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| Constantin Popovici, Prometheus, 1965, Vidraru Dam, Romania |
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The last few occult posts have been looking at Prometheus. It's been a long historical journey because he's an old figure with a lot of associations.
Now it's time for modern Prometheus. Not just to recap the symbolism, but to consider a fundamental inversion at the base of modern thought.
No one really believes in Prometheus anymore, and the elites don't care about Classical culture and history. But Prometheus has become a modern symbol that ties into the de-moralized luciferian occult that plagues contemporary culture. We can even call it Prometheanism. Start with the lessons we have learned about the historical Prometheus and see what made him such a compelling symbol.
The myths have no fixed form - just general associations. From ancient times the Prometheus story had different parts that could imply different things. These include the creation of man, the education and enlightenment of man, rebellion against the gods' authority, and punishment for pride and hubris. When we take these together, we get more of a set of possibilities than a single character. So later people can use him for different purposes, even contradictory ones.
Alexander Kapralov, Monument to Prometheus, 1998, Orlinye Skaly (Eagle Rocks), Sochi
If the story focus on creation and education, he is a symbol of knowledge and progress. If it ends with his torture, he is a cautionary tale about overreaching. If it ends with his deliverance, it becomes the triumph of human initiative and will. And so on.
Like this Russian version where the titanic figure breaks his chains with no eagle or Hercules in sight. Modern Prometheus often stands for the idea of human overreach as a good thing - that we can somehow overcome our physical and socio-psychological natures by tech and will. And if this sounds like luciferian magical thinking, well the good thing about art is that you can make it represent whatever you want. Reality doesn't matter.
Renaissance Prometheus ties into human vanity. Prometheus was transformed from a mythical character to an allegorical symbol to be applied to humanity in general. He was already just a set of associations - this just detaches these from any ancient context and makes him applicable to any time and place. This symbolically subverts the traditional Western Christian understanding that objective, transcendent truths are known by faith and pretends that they can be acquired by our own power.
Hendrik Goltzius (after), Prometheus Forms Man and Animates Him with Fire from Heaven, 1589, Metamorphoses by Ovid, plate 2, engraving, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
You can see the conflation with Prometheus starring in a creation scene where the arrangement is very close to Christian versions. The visual connects the two in ways that the stories do not.
There were two parts to this Renaissance subversion. The first is seemingly innocent - that ancient culture was better, so it offered lessons that Renaissance Italians could use to improve their lives. But these lessons included a boatload of metaphysical nonsense that vain court
Jacques Réattu, Prometheus Raised to Heaven by the Genius of Liberty and Protected by Minerva, 1792, oil on canvas, Musée Réattu, Arles
"Freedom" is an empty word that Enlightenment demagogues loved to throw around without ever really defining what it means in physical reality. Making Prometheus the centerpiece means that the "liberty" here is freedom from natural constraints through self-generated knowledge, or "wisdom", as represented by Minerva. As if things within the box can tell you what's outside the box.
Overreach - impossibly "escaping" an inescapable material existence inanely redefined as an "earthly prison" - becomes inverted. An impossibility - a lie - is transformed into not just a virtue, but a goal. The failure of the Enlightenment and the cultural wasteland that we inhabit in its wake was literally inevitable. You can't build on falsehoods and empty vanity.
In the modern era, soundly reasoned faith gets pushed aside and infantile magical thinking based on desire and vanity takes over. The Band has addressed this de-moralization in other contexts - click for the post where we explain the concept, and, if interested, for the post where we introduce it [the early posts didn't use the hyphen. This was added to differentiate the removal of morality from the lowering of morale]. The basic pattern is that advances in technology and knowledge are fraudulently presented as "proof" that humans can overcome their subjective, finite natures and reach transcendent Truths. This is the myth of Progress! - that we can endlessly improve in wealth, knowledge and capability in an observably finite system. It's so retarded it's irritating. But people are so drunk on their own vanity that they will propose patent absurdities like terraforming Mars rather than confront our objective limitations. Like this garbage:
Artist's concept of a terraformed Mars (left) and an O'Neill Cylinder; Artist’s concept of a possible Mars terraforming plant, from the article linked below.
