deceptions. These are the illusions of the Matrix.
The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com