“Prometheus (forethought), son of the Titan Iapetus and Clymene, and brother of Atlas, Menœtius and Epimetheus (after-thought), is represented as the creator of man, out of earth and water, and his great benefactor, having given him, in spite of Zeus who was apparently opposed to it all, a portion of all the qualities possessed by the other animals. He also stole fire from heaven in a hollow tube, and taught mortals all useful arts. In order to punish Prometheus for this, Zeus gave Pandora to Epimetheus, his brother, in consequence of which diseases and sufferings of every kind befell mortals. He also chained Prometheus to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where during the daytime an eagle consumed his liver, which was restored each succeeding night. Prometheus was thus exposed to perpetual torture; but Hercules (strength) killed the eagle and with the consent of Zeus, who in this way had an opportunity of allowing his son to gain immortal fame, delivered the sufferer.”
Smaller Classical Dictionary.
The significance of these several references to and quotations from the supposed creative power of the elder pagan world is, if anything, that man is a waif and an interloper in Nature (or things celestial or intelligent), a machine or toy, created by something which desires to use him or work through him in some way, with no essential power to make his own way and no “right” to seek either knowledge or wisdom, lest, in the words attributed to Jehovah, his Creator, in Genesis, he becomes “as one of us,” a minor god, for instance, as the Creator via this phrase writes himself down to be; not the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, by any means. And in this phrase (“one of us”) is contained a hint of a possible condition or order in the universe which, since the Christian era, has been put aside as untrue, namely, that the Creator of man, our two billion two-legged citizens stalking this earth, may be but (to use a very crude and yet for that reason understandable description) a “side-line” manufacturer, as it were, or a lower-level competitor for life and pleasure, along with many others of his kind—Creators or “Gods” or avatars of, let us say, mosquitos, flies, bulls, cats, dogs; in other words the specific and singular Creator of some one thing as opposed to other Gods or powers who might well be creators of other things of equal rank. And these “Gods,” in turn, should one choose to follow the thought, might well be the special product of some greater “God” or manufacturer or Creator who is finding a rather peculiar expression through them and their creations in turn; also the various rivalries which exist between man and the lower animals for the possession of the earth might thereby be explained or have something to do with that.
The thought is not new. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin, Lamarck and Spencer of the theory of evolution, has pointed out that “the organizing mind which actually carries out the development of the life world need not be infinite, need not be what is usually meant by the term God or Deity. The main cause of the antagonism between religion and science seems to me to be the assumption by both that there are no existences capable of taking part in the work of creation other than blind forces on the one hand and the infinite, eternal, omnipotent God on the other. The apparently gratuitous creation by theologians of a hierarchy of angels and archangels, with no defined duties but those of attendants and messengers of the Deity, perhaps increases this antagonism.” He then proceeds to develop a theory of his own in which (I quote) “the vast, the infinite chasm between ourselves and the Deity is to some extent occupied by an almost infinite series of grades of beings, each successive grade having higher and higher powers in regard to the origination, the development and the control of the universe.” He goes on to show how this might be done by them—all to the one end: namely, the creation and preparation of man via experiences here, presumably for a higher place in the control of the universe at large, always under the Supreme Ruler of course and his lesser, yet in so far as man is concerned greater, agents. In other words, under these sub-Gods.
The idea is interesting only it does not, although it may be too much to say that it cannot, explain the endless bickering and chaffering in the universe at large, the utter failure of various movements and types here on earth and apparently elsewhere, the astonishing selection of so minute a mote in the material universe as this particular planet for the purpose of working out a higher type of assistant or worshiper of God Himself. It may be true, but the idea is a little fantastic and suggests the labors of an ignorant and yet hopeful being endeavoring to account for himself, his presence, in the best way he can.
