Prom.: Ay, and by it full many arts will learn....
But, with the arts, the “fire” received has turned into the greatest curse; the animal element, and consciousness of its possession, has changed periodical instinct into chronic animalism and sensuality.[971] It is this which hangs over humanity like a heavy funereal pall. Thus arises the responsibility of free-will; the Titanic passions which represent humanity in its darkest aspect;
The restless insatiability of the lower passions and desires, when, with self-asserting insolence, they bid defiance to the restraints of law.[972]
Prometheus having endowed man, according to Plato's Protagoras, with that “wisdom which ministers to physical well-being,” but the lower aspect of Manas of the animal (Kâma) having remained unchanged, instead of “an untainted mind, heaven's first gift,” there was created the eternal vulture of ever unsatisfied desire, of regret and despair, coupled with “the dreamlike feebleness that fetters the blind race of mortals” (556), unto the day when Prometheus is released by his heaven-appointed deliverer, Herakles.
Now Christians—Roman Catholics especially—have tried to prophetically connect this drama with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be made. The true Theosophist, the pursuer of Divine Wisdom and worshipper of Absolute Perfection—the Unknown Deity which is neither Zeus nor Jehovah—will demur to such an idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove that there never has been an original sin, but only an abuse of physical intelligence—the Psychic being guided by the Animal, and both putting out the light of the Spiritual. He will say: All you who can read between the lines, study Ancient Wisdom in the old dramas, the Indian and the Greek; read carefully the “Prometheus Bound,” enacted in the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago! The myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor Æschylus; but, as Bunsen says, it “is older than the Hellenes themselves,” for it belongs, in truth, to the dawn of human consciousness. The crucified Titan is the personified symbol of the collective Logos, the “Host,” and of the “Lords of Wisdom” or the Heavenly Man, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as his name (Pro-me-theus, “he who sees before him” or futurity) shows[973]—in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological [pg 432] insight was not the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanus:
Of prophecies the various modes I fixed, (492)
And among dreams did first discriminate
The truthful vision ... and mortals guided
To a mysterious art....
All arts to mortals from Prometheus came....