The Advent of the Postmodern Prometheus: Bringing Back the Fire of the Gods

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Midway through Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus, the Creature finally meets his Creator at the foot of a glacier just below the highest peak in the Swiss Alps. Earlier, the Creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandoned his eight foot, yellowish Creation in disgust. The Creature, in humiliation and resentment, searches out and murders Frankenstein’s brother, William. The Creator, in anguish, then pursues his Creation high into the Alps to seek vengeance. Upon finding him, the Creature beseeches his Creator for mercy, stating:

Be calm! I entreat you to hear me before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine, my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me.

Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

The line between Victim, Monster, and Hero blurs in this promethean tale of morality and human nature, hubris and retribution, obsession and denial.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the Titan God who creates the clay form of Man into which Zeus breathes life. He is one of only a few gods who actually loves and cares for humanity. He takes the lessons of civilization from Athena and teaches Man how to rise above his animal instincts. On observing Man’s suffering, in defiance of Zeus, he steals fire from Mount Olympus and gives it to Man for warmth and industry.

In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein is the Modern Prometheus, who breaks the bounds of the gods by discovering the secret of life itself and bestowing it upon a lifeless body. Shelley then explores the fretted bond between the Creature and the Creator—uncertain of whom is the actual monster in the unfolding narrative.

In the Jewish Torah mythology, Eve and Adam embody the archetype of Prometheus as well by stealing from the Elohim the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Goodness and Badness, or Morality. This evolving myth, likewise, explores the relationship between Creature and Creator—morality and human nature developing out of hubris and retribution, obsession and denial.

The prevailing religious interpretation of the story of Eve and Adam traditionally paints this narrative as a morality play based in the underlying archetype of Victim, Monster, and Hero motivated by vengeance and the possibility of salvation. The actual myth is, in fact, something deeper and more profound—a tale of a parent’s love for his children and family bonds that transcend moral perfection and performance based in the underlying archetype of the Lover and Beloved, motivated by compassion and generosity.

In the Victim-Villain-Victor archetype, the Monster or Villain is the archetypal embodiment of obsession and hunger—a desire to acquire and then retain some object, quality, or aspect owned or represented by the Victim. The Victim is the archetypal representation of the loss of identity or integrity as a consequence of some violation by the perpetrator, the Monster. The Victor or moralistic Hero is the archetypal representation of the power manifest in the cultural or religious moral code. He defends the social order against the intrusive actions of the Monster—to restore a particular interpretation of justice.

In a simplistic moral tale, the moralistic Hero is a one-dimensional embodiment of social good. He wears a white hat or a hero’s cape. The Villain or Monster is a one-dimensional embodiment of evil and immorality. He may wear a black hat, and often has a facial deformity or some animalistic feature that somehow embodies the face of darkness. And then, the Victim is the archetypal embodiment of life, beauty, innocence, or goodness, which the Monster desires to possess. The Hero is obligated to defeat the valueless Monster, utterly destroying his power or existence in life or the social realm.

The morality of justice and retribution muddy this simplistic tale. One man’s Hero will often be another man’s Monster depending on one’s perspective in battle. The Victim’s moral behavior may often be the catalyst for their own demise. The Titan Prometheus does in fact violate the moral code of the Gods by stealing fire, acting against Zeus as the Perpetrator of a crime, but at the same time helping Man as a Hero.

Frankenstein’s Creature, victimized by his Creator’s rejection, sets out in the role of the Hero to avenge this wrong. But the Creature is also a Monster, the perpetrator of evil upon several innocent Victims whom he murders. The Creator, having been slighted by the actions of the Creature, then lashes out against him, seeking revenge in the role of the Hero against the Monster that he initially victimizes. In this more realistic tale of morality, vengeance creates a cycle of violence. As the great moral philosopher and activist, Gandhi once stated, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

In the Jewish Torah mythology, the Serpent embodies this moral complexity by its position and orientation in the narrative. It is introduced as a facet of the Tree of Morality and is further identified in the text by a Hebrew word that means “to make naked or to reveal”—painting the picture of one who reveals morality. As a composite picture, the Serpent is thus the archetype of moral conscience, the mediator between impulse and action, the revealer of a deeper moral character, or the Soul. Initially, on the Tree of Morality, the Serpent Conscience reveals Eve’s inner thoughts on her relationship with her Parent. She doubts his benevolent character as a Good Parent. The Serpent reveals that Eve suspects that the Elohim are selfishly keeping this powerful goodness of wisdom and moral consciousness from her. As such, she chooses to take what is not hers to have, at least not in that moment of her juvenile development as an Elohim. Her adversarial conscience of selfishness and greed are represented by the lowered Serpent on the ground. Later in the mythology, the raised Serpent will represent healing and a morality of love, compassion, and generosity as a resolution to this mythic tale.