Like this absurdity entitled "The future of space colonization – terraforming or space habitats?" from something with a name that suggests empirical rationality: physics.org. A good rule of thumb when assessing nonsense claims is whether or not the Science! is dependent on fantasy art to make its case rhetorically. It's amazing how much jibber jabber goes poof! when this test is applied.
And as for terraforming Mars, consider that we can't terraform Antarctica. And space habitats? Watching them explode on the launch pad may provide some dark humor. But the real benefit of imaginary science is that you can imagine as diverse a team of imaginary scientists as you want...
We can see how we've stalled out now - burgeoning third world population, skyrocketing housing costs, education, media, and government replaced by webs of lies, perversion as mainstream culture. The list goes on The falseness of Progress! in human nature as a promise is obvious now.
Looking at current trends, a self-selected elite living apart and off of teeming struggling masses looks more realistic. Though even this fails to account for the massive population reduction that would follow the collapse of widespread advanced infrastructure and logistics.
But it wasn't obvious to the turds in the Enlightenment who thought that their little theories could usher in Utopia. And when it quickly became obvious that they couldn't, it wasn't obvious to the fresh turds who declared everything subjective and ushered in Romanticism. And now the collective delusional vanity is such that modern turds actually will argue that that the limits imposed by human subjectivity means reality is unreal rather than admit that there are things out there that are beyond us. At which point irritating becomes pathetic and then self-destructive.
And so we get to modern Prometheus.
Ossip Zadkine, Prometheus, 1956, bronze, Paris
Like this ugly, late Cubist mess. Modern art is an expression of the modern Promethean perspective on culture - rejection of wisdom or legacy from the past for the deranged fantasy that we simply make up our future whole cloth.
Humans are shaped by environment and genetic limits, just as art is a product of skill and beauty. The Promethean fiction is that we are "liberated" from external constraints - and empowered to do what we wilt. The result isn't pretty. Turns out just making up whatever we want doesn't yield much of value.
We'll set the stage with Modernism's extension and antithesis, and a central theme in this blog. That is Postmodernism, and what it has to say about the nonsense claims that the Prometheans live on.
In the perfect Postmodern irony, the all the links on the site where this bit of Postmodern graphic design came from are broken.
An occult post isn't the place to get into the philosophical underpinnings of Postmodernism - regular Band posts are where we deal with that web of gibberish. It's enough for this post to point out the familiar characteristics - that there's no objective truth or meaning, everything is subjective, etc. What's important for us here is to distinguish the basic Postmodern conclusion that nothing is objective from the vile ideologies that make objective claims while professing to be Postmodern. Or post-Postmodern, if anyone gives a toss. Retarded fake belief systems like "social justice" are second-order effects - authoritarian scum taking advantage of the voids created when Postmodern cleaned out the old fake rules to introduce new fake rules of their own. Even the names - Post-postmodernism, meta-modernism, pragmatic idealism - are mentally-stunted faux intellectualism.
Simon Martin, Carlton, 2006, video, projection, colour and sound (stereo), Tate London
In practical terms, this distinction is irrelevant. No one cares if a cultural termite is a "true" Postmodernist or a "post" Postmodernist any more than whether a murderous thief is a true communist or democratic socialist. Or whether of not "the materiality of the object is subjugated to its historical context and cultural resonances" in a if a film of a bookcase taking up space in an art museum. They have to be opposed regardless.
But the distinction is important if we want to understand what is going on, because any substantive cure needs a diagonsis.
If there is a Postmodern "logic" it is oppositional. It both extends from and refutes the inane lies of Modernism that have progressively undermined Western culture for over a century. It is true that Postmodernity is anti-nationalist, anti-Christian, anti-human, and anti-truth, but in terms already laid out by Modernist anti-nationalism, anti-faith, anti-humanism, and anti-truth.
