If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Occult posts like this one - posts on the history and meaning of occult images - have their own menu page above. All posts are in the archive on the right.
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Jean Delville, Prometheus, 1907, oil on canvas, The Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels
Prometheus is a character from Greek mythology that has been used as a symbol of occult wisdom and human enlightenment. He's a lot like Lucifer in that he represents the fantasy that we can deny reality, but he lacks the historical connotations with naked evil that make the fake "morning star" off-putting to most people. This is the first of several occult posts that will look at the history of this figure and what it means to claim him as a symbol.
One thing that keeps coming up when we interpret occult symbols is the importance of belief. Not just what the people using them believe - although that's important too. Belief in general is a bigger deal in today's globalist Skinner box society than it used to be. Click for an earlier post on belief.
This is because authorized globalist popular culture is more openly de-moralized and pervasive than ever. It has no logical or even coherent morality. It rejects the possibility of objective moral standards for nebulous rhetorical idiocy like opposing "hate" and feeding appetites. There is no value here.
So for many, even realizing something is satanic gets little response, because nothing really matters. Not in that metaphysical supernatural sense anyhow. So long as they aren't breaking any laws, satanic images aren't hurting anyone. It's just edgy. Only crazies think its serious...
... except it is.
This is a typical NPC shilling the mainstream narrative. And here the confirmation of the McMartin school tunnels that shills claimed was "paranoia" while mocking victims [and the archived version]. We don't know what actually happened, but we do know that the authorized narrative is false. Think about that for a moment. The mainstream shills willfully lie to cover up evil of this magnitude than attack the innocent to support their lies. They are complicit.
The Band has taken to calling this fake materialist modern media culture a beast system because it actively fosters evil. It's why we are motivated to show how it works to help people recognize it. The question for those under the spell: now that you know you are being lied to, do you start rethinking things, or keep clinging to objective falsehoods?
Once you know better, it becomes a moral choice.
Occult means secret and the occult imagery posts were started to show the history behind some of the more nefarious ones. We noticed some patterns right away. But what we noticed was that the whole de-moralized globalist culture resembles an occult secret - a spell that hides a more truthful relationship to reality. We used the word "glamour" in an earlier post to describe the collective illusion. And we saw that it is materialist and de-moralized. It lacks the conditions needed to even set up a moral judgment, let alone chart the right course.
People get so baffled with ever-changing nonsense preoccupations that simple truths become hard to see.
Here are top preoccupations according to EducationWorld. What does any of this have to do with the existential issues facing the West? Nothing. It's all mindless emotional stimulation intended to keep people ignorant and helpless - too wound up to walk away and chart their own course.
But simple truths are actually not that hard to see - if you drop preconceptions and really pay attention and think things through. We know we are dependent on our subjective interpretation of empirical observation to understand the world around us. We are aware of abstract truths that don't map perfectly onto this messy material world. And the abstractions points to the logical necessity of ultimate reality - the source, foundation, origin, etc. of all that can be. What IS. God in Christian terms, Truth in philosophical ones.
Healersmoon, Heaven's Light
The Band takes a basic Western perspective that there is a continuum that ties these together that we call Christian Logos or the order of reality. This known in ultimate reality by faith, abstract reality by logic, and applied in the material world as morality.
Ladder of Divine Ascent, 12th-century icon, Monastery of St Catherine, Mount Sinai
Morality, then, is alignment with Truth as we can understand it in situations that are often shades of gray.
The point isn't that we always get it right. The point is that we orient towards objective Truth to the best of our discernment. So that our general direction is the same. This is where public, social, or collective morality comes from. Individuals with common moral orientations forming polities that reflect the perspectives of their constituents.
The beast system is the inverse - a top-down mass culture that denies this absurdly simple relation for an endless spray of ever-changing de-moralizing lies. Where it's always year zero, but the progress never ends. There is no one "answer" to a system this centralized and all-pervasive. Other than disengage from the lies as best as possible.
So belief is a fundamental issue on multiple levels. What you believe determines whether or not you perceive something is even "a problem" and whether you feel nihilism and despair when the deceptive nature of the system becomes undeniable. Regular Band posts try and show where and how the beast system hall of mirrors comes from and where to look for the truth that it has hidden from you. And the one pattern that we've seen repeat more than any other is inversion. This is so constant that we call it satanic inversion and wrote a post on it as the occult archetype.
Gustave Doré, Farinata degli Uberti addresses Dante (c 1857), engraving from Dante's Divine Comedy canto X
The satanic inversion takes many forms but fits the same pattern - self over reality, whim over Truth, desire over Logos, man over God. The metaphysical emptiness of do what thou wilt, and the pathos-in-the-face-of-mortality of be your own god.
Of course, the one truth in their web of lies is the one they don't mention - in a world ruled by will and desire, the winner takes all.
The thing that makes inversion so universal is that it's like Logos - it can play out on every level of reality. Invert faith by pretending personal greviences are moral absolutes. Invert logic by fudging models to fit preconceptions. Invert empirical reality by lying about what happened. This last one can help anyone see the problem with inversion, regardless of what you believe. You don't need complicated morality to understand that when someone is inverting what is, they are dealing dishonestly. They seek to exploit by rejecting what is true. From there you can extend back out to morality and see how the inversion of truth is a measure of evil
Once we see inversion is rooted in the rejection of Truth., it's obvious why it is so common in a fallen beast system. Evil by definition rejects Logos, Truth, reality, Being - whatever you want to call ultimate reality. All that is, leaving it with not-is, or all that isn't. All it can do is corrupt and invert.
Like Pedowood.
So set aside endless wrangling over belief and look for inversions. You aren't guaranteed to find evil, but you are on its turf. And if the inversion just happens to elevate "Man" above reality...
Paul Manship, Prometheus, 1934, gilded bronze, lower plaza, Rockefeller Center, Manhattan
...you have Prometheus.
The Titan from Greek mythology connected to intelligence, craft, and human advancement that became a modernist kewpie doll and a symbol of occult enlightenment. Here's Infogalactic on Prometheus and a good overview of the occult symbolism of the Manship, and the Rockefeller Center.
Philomon, from Jung's Red Book
This is not the first time we've seen the same pattern play out in mainstream authorized culture and in what is conventionally dismissed as superstition or fringy nonsense. Like pioneering psychologist Carl Jung's mystical dream guide speaking through automatic writing.
When you think how inverted the mass culture bubble that surrounds us is, this pattern is not surprising. But that assumes you are aware of the glamour.
It does seem that reality is catching up on the glamour, and the beast system becomes more and more absurd and deranged as the deceptions unravel. The Band is only one - a small one - of many voices shredding the webs of lies that have made us into far less than what we could be. And once you've seen how feeble and transparent the nonsense narratives are, it becomes harder to believe anyone could take them seriously and easy to just tune them out altogether.
The problem with that is that there are still a lot of people who buy the glamour and actually believe mass media reflects reality. Even many who know they are being lied to and manipulated a lot of the time foolishly place credence in some of it.
It shouldn't matter if individual facts are sometimes true or some show isn't utterly pozzed - the entire system is a projection of soulless, materialist globalist will to power. You don't have to dig far to find inversion and de-moralization. But too many still consider the lies the work of bad apples and not fundamental to the system.
You've witnessed this every time one of these victims is triggered by some glaring hole their rice-paper narrative or the self-contradictions of a cathode head. The violence of the reactions indicates that there is some visceral doubt, but they're committed to believing mockingly-transparent lies from people that openly hate them.
It's those points where occult and authorized mainstream reality overlap that reveal the inherent dishonesty of the beast system and it's "evidence-based" lies. Serpent audience halls and psychedelic "enlightenment" are just moments where the sham shows through. Prometheus is another. Like glitches in the matrix telling us where to look.
Erik Johansson, illusion
What is so interesting about Prometheus as symbol is that the inversion of what he represents started before the ancient world came to an end. The earliest source of his myth is Hesiod - a Greek poet active sometime between 650 and 750 BC, and along with Homer, considered a founder of the Greek literary tradition. But by the classical period in the 5th century BC, Prometheus has been changed quite a bit. This is important for understanding his meaning in more modern times.
Edmond-François Aman-Jean, detail of Hesiod Listening to the Inspirations of the Muse, 1890, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Hesiod's works aren't as famous as the Iliad or Odyssey, but he is a pivotal figure in one of the main pillars of Western culture and our best source for Greek mythology at the beginning of the Archaic period. Prometheus turns up in best known poems - the Theogony and Works and Days as a trickster/champion of humanity and foil to Zeus, the king of the gods.
The Theogony describes the creation of the gods and the cosmos, beginning with the spontaneous generation of Earth and other entities from Chaos. These spawn the Titans who seize control of the universe, only to be overthrown by the better known Olympian gods. The main focus is on the genealogies and relationships between the gods and other superhuman entities - it uses these as a way to tell the story of creation. Greek polytheism mixed gods with personalities with names that seem more like pure personifications of natural forces. Hesiod doesn't really differentiate.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis, 1811, oil on canvas, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence, France.
The Theogony is in the form of a hymn to Zeus and the Muses, so the power and authority of Zeus is played up and the details not worked out as systematically as we would like. But the basic account is the backbone of our understanding of Greek myth heading into the Classical era. Click for a description and for the full text translated in prose and in verse.
Hesiod's Prometheus is a Titan, but doesn't take part in the war with the Olympians, and avoids the banishment of his fellows to the netherworld. His appearance in the Theogony is brief - his parentage is given then his terrible punishment is described before we are told his crime. He aided mortals in a dispute with the gods - presumably over the rules for sacrifice - and tricked Zeus into accepting bones and fat as the gods' share. Zeus is angry, so withholds the gift of fire from man. Prometheus counters by stealing "the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk" bringing about the ghastly punishment.
Atlas, Typhoëus, Prometheusm, around 560-550 BC, black-figure ceramic bowl, Vatican Museums
This story is developed a little in the Works and Days [click for prose translation and for an overview]. This poem is different from the Theogony - described as part almanac, part agricultural treatise, and part homily - but also addresses mythological subjects. Hesiod frames the story around dispute between him and his brother over some farmland and a condemnation of corrupt judges before moving into a mythic history of the nature of justice and evil and the Ages of Man. The details about the sacrificial portions trick are omitted, but the story of Pandora is elaborated. Here's the opening of the Prometheus story:
Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods, Liebig card, from a series on the legend of Prometheus, published late 19th or early 20th century.
"For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste. But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it, because Prometheus the crafty deceived him; therefore he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He hid fire; but that the noble son of Iapetus stole again for men from Zeus the counsellor in a hollow fennel-stalk, so that Zeus who delights in thunder did not see it. But afterwards Zeus who gathers the clouds said to him in anger:
`Son of Iapetus, surpassing all in cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire -- a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.'"
This passage is important to later occult interpretations, because it broadens to gift of fire to "the means of life" but in an ambiguous way. We aren't told what the means of life is or are, and the story quickly switches to fire. Hesiod frames it in terms of labor productivity and earthly fertility - if we had the means of life, a days work would give a year's food, and the nature of society itself would be changed by the abundance. It isn't explicit here, but this is the opening for what will develop into the claim that Prometheus didn't just give man fire, but gifts of technology and other labor-saving modern processes.
Avril Brand, Old Family Bible and Psalm Book, oil on canvas
One major difference between Greek mythology and Christianity is that the Greeks didn't have a set holy scripture like the Bible. Hesiod frames his poems as divinely inspired, but they aren't subsequently taken as holy writ - they change and evolve over time. Obviously Christianity has also changed a lot, but the Bible fixes certain basic tenets. The free-flowing Greek myths don't even have a consistent creation story, and stories like Prometheus have variants - none "canonical".
Consider Hesiod's account of the creation of man following the Prometheus story in the Works and Days. He describes Five Ages of Man - the Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Ages - created one after the other, and all by Zeus. But before the end of Greek antiquity, it's Prometheus credited with creating mankind and not just helping them. There is nothing in Hesiod that points to this - it's just the sort of change that occurs when there is no canonical account to refer to. But Prometheus as creator adds another symbolic dimension to the character that we'll take up in the next post.
Thomas Cole, The Titan's Goblet, 1833, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The lack of canonical stories and characters is a real challenges for interpreting mythology-based occult symbols. The occult is slippery at the best of times, but these figures have no fixed identity from the start. Hesiod's Prometheus is different from Plato's, who is different from Aeschylus' or whoever wrote Prometheus Bound. A fluid figure like this is ideal for conversion into different symbolic meanings.
The next post will look at the later Greek versions of Prometheus. We'll wrap this one by looking at some implications of Hesiod's original.
The first problem with Prometheus as a more modern symbol is the source. Ancient Greek culture - not the stylized Neoclassical versions of it - is not "Western" in the "Western culture" sense. Greco-Roman antiquity is one of the historical roots of the West, but it predates it. It lacks the Christianity and European nationalities that are the other pillars of Western culture. Aspects of Greek thought are formative for the West, there is also a lot in their world view that is alien and even incompatible. This is clear in Hesiod's attitude towards divine authority, reality, and human existence.
From a Western perspective, the divine, reality, and human existence are unified and coherent. God encompassing ultimate reality and Truth that flows through Logos and morality into experience. This picture doesn't really capture it, but it does give a sense of the unity in creation that is the result. The deceiving thing is that God is presented as an old sky god - like a Zeus type. This is purely metaphorical since he transcends the very concept of physical form.
Greek myth is the opposite - especially in Hesiod's archaic period, centuries before the Greek philosophical schools started working out the abstract logic that would be their great contribution to Western civilization. There is no fundamental order or Logos in Greek mythology beyond force.
JuanSan, Zeus punishment
The Theogony describes a universe without higher meaning. It is born of chaos - heaven and earth and various chthonic entities spontaneously generate with no purpose or motivating will. Generations of gods and monsters contest for domination until Zeus establishes control through his overwhelming might. Order or rule is based on what can be imposed by force - power is the fundamental principle.
This picture shows Zeus defeating his father, the Titan Chronos, and seizing rulership of the universe. The old man-sky god look in this case is is their actual appearances because these are physical beings.
The easiest way to frame the comparison is that the universe is within God, whereas Zeus is within the universe.
Readers are likely familiar with feebleminded complaints about God's "temperament" in the Old Testament. Feebleminded because they assume that the ultimate reality from which all things extend can judged by the limited subjectivities of his creations. We can't "see" God the Father directly, and accommodating him as a character in terms that are comprehensible to us is necessarily unsatisfactory. But Zeus is just another created being - at best a third generation usurper. The only "argument" for his righteousness is Hesiod's
sirocco-rc, Pandora's Box
Consider Zeus reaction to humanity getting fire - Pandora, with all the evils and ailments that plague the world. Mankind really did do nothing wrong, but suffers eternal punishments because Prometheus tried to help them. And unlike Christianity, there is no path to salvation.
In Greek myth, humanity was created in an adversarial relationship with the gods. Actually consider what Prometheus' sacrifice "trick" actually entailed. First there is the dispute itself - it is a given that humanity has to share the fruits of its labors with the gods - not because they are Truth or the Good or expressions of Logos, but because they're too powerful to deny. It's an extortion racket, where the new muscle demands an undeserved cut, and the only discussion involves percentages. So Prometheus used cunning to get the best outcome for his side within the rules in a "contest" where the terms and conditions were imposed entirely by one party. Who also happens to be the judge.
Carl Bloch, The Sermon on the Mount, 1877, oil on copper, The Museum of National History, Hillerod, Denmark
A legitimate creator God simply establishes the rules of reality, with consequences clearly spelled out for those who break them.
But what sort of gamma freak makes up a fake rigged contest, still loses, then wrecks eternal vengeance? Logos suggests that Prometheus was correct to resist such a monster, though the consequences may have been too high.
But if we accept this idea of Prometheus as hero-rebel, then we also have to accept that his heroic rebellion is against the opposite of Western metaphysics and morality. It's against a emotion-driven cosmic usurper and rapist that is opposite to any notion of unified Truth or Logos in Creation.
Gustave Doré, The Triumph Of Christianity Over Paganism, 1868, oil in canvas, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
In fact, Christianity expunges this perverse demon.
But there is another way to look at this.
A more figurative take, where the mythical creatures stand for concepts rather than as beings in themselves. There is a tradition going back to the Middle Ages of using ancient figures to symbolize essentially Christian ideas. This is part of the integration of Classical heritage into the developing West. From this perspective, Zeus' monstrous character is less relevant then his role as a symbol of divine authority. If we look at it this way, then Zeus has to be inherently correct, since he is standing for the notion of a Logos-driven creator God. He is a symbol or allegory for a foundational Truth on which reality is predicated. This means that Prometheus' actions are necessarily morally wrong. They take the limited perspective of a created being within reality and elevate it over the divine plan for creation because the snowflake thought it seemed right.
So there are two possibilities - either Prometheus is a hero because he opposes a demonic system that inverts rightful divine authority or a villain for attacking rightful divine authority.
And this should start to shed light on the sort of individuals who might uphold him as a model in the Christian West.
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