Traditionally, patriarchal religious interpreters wholly identify Eve by her vagina, or more to the point, her lack of a penis. Men and women are seen as morally and inherently separate and distinct subspecies. Women are a characteristically weak, inferior subspecies of human beings who lack moral character and are the cause the fall of mankind. Nakedness in the Garden is sexualized and temptation is thus a prominent characteristic of women’s sexuality that lures men to their doom. However, this tells you more about the religious and patriarchal institutions than the actual myth.

In the mythology, Eve is fundamentally and equally human, or more specifically, Elohim, a Hebrew word meaning “one who is a very great power”, which is then extrapolated to a family of Elohim. She represents two distinct dimensions of the Elohim story. One is her capacity to perpetuate human life as a mother in the sexual pairing with her husband when she eventually is mature enough. However, in the Garden narrative, this capacity for reproduction is merely a potential of her biology. In the juvenile developmental narrative of the Garden, there is no bumpety-bump procreat’in go’in on, or as the ancient he-bros liked to say, “know’in each other”. Eve and Adam are presented as immature Elohim, acting in the role of brother and sister, still grappling with their powers and responsibilities, uncertain of themselves or their relationship to one another.

This, then, portends the second dimension of Eve’s identity as the second born of humanity. As such, she represents the inheritor of ancestral and cultural myths, passed down from one generation to another. Adam is the first born. In the ancient traditions of Mesopotamia and the Levant, he is designated to represent the desires and identity of the Father, to take care of the family in his absence. He is specifically instructed by the Good Parent as to his position and responsibilities in the Garden. He is then responsible to pass this along to the next generation, in this case, his younger sister.

The myth actually indicates he screwed that up and adds “Do not touch” to the one prohibition of eating the Fruit of Morality—establishing the first religious edict intended to control the behavior of others in the tribe. Within the mythology, it is from this dimension of her narrowed experience as an imperfect inheritor of the cultural myth that Eve’s doubts arise (not because she lacks a penis). Adam then responds to the opportunity for wisdom and moral consciousness out of his own doubts, immaturity, and insecurities, likely as any adolescent lacking in impulse control (and not because of sexual temptation.)

Similar to the divine origins of fire in the initial story of Prometheus or the spark of life in the story of Frankenstein, moral maturity is the domain of the Adult Elohim in the Torah myth. Each of these desired capabilities is stolen from the greater powers who own them. The fundamental need for these powers arises out of specific vulnerabilities in human nature—suffering, death, and ignorance.

The Promethean Paradox of the Torah-Gospel mythology is that “Bringing Back the Fire of the Gods”—fixing the original problem presented in the first part of the myth— does not involve a journey back to where we began in order to return what was stolen. Nor does it require a punitive transaction in payment. But rather, it motivates a developmental journey, moving us forward, to essentially become the Fire, to become morally mature Adult Elohim, embodying the mature fruit of the Tree of Morality.

Later in the Torah-Gospel myth, the Tree of Morality is brought to life as the Law of Moses. This is then summarized by Rabbi Jeshua as love—love for the Parent Elohim and love for all within the Universal Family of Elohim—establishing the relational archetypal paradigm of the Lover and Beloved.

To the contrary, many of the traditional moralistic religious interpretations of the so-called “Fall of Man” are founded in the adversarial paradigm of the Victim-Villain-Victor archetype. These versions of the narrative envision a moral battlefield, pitting Man against God in a perpetual struggle against his Laws. Religious moralism by intent and purpose is fundamentally transactional and rule-based. Thus, in the various Abrahamic religious systems, the Mosaic Law is portrayed as a list of rules one must follow. To break a rule is to incur the wrath of the rule-maker, the Divine Judge. In this religious paradigm, Adam and Eve are the original sinners or rule-breakers that bring condemnation and death into the world, which then, must be paid for by a punitive transaction to satisfy the holiness and justice of the Angry God, and, of course, necessitates a system of intermediaries to represent the God and enforce this code in the daily life of the tribe.

Conspicuously, in spite of the obligations that the Mosaic Law lays out to amend for one’s routine failures against each other and the Divine Ruler, this is never enough for those seeking social control. Consequently, various traditions evolved throughout the ages and across the Abrahamic traditions to “fence in the law”—to add additional boundaries and conditions.

As such, in formulating the Christian religion, several new moralistic layers are added to the original relational mandate given by Rabbi Jeshua to love one another. Based on the later prophetic vision and writings of the neo-apostle Paul, Christianity becomes fixated on Paul’s transactional gospel that an ultimate sacrifice must be given as a payment for sin, once and for all, to satisfy the blood thirst of the Angry God. This idealized human sacrifice, shedding the blood of the Son of the Christian God, Jesus Christ, becomes the ultimate payment for the sins of humanity throughout history from Adam to the end of the world. Well… sort of. Mysteriously, unlike the sacrifices under the Mosaic Law, this human sacrifice doesn’t actually absolve one’s guilt unless other criteria are met. These conditions vary according to the extrapolated doctrines of some thirty thousand Christian sects over the last two millennia, each claiming to represent the Word of God. Perversely, many of these disagreements between sects were only resolved by torture, banishment, or the point of a sword to get the opposing side to agree, or else disappear in the backwaters of history.

