What Does the Myth of Prometheus Really Mean?
You can read plenty of views on Prometheus. Some worship him in a dark lord kind of way and others stay away from thinking about him at all for fear that he represents evil or antichrist energy.
Like most mythology, however, there are always layers of imbedded wisdom and truth, a type of timeless wisdom that is far beyond any human concepts of good and evil.
So the story goes, Zeus chained Prometheus to Mount Caucasus for misbehaving and giving the power of fire to humans.
Chiron, the Wounded Healer, was immortal. Chiron set Prometheus free. Zeus took away Chiron’s immortality from him and sent him to the underworld. Chiron willingly sacrificed himself. As long as fire was stuck as a result Prometheus’ chains, humans could not access their power of the sacred fire. With Chiron’s help, we can consciously choose to awaken our power. By sacred fire, we are referring to the kundalini awakening, the awakening that results as the sacred fire moves through our chakras from the root to the crown to heal our energy centers in our bodies.
Haven’t we all had experiences where we are forced to face our wounds in our subconscious and unconscious similar to how Chiron willingly went to the underworld? It does feel like a death experience. I have discovered first hand how horrible the grief can be. There we face our greatest wounds and fears, but we also have a chance to reclaim our lost power (or sacred kundalini fires). We can then learn to use our power more wisely.
Collectively, humanity is facing their deepest wounds during these times of chaos, in between one age and another (from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius). To get too caught up in the fight of good vs evil means losing your opportunity to regain your own lost power, the only real way you can empower yourself to do your part to heal yourself, your ancestral energies and the world.
Specifically, through this combined Chiron and Prometheus healing, we heal our fallen creator male energies that exist in all of us, regardless of gender. You can think of these energies as the energies of endless war, over inflated egos, materialism, science over spirit, the mind separate from body and spirit. By facing our fears and wounds, we are able to heal our main Nadis (Ida, Pingala, and Sushumna), the channels through which our life force is supposed to flow, but often does not due to our separation from nature and spirit.
The myth of Prometheus helps us understand better what we see going on in the world and in our own lives: an endless cycle of abuse, the relentless cycle of giving and receiving abuse, shame, and pain. In Greek sources, Prometheus created fire out of clay. Zeus took the fire from humanity. Prometheus stole the fire back for humanity so they could connect to spirit and have warmth. Zeus then chained him to the mountain where vultures pecked at his liver every day which was then restored every night. Liver eating birds represent our angry fallen male side losing trust and hope in the future, while also destroying our bodies (our female side or nature from which we are disconnected). In this version of the story, Zeus is like our medical doctors or public health officials that no longer have a connection to Mother Earth and Father Sky, so our bodies get tired and deteriorate. We also give our power away and lose our sovereignty (does any of this sound familiar?). Our only path is to learn to heal ourselves, to come to terms with our own mortality, and to let go of our God-like illusions of ourselves. When we face the fear of death as well as our deepest fears and wounds, we break our “prometheus” chains and learn to use our life force power more responsibly. We reconnect to nature and spirit in the process, which helps us to reconnect to life, which, paradoxically, requires releasing our fear of death. We cannot forgive what we refuse to face in ourselves and the world.
To learn more about this interpretation of the myths of Chiron and Prometheus, please see Barbara Hand Clow’s book “Astrology and the Rising of Kundalini: The Transformative Power of Saturn, Chiron, and Uranus” very helpful. The entire Chapter “Chiron: The Rainbow Bridge” is relevant for this conversation (pages 198-201). Please click here to learn more about the book. Read the whole book. It will add a whole new layer to your understanding of the interconnections of astrology, cycles, the kundalini awakening, and shadow wounds.
Other helpful definitions:
Ida: female, lunar, cooling effect, river, Shakti, left in body, animal (nature)
Pingala: male, sun, right in body, Shiva, human
Shushumna: center channel
When Shakti and Shiva are united and duality is healed, energy flows freely up and down your spine through the healed three chambers. This is known as the Kundalini awakening.
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