On Prometheus and Lucifer

A friend of mine is living overseas at the moment. She’s getting stuck into writing, and sent me an email a little while back with her latest idea for a story. I’m anxiously awaiting the first draft of her first chapter.

One of the main villains in her story is going to be Lucifer. I offered to give her a run down of some of the symbolism that’s wrapped up under the surface of Lucifer in Christian mythology, and she said yes. I thought that my response would take a few paragraphs, but my fingers took over and she got herself an essay. A dæmon made me do it.

Anyway, this was cobbled together in the late hours of the evening after I’d had a few beers, so it’s a bit of a ramble. I also didn’t put in any references. Really, I was just vomiting up a chunk of knowledge that’s been sitting in the intestines of my brain for the few years. I’m putting it up here, in the harsh light of day, mainly to expose it to as much criticism as possible – in truth, I don’t know how right or wrong I am when I pieced all this together, and I’d like to know. So I open myself to your correction and dissent: It only makes me stronger.

Besides, there’s a small chance you might even find this interesting.

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As for the symbolism behind Lucifer, we have to look to the Greeks for that one.

In the Greek, a dæmon was something very different to how we understand the word ‘demon’, for reasons I’ll get to later. The Greek idea of a dæmon was something not entirely unlike a muse. Muses were the sources of inspiration to do great works. In a similar way, the Gods stationed the dæmons – which were spirits of the air (æthereal beings, note the shared ‘æ’ in both words) – as the proxy between Gods and men. So while the muses were the source of inspiration, the dæmons were the source of those flashes of thought and brilliance that occasionally seem to hit us from out of nowhere. Dæmons were considered to be a bit dangerous – but dangerous the way fire is dangerous, not the way a gun is dangerous. So in the general poetic nature of Greek discourse, invoking the blessings of the dæmons was a metaphor for invoking the very idea of knowledge itself. In a nutshell, ‘dæmon’ meant ‘knowledge’.

That description isn’t entirely accurate… But it’s good enough to be getting on with.

When you contrast the dæmons against Prometheus, you might start to see where I’m coming from. Prometheus was a Titan that stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humans. That’s too simple a summary, however; Prometheus represented much more than just fire. He also gave humanity the secrets of writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and science. In that sense, though he was not a dæmon himself, he was fulfilling the same role. It’s just that where the dæmons were subservient to the Gods, Prometheus had acted against them – and so he was punished by being chained to a rock for all eternity, where a vulture would turn up every day to eat his liver, only to show up the next day to eat Prometheus’ liver again after it had had a night to grow back. The message was clear: Don’t Fuck With Zeus.

Interestingly, Prometheus was also said to have created mankind from clay only to find out that one of his brothers had already used up all the best parts. This myth predates Christianity by a long shot. Curious, much?

When Christianity started exploding out of ancient Israel and into the world of the Gentiles, it came up into direct conflict and competition with Hellenistic culture. It’s important to understand why this was the case.

Hellenistic culture had a different value-system to our modern, largely Abrahamic-based system of morals and ethics. Hellenistic culture valued strength and glory. Humility and weakness were not virtues to the ancient Greeks and Romans, they were sins – although not really sins, since the concept of sin wasn’t even a Hellenistic idea. You had admirable people and despicable people, but there was no room for a concept exactly akin to all the nuances of a sinner. Unfortunately for history, it was part of the nature of Hellenistic values that the weak should bow to the strong.

So although the Hellenistic system had a lot going for it, it did allow for the powerful few at the top of society to oppress the weak. It was the dissatisfaction of the ignorant, weak and powerless in Hellenistic culture that paved the way for the uprising of Christendom. Christ’s teachings offered a different value system, one were meekness and submission to authority became signs of virtue to be admired rather than weaknesses to be despised.

As is always the case, the poor and dispossessed outnumbered by far the wealthy and prosperous, so it was only a matter of time before the early Christians gained enough followers to become a power in their own right. Emperor Constantine’s deathbed conversion had more to do with bowing to the political reality of the situation than anything else.