To my humble way of thinking, the ancient Greeks and the various theogonies of the ancient pagan world (Egyptian, Chaldean, Hindu) were at least as plausible in their apprehension of a troublesome disorder. The Old Testament and all other forms of ancient pagan literature suggest the general and very natural conception, based on the evidence of life itself, that various gods were or are contending via various forms of life (animal, vegetable and mineral) for some form of expression here on earth, and that the various things which they make (or the one thing which each makes, its image and likeness perhaps) is opposed to all others here. Pagan thought reeked with the feeling of contests between gods or creators or controllers of this, that and the other, and in the Sinaitic interpretation of life just quoted we see something of the same thing; also in what small consideration man was held by his alleged special Creator. Evidently the conclusion reached by the thinking elders of the pagan world was that man, in so far as his own special Creator was concerned, was viewed with sinister opposition by the power which made him. It did not want him to amount to anything. Indeed he was very, very plainly conscious of the inimical attitude of Nature, or rather man’s especial God or Creator, toward him. He was not as yet deluded by the Christian phantasm that man is made in the image and likeness of his Creator, who is highly considerate of him, and that the world was made for man, or that because of faith, good deeds, special forms of self-abnegation and self-effacement he is to be reserved to eternal bliss hereafter although there is no especial reward for him here and now. And this is excellent indeed as illustrating a force or forces of a creative turn which might wish to use man as man uses any other minor implement for the accomplishment of any purpose he may have, but not very complimentary to him as an illustration of his own free and creative powers.
And, curiously, modern chemistry with its various tropisms—helio, magnetic, stereo and chemo—together with its legal part, physics, does little better by him. Already they tend to show that he is merely—and, what is worse, accidentally so—an evoluted arrangement of attractions and repulsions, arranged by chemicals and forces which desire or cannot escape whorls or epitomes of complicated motions and emotions or attractions which take the odd forms presented by men and animals.
But aside from this the most effective illustration of the essential nothingness of man is his plain individual weakness here and now as contrasted with his mass ideals and the huge vanity or tendency toward romance which causes him to wish to seem to be more than he really is or can ever hope to be. For plainly every life, in the last analysis, however useful to an assumed and carefully directing Creator, or however successful from a momentary analysis it may appear, is a failure. We hear of that curious thing, “a successful life.” It is in the main a myth, a self-delusion. How could there possibly be success for a watery, bulbous, highly limited and specially functioned creature, lacking (in the case of man, for instance) many of the superior attributes of other animals—wings, a sense of direction, foreknowledge and the like—and manufactured every forty years by hundreds of millions, century in and century out, made apparently not in the image and likeness of anything superior to himself but in that of an accidentally compelled pattern, due to an accidental arrangement of chemicals, his every move and aspiration anticipated and accounted for by a formula and an accidentally evolved system long before he arrives, and he himself born puling, compact of vain illusions in regard to himself, his “mission,” his dominant relation to the enormous schemes of Nature, and ending, if “life” endures so long, in toothless senility and watery decay, dissolution. And in addition some have scientifically placed the creative as well as the generative period of man between his twentieth and fortieth years—twenty years! Others generously extend it to fifty and even sixty. Few venture to carry it beyond that. At seventy old Nestor drools and repeats his fables of his few years and many troubles. At fifty, even forty-five, most men are busy recounting the deeds, adventures and creations of their earlier years!
To me the most astonishing thing in connection with man is this same vanity or power of romanticising everything relating to himself, so that whereas in reality he is what he is, a structure of brief import and minute social or any other form of energy, left by his loving Creator to contest in the most drastic and often fatal way with thousands, one might almost say millions of inimical powers and only significant really in so far as he or it is interlocked with others in some larger unity, either (for illustration) as a soldier in an army or its delegated commander or as a delegated or acknowledged representative of some moving or mass or race impulse, still he has this astonishing power of viewing himself as a tremendous force in himself, a god, a hero, an enduring and undying figure of glory and beauty—as significant almost as the Creator Himself, in whose image and likeness he is supposed to be made!