Elseways, Greek moralism is certainly more consistent and straightforward. Prometheus is directly punished for his insubordination to Zeus by being chained to a rock in Tartarus, the great pit, to have his liver eaten out each day by an Eagle. Since he is a god, his liver grows back each night only to have the torment repeated the next day. And then, for receiving stolen goods, Men are punished by the creation of the first woman, Pandora. Similar to the misogynistic interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Eve, Pandora is formed most beautifully and deceitfully to bring all manner of suffering and evil into the world.

And then, in the story of Frankenstein, his breach of the boundary of human mortality is punished by the Creator’s ultimate death in pursuit of revenge. The Creature is forever lost wandering alone in the barren ice fields of the Arctic, an aberration and cautionary tale to the limits of scientific hubris.

On the other hand, in the relational paradigm of the Torah-Gospel myth, the failure of Eve and Adam is portrayed as the falsification of the identity and character of the Parent Elohim, doubting his good intentions and assuming a malevolent purpose in keeping the fruit of Morality for himself. Rather than a violation of some magical divine code, this is merely the consequence of defying a universal relational equation that defines truthfulness, trustworthiness, respectfulness, and generosity as the basis for relationship.

In this equation, one side of a relationship is defined by the truth of who I am. The other side is defined by the truth of who you are. If either side of this truth-telling contract is violated, whether I lie about who I am or otherwise, who you are, or else vice versa, you lie about who I am, the false identification will imminently inhibit the relationship—eventually leading to separation and death of the relationship.

The Garden of Eden symbolizes the Adamite’s intimacy with their Parent. Their exile from the Garden symbolizes the death of that relationship. The rest of the mythology is the path to the restoration of intimacy with the Good Parent by reaffirming the truth of his good character and intentions as a loving Parent Elohim, bringing new life to that relationship, and moral maturity to the Child Elohim.

The primary symbol of the toxicity of false identification is the Viper or Ground Serpent. Initially, the Serpent Conscience on the Tree of Morality is cursed to crawl on the ground as a consequence of Eve and Adams false identification of the Good Parent’s intentions regarding the Tree of Morality. Then, in a pivotal story in the Exodus myth of the Bronze Serpent in the wilderness, the Parent Elohim sends poisonous vipers to attack the Israelites, representing their prior false accusation against the Parent Elohim and his guides, Moses and Aaron.

Likewise, in the Gospel accounts, the religious elite are described as Vipers, symbolizing their false attribution of the Parent Elohim as a tribal god. Many believed that if the entire tribe would follow the Mosaic Law completely even for a day, this moralistic Tribal Elohim would send an anointed Warrior-King, a messiah, who would slay their foes and make them a powerful nation again. However, in context to Rabbi Jeshua’s teaching, the political aims of the Jewish religious establishment were irreconcilably in conflict with the relational paradigm to love one another, inclusive of one’s enemies. The narrative of a familial messiah who reconciles humanity to the Parent Elohim and to one another is identified as treasonous to the cause of the expected political messiah who would kill their enemies and establish a new Jewish kingdom. As both cannot be true, the religious elite accuse Rabbi Jeshua of blasphemy and he is then crucified under Roman Law as a valueless traitor.

In the Victim-Villain-Victor archetypal dynamic, the Monster-Villain is identified as a valueless entity who deserves to be destroyed. When we falsely imagine our adversaries, those we fear and hate, to be valueless, we justify all manner of violence. They no longer deserve compassion, kindness, or empathy. In this adversarial paradigm, any possibility of relationship, or love, is destroyed the moment we project onto our adversary false and demeaning characteristics and motivations, whether consciously or not.

Thus, in the Mosaic Law, two of the primary Ten Commandments are prohibitions against making false attribution to the character or identity of another. And, later, Rabbi Jeshua states that all failures will be forgiven, or let go, except to vilify or attribute false intentions to the motivating spirit of the Parent Elohim. The truth of each person’s identity is central to our ability to love and accept one another according to the Torah-Gospel mythology.

In the Exodus myth of the Bronze Serpent that was mentioned earlier, those bitten by the poisonous Ground Vipers, sent to embody their prior false accusations, are healed when they look upon the raised Bronze Serpent, embodying healing and truth. Later, this develops as a symbol of a mature Conscience founded in love as Rabbi Jeshua identifies himself as the raised Bronze Serpent. This gives meaning to his impending death on the cross as a representation of the possibility of love and healing over the powers of false identity and broken relationship.

Relationships can only develop when we embrace the truth of one another and ourselves, both our strengths and weaknesses. Human systems for control, whether personal or institutional, only serve to destroy intimacy between one another. In our pursuit of love and relationship, we must let go of the dogma of moral perfection and inauthentic behavior to embrace each other in all our beauty, imperfection, and vulnerability—sharing our strengths and supporting our weaknesses. Ultimately, we must embrace the fire of loving one another.