In their conflict against the Hellenistic tradition, the early Christians adopted a method of cultural assimilation and slander that, arguably, has continued to the present day. They incorporated much of Hellenistic mythology into their own. It was just like how Christianity wound up taking the winter solstice festival in the northern hemisphere and stamping their name on it. Depending on what the orbit of the earth is doing, the winter solstice (shortest day of the year, exact middle of winter, after which the days start to get longer and warmer) falls around December 20/21/22 ish. On the old Christian Liturgical Calendar, every day had some religious rite that went with it, and as such each day was named accordingly (with one exception – the Nameless Day had no such rite). Around the middle of winter there as the Mass of the Nativity of Christ, where all the Churches would give a special mass that was centered around the theme of Jesus’ birth. On the Gregorian calendar, the Mass of the Nativity of Christ got mapped onto December 25.

The Church couldn’t get the peasants to stop celebrating the pagan solstice no matter what they tried. So they compromised. They delayed the solstice festivals by a few days, and then got everyone to pretend that it was all down to the Mass of the Nativity of Christ (Mass of the Nativity of Christ => Christ’s Mass => Christmas). The peasants couldn’t really wrap their heads around all that very well, but the idea of a birthday celebration seemed to kinda fit the situation – and thus the myth that December 25th is Jesus’ birthday. I say myth because we don’t really know, and have no way of knowing, on which day of the year Jesus was born (although it should be emphasized that this is not a big deal – it just doesn’t matter which day Jesus was actually born on, believer or not).

But I digress. The early Christians stole a lot from the Greeks in a similar fashion to how in later years they would steal the pagan solstice festival. But there were some things in Hellenistic culture that were anathema to the value system of the early Christians. In the Hellenistic tradition, knowledge was the province of wealthy and powerful elites. To slander those elites, the early Christians bastardized the idea of dæmons and turned them into demons – wicked spirits, tempters and tricksters, that would use honeyed words to tempt the faithful astray.

Modern day Christian fundamentalists still use the same basic argument – albeit hammered into a more modern shape – when they try to ‘prove’ that the Earth is really just six-thousand years old. “Don’t listen to those atheistic scientists,” they say, “they’re just collaborating under an agenda to turn people away from God on account of their arrogance and hatred towards God,” and so forth. The ancient ancestor of this kind of fundamentalist argument was the literal demonisation of the Greek dæmons.

In a similar way, Prometheus played a prominent role in Hellenistic culture as the one who brought fire to humanity. When you think about it, the knowledge of how to make fire from rubbing two sticks together was really the birth of chemistry and the energy economy. Because of fire, humans didn’t have to rely solely on their own energy in order to survive. They could tap into the energy stored in the chemical world to make heat and light – and from heat cometh motion.

In more modern times, we can tap even deeper into reality than mere chemistry – nuclear fusion [edit: fission, not fusion - we haven't quite got fusion down yet ] is really just a deeper extension of our capacity to draw raw energy from the substance of the world around us and bend it to our whim. It is the surplus of energy generated in this way that gives us the resources to pursue civilization, science, art, music, medicine, construction, science, and so on and so forth. It’s kind of a big deal.

It’s important to underscore that the ancient Greeks knew their shit. In 570 BCE, Pythagoras first hypothesized that the world (and the stars) were all spheres. By 500 BCE, any Greek writer of repute accepted that the Earth was spherical. In 240 BCE, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth with an error of 5% to 10% by using trigonometry to comparing the lengths of noon-shadows in Syene and Alexandria for objects of known heights. Years later, Hero(n) of Alexandria (10 AD – 70 AD) published the earliest known book on the subject of robotics (albeit a primitive version of robotics).

So Prometheus was the bringer of knowledge, power, warmth, and light. Because of the knowledge and power part, both of which were associated with the Hellenistic master classes against whom Christianity was in conflict, the early Christians couldn’t incorporate Prometheus in a positive light the same way that they would eventually do with the winter solstice. Prometheus was anathema to their core values. So instead, they vilified Prometheus in the same way that they did the dæmons.

Prometheus brought the light of knowledge and science to humanity. As I’m sure you already know, ‘Lucifer’ is Latin for ‘Light-bringer’. It always seemed curious to me that the name of the ‘Evil One’ in the Christian tradition translated to something as benign-sounding as ‘Light-bringer’ – but once I came across the actual history of the symbology behind the myths, suddenly it all made sense.

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The link above is a reference to yet another video clip starring Carl Sagan. Here it is, to save you the trip: