Prometheus

In ancient Greek mythology the hero Prometheus (meaning forethought) rose up to the heavens to light a torch from the Sun's fire, then brought it back to Earth for humankind. This fire, stolen from the sun god Helios, transformed humankind into something superior to other living beings. As retribution, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to be chained to a rock while an eagle forever gnawed at his liver; Hercules killed the eagle and freed him. Zeus's divine justice included a ruse for Prometheus's brother Epimetheus (meaning afterthought). He received the gift of an all-good, incomparably beautiful wife, Pandora, who came accompanied by a box that was never to be opened. Pandora could not resist the temptation and opened the box, releasing upon humankind a manifold of miseries and evils—along with hope.

In Greek literature the story of Prometheus can be found in three sources: Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days (eighth century B.C.E.) and Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (fifth century B.C.E.). (Aeschylus's drama is the only extant part of a trilogy that began with Prometheus

The Punishment of Prometheus, as depicted on a Laconian cup, c. 555 B.C.E. (© Scala/Art Resource, NY.)

In modern culture, however, Prometheus plays a more significant and somewhat altered role. As Karl Kerényi (1963), among others, notes, he often represents a creative rebellion against the limitations of the human condition, for which he is unjustly punished. Although humanity pays for its productive creations, Prometheus is to be admired for his courage and the heroic self-sacrifice that accompanies technological progress. At the same time, new discoveries, driven by hope springing eternal, repeatedly bring forth negative unintended consequences. In counterpoint to such a Promethean fate, Ivan Illich (1972) presented the image of Epimethean Man, who in retrospect learns to practice what, in the early-twenty-first century, is called the "precautionary principle."

Among the many modern reflections on the Prometheus story are the short lyric poem of the same name by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774) and the poetic play, Prometheus Unbound, by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819). The Dirck van Baburen painting Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan (1623) is representative of a novel visual interest. Ludwig van Beethoven's Geschöpfe des Prometheus (ballet, opus 43, 1801) and Erocia (third symphony, opus 55, 1801) both reveal the composer's personal sense of confrontation with Promethean struggles. The best-known modern adaptation is, however, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1816).

More recently Carl Orff's opera Prometheus (1968), Richard Schechner's performance work The Prometheus Project (1985), and Tony Harrison's film Prometheus (1998) all link the story to technology, although in different ways. Orff's music has been described as anticipating technomusic. Schechner's performance employs projected images to connect Hiroshima and pornography. In Harrison's film, miners from a closed colliery pit are melted down and made into a golden statue of Prometheus, which is then trucked by Hermes across Europe from Dresden to Auschwitz and eventually to Greece. Allegorically, Hermes, the messenger god in mythology, returns the current age to the immortality of ancient Greece; so too each epoch age revives the original impulse of the promethean myth and this recurrent hope: Carrying the human torch back to its source, like an Olympian returning home, connotes carrying on with humanity, its eternal re-emergence rising from human ashes and senseless destruction to rebirth, with glories restored and horrors transcended.

Finally the extent to which the Prometheus story may serve as a continuing vehicle for reflections on issues related to science, technology, and ethics is indicated by simply noting the titles of the following books: John M. Ziman's Prometheus Bound: Science in a Dynamic Steady State (1994); Thomas Parke Hughes's Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects that Changed the Modern World (1998); Norman Levitt's Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture (1999); Darin Barney's Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (2000); Arthur Mitzman's Prometheus Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the Twenty-first Century (2003); and William Newman's Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (2004).

Faust;; Frankenstein;; Playing God.

Illich, Ivan. (1972). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper and Row.

Kerényi, Karl. (1963). Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Pantheon. First German publication, 1946. A Jungian commentary that references Goethe's poetry more than Aeschylus's drama.