As an oppositional position, Postmodernism can't offer anything positive to replace the web of lies that it eviscerated. The nihilism of Postmodernism is specifically the destruction of Modernist faith, Modernist truth, Modernist objectivity, Modernist meaning, etc. It was the logical endpoint of nonsense Modernist claims - the demonstration that these claims were inherently fake and meaningless. If we call it a system of thought - which it really isn't - its conclusions are only relevant if we accept its Modernist starting point as a frame of reference.
Modernism sets the terms and Postmodernism deconstructs them. But deconstructing them is still taking them up - is still accepting the frame of reference that Modernism created. The answer to the Modern artists' claims of genius was "no you aren't".
But in practical historical terms, the problem is that this is what happened. Our cultural institutions all did accept Modernist idiocy on faith, so when Postmodernism took a weed-wacker to it, there was nothing left to stand on. But the institutions continued as physical entities - buildings, staffs, budgets, etc. - so something had to fill the void. Modernism had already made our institutions anti-Western culture first and foremost - consider modern art, literature, social sciences, etc. The acceptance of Modernist ideology already meant that truth had been actively rejected. And an anti-Western, anti-truth orientation is independent of any one specific ideology, so Modernism could be expunged without changing this overall perspective.
Institutional carcasses aren't animated by arguments against Modernist idiocy. It's incoherent screeds in place of the now-debunked Modernism that share the same opposition to truth and Western culture.
But the underlying vanity of Modernism isn't gone. If anything, it dominates our false beliefs that techno-utopias and state power can transform human nature. Put generally, Modernism is the objectively retarded claim that technical advancement gave humans access to pure objective Truth. That a never clearly defined "Reason" could define absolute laws of morality, control human nature, and unlock the secrets of the universe. The argument seems to boil down to this - logic is objectively true within it's own domain, and humans can perform logical operations like math, so "reason" gives us universal objectivity. It's literally that stupid, but incredibly seductive because it appeals to our vanity. And it's nothing new - Modernity just used new technology to supercharge it.
Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois, Adam and Eve, 19th century, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Besançon
That somehow knowledge can make us gods is a delusion as old as the human species.
Compare this to the traditional West, where there are no human generated absolute "Truths". We acquire circumstantial knowledge through experience and draw conclusions inductively. Objective, transcendent, big picture truth are known by faith and applied to our circumstances deductively. These are the only paths to the respective domains. Empirical observation can't tell us anything about objective, universal, capital T Truths, and faith doesn't navigate the physical world for us.
Jadwiga Hawrylak-Grabowska, housing complex, Wroclaw, Poland. Built 1968-1973
From this perspective, Modernism inverted on both ends - it elevated our material impressions to the level of faith, then insisted that that fake faith determined the nature of the physical world despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Like this being an ideal way to live. Or pretty much any conclusion of the "academic" social sciences in general.
Postmodernism annihilated Modernist claims to absolute Truth with the sort of ease you'd expect, and revealed the fundamental inversion at the heart of it. Our language, perspective, formation, and context are all flawed, finite, and subjective. Our perception is conditional and our collective memory Swiss cheese. Modernism was the inversion of subject-object relations - contingent humans professing transcendent mastery. And none of this should cause a sensible person to even bat an eye.
Of course there is no transcendent truth available to our reason. Only a mentally-crippled Modernist ever believed that.
But where Postmodernism did become toxic is with how it replaced the Modernist nonsense in our dying institutions. Rather than returning to sound Western principles of empiricism and faith, it kept the Modernist lie that we master our own natures, even after destroying the arguments that that lie was built on. This opened the way to a fragmented and chaotic do what thou wilt - one where you could make up anything you want, and if you had institutional status, it was accepted as true. This was how chimera like oppression, hate, and diversity were simply declared articles of faith and replaced empirical observation and logic in in decision making. But there was no cogent reasoning - only whims enforced by state power. And the notion that power can force acquiescence to whims is neither modern nor postmodern.
Triad of Ramses II with the gods Amon and Mut, around 1270 BC, granite, Egyptian Museum, Cairo
It's as old as the first emperor claiming to be a god.
And a quick note on deconstruction. The Postmodern argument against texts and images having objective meaning is often misunderstood and deliberately exploited. Obviously language is a form of reliable information transfer. We see that every day.
What deconstruction shows that this information transfer is limited by the subjectivities of the language system and the people using it. It's not that there isn't meaningful communication. It's that the communication can't achieve pure, objective, transcendent Truth. We can't, so how could our tools?
Prometheus is the poster boy for the Modernist lie.
He was and remains, the pure symbol of human transcendence, in both Modern and Postmodern contexts. To the Modernists - the notion that human knowledge can overthrow the gods and usher in a state of rational perfection. To the Postmodernists - the notion that human striving and ingeneuity can impose our wills on an otherwise meaningless cosmos. But the irony is that in both cases, he is shaped by a fundamentally Christian thought pattern - just inverted in the typical Satanic way. This is the idea that humanity can fall or be saved, only fall and salvation are brought about by ourselves and not something external. And if that sounds familiar, it's because we're back in be your own god country.
To the Romantics, he symbolized the dangers of the human knowledge that the Enlightenment pretended would usher in a Utopia of pure reason. Our ability to bring about our own Fall, you might say.
Sir Luke Fildes, Houseless and Hungry, wood engraving from The Graphic, 4 December 1869
For example, those aspects of the Insustrial Revolution and Enlightenment that introduced the sprawling slum with new diseases and choking air.
Consider Rousseau - a pioneer of Romantic "thought" and a hollow gasbag with a knack for making up absurdities and selling them to other poseurs. His Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) [click for a translation], put him on the French intellectual map - the most intellectually overrated map in human history - for the "insight" that the advancement of human knowledge comes with a downside. He was typical of uni-dimensional Enlightenment darlings - a one trick pony whose one trick was empirically wrong. In this case, the idea that man in a "natural" state - without any trappings of civilization or technical knowledge - lived in a state of benevolent bliss. This is so stupid, so historically ignorant, that it is difficult to take seriously.
It is as if he saw a mythological Golden Age painting and mistook it for a true history.
Follower of Abraham Bloemaert, The Golden Age, early 17th century, oil on copper, private collection
The mythical "Golden Age" was a Greek fiction that was no more real than Avatar.
The inexplicable popularity of Rousseau has two factors: hollow nature of Enlightenment-era "intellectuals" and their place in the de-moralized naval-gazing academic world that followed. At a time when most people had to work hard just to make ends meet, this intellectual was were a small, incestuous group supported by parasitic aristocrats living off inherited wealth and others' production. Success had more to do with satisfying patrons and impressing gatekeepers than any real intelligence or meaningful contribution to human understanding. Which is why Rousseau's Discourse reads with such a blend of pomposity and banality - he was writing for a vain and vapid audience where pretense trumped insight.
Pierre Louis Dumesnil, La conversation de salon Couleur, 1739, oil in canvas.
It's hard to imagine a bigger crowd of self-promoters, poseurs, and gammas, than a French "salon". Modern academics love these collective ego rubs because they tended to be organized by rich, do-nothing women. Symbols of feminist enlightenment! All the sycophants like Rousseau would compete to be noticed by some self-proclaimed doyenne in a home she didn't buy.
The level of thought that emerged from the salons is about what you'd expect, and intellectual minnows like Rousseau should have disappeared with the passing of time. But that's where Modernist institutional ideology comes in. Because the Enlightenment was declared fundamentally important to modern de-moralization, this self-appointed intelligensia became immortalized by later self-appointed intelligensia. It didn't matter if his idiocy was wrong, because it was held up as "important".
All you have to do is go to a search engine - Google Books, an academic database, a university library - and search for Rousseau. Here's Princeton's on-line catalog for example.
Look at the numbers. Literally thousands of books and articles wasted of a self-promoting fool who, if he hadn't existed, would have made no difference to human knowledge whatsoever. Though there is an outside chance that things would have been marginally better without the influence of his moronic blather. And consider this - the authors of all these books and articles aren't all idiots. Most were bright, hard-working, successful types with an aptitude for academics - the sort of people who could be useful to a society if productively engaged. Think of the aggregate brain power wasted on the endless recycling of Rousseau's asinine scrawl. One of many reasons why the modern university is actually harmful to society and needs to be replaced rather than reformed.
