Summer Solstice 2013: Prometheus and Hellenic Reconstructionism

The BBC came out with an article yesterday that I thought was an interesting, and too-brief, look at the Greek phenomenon known as Hellenic Reconstructionism and the challenges it faces.


These folks see Greece as a pagan nation under occupation by the Orthodox Church and are, quite literally, attempting to reconstruct the ancient religion of Greece.

 

From anyone else, it would be a flagrant case of cultural imperialism: thus why I make absolutely no claims to be following anything close to what the Ancients did.  I don't even speak Greek (though it is on my list of languages-to-learn), nor have I ever been there (that will, however, be remedied in time).  But the archetypal energy of Athena resonates within me, and I honor that as best as I know how to while always trying to learn more about Her and about the culture in which Her worship developed and flourished.  I am not about to go sacrifice an animal on Her altar (sorry, I love my furry puppy too much for that!) - but I have no problem with burning thyme in Her name as the ancients did...

Trying to rebuild an entire religion, 2000 years later and in the midst of a culture that is largely indifferent-to-hostile towards the effort, based on archaeological evidence and a few surviving literary masterpieces is not easy, and there's bound to be a few errors in the transcription.  Still, if any religion is more open to accepting that than the ancient religion of the Hellenes, I have yet to find it: they were cool with inventing stories about their gods.  Anything to enhance Their glory....

It's pointed out in the article that Prometheus never had a festival of his own. in ancient days.  Didn't he?  I see a statement like that and I start questioning....

Well... He was a Titan.  The Titans are the remnant of a religion that is even older than what we recognize today as "ancient Greek": they come from before the Doric invasion.  They're not the only ones who made it in, demoted as demigods and heroes and demons or monsters but still remembered - nor is the Greek religion the only instance of this happening (witness the hierarchies of saints and angels adopted by the Catholics).  Athena, Aphrodite, Hecate, Ariadne, the Medusa, the Moirae (Fates), the Muses: they are only a few of several characters in the pantheon of the Greeks whom I have identified as being much, much older than the Doric invasion.  Their mythologies simply... don't belong in the culture that adopted them.

The very name "Prometheus" means "First of the Gods," and he is, according to some very OLD myths, the Creator of humanity.  He and His brother had the raw materials of life with which to populate the Earth with life, and Prometheus worked carefully to fashion a creature in the image of the Titans themselves (echoed back in Genesis of the Bible) - but when he turned around to reach for gifts from the piles of gifts that were to be bestowed on creation, there were none left.  His brother had formed many creatures at great speed and bestowed the gifts lavishly on them: furs, feathers, scales, fangs, teeth, claws.  So Prometheus, in pity and mercy, brought fire and light to his poor, naked creations where they huddled shivering in the dark: the sacred fire of the Heavens.

In all likelihood, that story is a faint echo of a memory of a time when fire could not be readily made and had to be kept alive by a trusted guardian lest the tribe lose a means of heat and protection.  Lightning, which is known to start wildfires, is the province of the thunder god Zeus - whom the Doric invasion established as the King of Olympus.  If Hades is the ruler of the Underworld, and Poseidon is the Lord of the Deeps, then after Chronos (Time) banished Uranus (the Stars) and Zeus banished Chronos, that would leave their brother Zeus as uncontested ruler of the Earth and Heavens - so to take a spark of flame from the ashes left by a lightning-sparked fire or from a temple consecrated to Zeus would indeed have been "stealing fire from heaven."  (By the way, it seems to be a universal truism in polytheist pantheons that, if a deity is described as a brother or sister of another, they may in fact be two facets of the same concept.  The children of Chronos and Rhea are particularly telling in this regard: three gods, three goddesses.  A masculine Trinity, and a feminine Trinity.)

For the great theft of the fire from heaven, myth says that Prometheus was chained to the mountaintops where an eagle (Zeus' bird) would rip out and devour his liver each day: could this have been an ancient explanation for the cycle of days?  This would imply that Prometheus is also an ancient-beyond-ancient Solar deity, dying anew not every year, but daily.  And this also has its cognates in the Mediterranean region: Ra sails in the golden barque of the Sun across the heavens each day.  Helios, and later Apollo, drive the chariot of the Sun.

What it truly sounds like to me is the echo of what was essentially a hostile takeover of the Ionian region by the Doric invaders, reverberating down through one of the institutions that the Greeks left to us: their religious beliefs.  It must have been a fierce resistance put up by the native Ionians, for their gods to have been shoehorned and "made to fit," Procrustean-style, into the Doric's developing pantheon.  Yet they managed it, and the rich tapestry of mythology and literature left to posterity is a great prize, worth the time it takes to analyze it and break it down.  It is one of the few things I've found that does not lose anything by such treatment, but in fact gains with the greater understanding.

I will deal with the annoying remark in the BBC article that the Greek gods had nothing to do with morality in another post.  Please, you've spent enough of your Solstice on me today: go have fun!