Leaving for a few pages the main subject, let us pause and see what may be the hidden meaning of this, the most ancient as it is the most suggestive of traditional allegories. As it relates directly to the early Races, this will be no real digression.
The subject of Æschylus' trilogy, of which two plays are lost, is known to all cultured readers. The Demi-god robs the Gods (the Elohim) of their secret—the mystery of the Creative Fire. For this sacrilegious attempt he is struck down by Cronus[974] and delivered unto Zeus, the Father and Creator of a mankind which he would have wished to have blind intellectually, and animal-like; a Personal Deity, which will not see Man “like one of us.” Hence Prometheus, the “Fire and Light-giver,” is chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture. But the triform Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus—
E'en he the fore-ordained cannot escape....
—ordain that those sufferings will last only to that day when a son of Zeus—
Ay, a son bearing stronger than his sire (787)
One of thine [Io's] own descendants it must be (791)
—is born. This “Son” will deliver Prometheus (suffering Humanity) from his own fatal gift. His name is, “He who has to come.”
On the authority, then, of these few lines, which, like any other allegorical sentence, may be twisted into almost any meaning—on the authority of the words pronounced by Prometheus and addressed to Io, the daughter of Inachus, persecuted by Zeus—a whole prophecy is constructed by some Catholic writers. Says the crucified Titan:
And, portent past belief, the speaking oaks
By which full clearly, in no riddling phrase,