Prometheus appears on the frontispiece to the Discourse - Rousseau's first major work.
It's the fire bringer version of the character - he appears to be animating or enlightening a human figure - only there's a half-human satyr coming in from the right who isn't part of the story. And there is a caption underneath that says: "satyr, you don't know that". The text includes a description of the picture:
"It is easy to see the allegory in the fable of Prometheus: and it does not appear that the Greeks, who chained him to the Caucasus, had a better opinion of him than the Egyptians had of their god Theutus. The Satyr, says an ancient fable, the first time he saw a fire, was going to kiss and embrace it; but Prometheus cried out to him to forbear, or his beard would rue it. It burns, says he, everything that touches it."First, he gets the legend wrong. It's true that the Prometheus story is has different forms, but in no version is it the Greeks who punish Prometheus for his gifts. It's humanity that benefits and the gods that punish. But Rousseau wants Prometheus to match his idea that the Egyptians disliked their god of knowledge Thoth, so he just makes something up. Same with the "ancient fable", which is neither. The message is pretty much his usual one - that Prometheus was the knowledge bringer, and knowledge takes us away from the blissful state of nature. He adds: "our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved."
The first thing to note is the switch from the gods punishing Prometheus to the Greeks.
José Clemente Orozco, Prometheus, 1930, Fresco, 240 x 342 inches (610 x 869 cm), Pomona College, Claremont, CA
Mural that captures the idea of Prometheus, fire, and humanity as a closed circuit. No divinities required.
The whole inversion of modernism is based on pretending humanity makes its own fate, rather than existing in a reality that is outside and beyond our mastery. The luciferian inversion of what is rationally best described as "mortal" and "divine". That we can be our own gods.
Then there is the danger of knowledge idea. Apparently it isn't dangerous for everyone. Several years later, Rousseau explained the frontispiece in his “Lettre à Lecat” [taken from Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (Yale University Press, 2010), page 120]:
“Prometheus's torch is that of the Sciences, created to inspire great geniuses; that the Satyr who, seeing fire for the first time, runs to it and wants to embrace it, represents common men seduced by the brilliance of letters, who surrender indiscreetly to study; that the Prometheus who cries out and warns them of the danger is the Citizen of Geneva.”The "citizen of Geneva" is Rousseau himself - a "genius" who can see past the dangers of knowledge that seduces and burns the common man. He distinguishes between geniuses who are inspired by knowledge, likely to flatter his peers, while emphasizing the negative effects on humanity at large. Humanity makes its own Fall, but also possess the potential for it's own salvation. Just have to listen to genii like Rousseau.
It's the negative aspect of Promethean knowledge that will be the Romantic pattern. A modern mural visualizes this better than any Romantic era picture.
Harold Freedman (designer) and Tony Barese, Joe Attard and David Jack (mosaicists), The Legend of Fire, 1980-1982, mosaic, Eastern Hill Fire Station, Melbourne
The Melbourne Fire Brigade mosaic is an impressive bit of public art that includes the divine source of Prometheus' fire, but takes an otherwise pretty negative view of his gift
The lower panels tell the story - the left one shows both sides of the gift and the importance of firefighters in dealing with the negatives. What you'd expect from a firefighter mural.
But the right panel brings Pandora onto the scene and the fire is nothing but negativity and destruction.
A more straightforward Romantic era warning than Rousseau comes from Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (1818). It was even subtitled The Modern Prometheus. This refers to the famous scientist's creation of an artificial life that turns against him, killing those he loves before driving him to his own death.
Title page to the first edition of 1818
Victor Frankenstein becoming disgusted at his creation, frontispiece of the 1831 edition, engraving, Colburn and Bentley, London 1831
Here, Prometheus is a reference to creation, and to knowledge in the Rousseau sense - as something that leads to a bad outcome. The idea is that human science will reach a point where it can replace what had been seen as divine - the creation of life - but the consequences will be deadly. It's a warning about overreach, about pushing past our "natural" place, and the consequences that will follow.
There's an almost endless number of stories on similar themes since - everything from new lifeforms to AIs - and the theme is always the danger of "playing God". Kind of ironic, since these stories always tend to be atheistic. It's almost as if the impossibility of creation ex nihilo is something even the most devout fingers in their ears and shouting retards can't help but sense subconsciously. Then again, the Modernism we're looking at is the inversion of divine creation.
An insidious contemporary version would be Ridley Scott's Pedowood trash Prometheus.
Prometheus, 2012, directed by Ridley Scott
This is a chapter in his Alien slaughter porn franchise - a long-running litmus test for moral emptiness. Here, the name refers to a spaceship piloted by a group of explorers seeking the "origins of humanity" only to be graphically butchered to titillate
This is the sort of fiction that is contrived to undermine the central place of humanity in creation - as made in God's image, and morally responsible for our own fate. By pretending we're second-rate offshoots of some other random species, it simultaneously denies that we're anything special while also lifting any spiritual responsibility. Created beings are what create life and the means of our own Fall.
This is the Postmodern version of Prometheus. There is no dominant narrative of Progress! - just a random universe, but one where random sentient humanoids create life and we bring about our own damnation. The only thing that makes the "creators" important is that they created us - a purely subjective meaning to reality. But what none of these nonsense-peddlers ever address is the real physics problems that they space stories would need. This sort of creation story is utterly impossible just by the standards of the physical universe as we understand it. Simply the size of the power plant and the durability of atomic structures are sufficient to relegate this drivel to fantasy. But in the de-moralized world of idiot materialists, the materially impossible is preferable to the spiritually real.
There are "aliens"...
Gustave Doré, Lucifer, King of Hell, 1861–1868, engraving from Canto XXXIV of Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno, by Dante Alighieri
They just don't come from space.
The more common modern Prometheus is superficially positive, but logically retarded and, not coincidentally, another bit of inversion. This is the symbol of man's limitless potential to challenge the divine and overcome limits with by the power of our intellect. This is the luciferian Prometheus - the firebringer that elevates us above our finite natures. And the punishment doesn't really factor in with this one. It's more fundamentally wrong than the physical impossibility of pushing a material lattice across interstellar space - the logical impossibility of infinite progress in a finite environment.
Maxfield Parrish, Prometheus, 1919, oil on panel, private collection
Parrish is a good artist. Here he captures the gist of this version of the Modern Prometheus. There is no punishment, and the figure of Minerva/Athena that represents divine wisdom in the myth has been added to the firebringer in the form of the symbolic helmet.
Note how the torch of "divine" wisdom Prometheus touches names associated with technical and scientific Progress! He couldn't make the inversion of our place in the universe clearer if he slapped you across the face with it.
We replace the gods through our own mastery of Promethean knowledge.
But this is the key to the modern symbol of Prometheus and the Promethian perspective. It is a rejection and attack on the basic Western understanding of human nature and salvation. It inverts the empirical and Christian notion that we are inherently flawed and require an external divine power to redeem us with an empirically false claim that we manufacture our own nature and destiny. The cautionary tales are that we bring ruin onto ourselves. So the implication of the positive version is that we'd be fine were we don't overreaching and do it right...
Consider: Kant called Benjamin Franklin the ‘modern Prometheus’ for his experiments with electricity and the use of scientific reason to control nature in the 18th century. Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is dismissive of divine power and its hero the ideal man that leads humanity to a better state in the 19th century. Prometheus Books was founded by the same self-deifying buffoon that gave us the "Council for Secular Humanism" to publish self-deifying buffoonery in the 20th. A successfully cloned horse was called Prometea in the 21st.
LO Wenckebach, Prometheus, 1953, outside the Chemical Engineering and Chemistry building, Delft Technical University, the Netherlands.
Shimmying nude fire dancer lights the torch of knowledge above the entrance to institutional bloat.
We will damn or save ourselves on our own power - not just in a technical way, but that our technological advancement will fundamentally change what we are. We are the gods that write our salvation or damnation. We hold the occult power over the universe. Or so the Prometheans tell us...
Prometheus relief on a house in Dresden-Neustadt, 1900
What was once a symbol of man's treatment by and rebellion against the divine has become man replacing the divine.
Doesn't really answer how we got here though. But Promethean globalists pretend the past doesn't exist. Every day is day one, and every tomorrow is Progress! towards the the Utopia to come.
As if our technology isn't bringing us a surveillance state, cultural degredation, unhealthy diets, parasitic globalist grifters in government, lying media, social justice in education, and every other cancer that comes with centralization. We may eventually destroy ourselves, but you don't even have to look at the logic to see we're not saving ourselves. Just look at the pattern trajectory.
How's that IQ decline over time graph shaping up?
Design Toscano Prometheus lamp, replica of 1864 sculpture John Bell
Perhaps a Prometheus lamp could brighten up the objective degradation of the species.
Alternatively, ignore the logical and the empirical and just read Prometheus Rising (1983) by epic charlatan Robert Anton Wilson. Or don't. Infogalactic describes it as "an amalgam of Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness, Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, Sociobiology, Yoga, relativity, and quantum mechanics". In other words, the same old occult spray of symbols that we've been dealing with in these occult posts all along.
This would be the Postmodern version - no particular line of truth, just you making up whatever pastiche suits you out of whatever nonsense appeals to you. Instead of "human divine" wisdom making up collective salvation, subjective whims make up your own. Be your own god in a fragmented individual rather than collective way. So maybe don't read it. There's no truth to be found there. But then again, there is no truth to be found in globalist Prometheanism either.
Coming back to the Rockefeller Center where we started this journey, we can see the message in the golden statue more clearly now.
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| Paul Manship, Prometheus, 1934 gilded, cast bronze, Rockefeller Center |
This Prometheus flies through the heavens carrying the gift of fire - no symbol of divinity or hint of punishment included. Placed in a prominent area in a complex built by and named for one of the architects of the modern beast system, it is the Modern Progress! version of the figure. This is made more obvious when we consider the figure visible on the building behind it - Lee Lawrie's Wisdom above the entrance.
Lee Lawrie, Wisdom, 1933, Rockefeller Center
Clearly a take on God the Father in the heavens, right down to the compasses that were an old symbol of divine creation [click for a post]. Only the creation is an abstract mechanical mess - the world of technological Progress! rather than any organic human existence.
So the divine wisdom that Prometheus brings is the wisdom of the machine. Of human creation and ingeneuity. The collective message is that we are the creators of reality. And the globalist elites call the shots.
Who are the Prometheans? The would-be masters of the world who seek to remake it in their own materialist, de-moralized image. To damn and save by their own means. To appropriate that which is logically divine to their own venal and contingent desires. In other words, the scum on the top of the globalist turd milkshake.
Maybe the best depiction of this collection of empty myths can be found in the Ukraine of all places - a statue where Prometheus teams up with another empty symbol of man claiming complete control over his nature and reality.
Prometheus and Statue of Liberty, Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine
We haven't been able to track down the artist or date, but the symbolism is too perfect to pass up. Promethean wisdom is the path to "freedom". But freedom from what? Not globalist control. Not anti-human one-world fictions. Not fake morality, fake science, and fake institutions. Not censorship in the name of a Promethean agenda for everyone.
That's a good place to wrap, though we are going to have to look more closely at the symbol of the torch at some point. It's also worth considering if there is something in the Prometheus story that can be flipped around and turned against the occult masters of the world. But for now it's enough to see what Prometheus has come to represent.
We are finite, subjective, material beings. We are physically situated in a world of time and space that vastly outstrips us. It isn't a question of whether we "accept" that or not - it simply is. But we can pretend that it isn't, and in doing so tell lies that our surroundings aren't known empirically and our higher Truths taken on faith. It's wrong, it's inverted, but with enough wealth and power it can be forced by the elites through media and direct coercion. The lie is obvious when you need idols to fake gods to pitch it.
