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Patrizia Tedesco Busetto

2. Prometheus – A myth of age-passage

Prometheus is the God: he shaped man, then granted him knowledge thanks to fire, a symbol of light, clarity, sight, and visions.

But hear the misery of mortals first, defenseless and mute like infants, to whom I gave thought and consciousness […] They had eyes and did not see, they had ears and did not hear, they resembled images of dreams, they endured a long and vague and confused time, they were ignorant of brick houses, wooden works: they inhabited caves, like ants, light as the wind in the dark recesses of the caves;1 they always worked2 and did not know, until I indicated how subtly the rising and setting of the stars are known, and finally for them I discovered the number, an excellent artifice, and the written signs as they are composed.3

In the words of Aeschylus, much is said: the mortals being referred to, similar to the images of dreams, ὀνειράτων ἀλίγκοι μορφαῖσι (oneiraton alinkoi morphais), were beings not yet manifested, they were larvae in a prenatal state or in the condition of post mortem, similar, indeed, to images of dreams and the shadows of the realm of the dead; they were the piṇḍa of the hindū tradition4. They are compared to light insects dragged by an uncontrollable flow. Even Plato in the Phaedo compares men to ants that live in cavities which, numerous and diverse, are everywhere around the earth. In such cavities, then, water, mist, and air converge. The true earth floats pure in the ether, the realm of the stars. While men inhabit a cavity of the earth, they believe they dwell above it5. There is a clear division between the upper and lower waters, which host categories of different beings.6

With water and clay, Prometheus prepares man, but at this stage, the corporeal state, the form, is still lacking. To these still incomplete beings, Prometheus now gives fire, understood as a luminous element that, by illuminating, allows things to become visible both in form and in color; simultaneously, light represents rationality and consciousness. “Individual consciousness contains in nuce a certain number of subtle possibilities that are manifested at the moment of the production of the individual when he assumes a body”7.

From the rising and setting of the stars, the flow of time is generated, the numerical fragmentation, the spatial development.

With fire, Prometheus gave men knowledge through number and, therefore, letters, indispensable means to appropriate the gross world and initiate science. Men, therefore, will prove to be a danger to the Gods, too capable and powerful, an element of disorder in the serene harmony of the cosmos.

As for a single individual, Prometheus-Demiurge determines the descent from the subtle into the gross and leads it to birth, so, on a larger scale, He, at the beginning of the world, manifests humanity. It will then be shown that this scientific knowledge of number can also be transposed in a qualitative sense as an intuition of the ultrasensible, of metaphysical reality.

Indeed, Prometheus also possesses a hidden aspect in which he initiates humanity into the mysteries, granting them the ability to emerge from the merely material shell and to rise up to the Gods.

And I ordered, I clarified the many forms of divination, and first I judged which true visions the dream brings, I unveiled the dark voices of omens, the prophetic encounters on the paths. I clearly distinguished the flights of the birds of prey, those favorable and those of augury, and the nourishment of each, their hates, their loves, their dwelling; and the smoothness of the entrails, if pleasing to the Gods, the favorable and varied form of the bile and the lobe. I burned flesh wrapped in fat and long loins and guided mortals to an unprovable knowledge and opened their heavy veiled eyes to the vivid omens of the flame. This I did.8

Reflecting on this further aspect of Prometheus as the initiator of the mysteries, it is inevitable to emphasize his ability to know the past and the future: in Aeschylus he does not mention the present. In this, it is possible to identify him with Janus, Janus bifrons, of the Latin tradition. The two faces of Janus are generally referred to two temporal moments, namely the past and the future. But the true face is invisible, because it is atemporal, beyond the world and, therefore, time.

Among the Romans, Janus was the God of initiation into the Mysteries, and he is the initiatory God par excellence9, the deity of passage, of doors.

Prometheus has offered humanity analytical knowledge, which seemingly elevates man with scientific knowledge, but in reality, it clouds his vision with the veil of māyā, preventing him from seeing the truth. At the same time, however, He has granted mortals the possibility of elevating themselves with initiatory knowledge, through which past and future have no meaning, only the present exists that encompasses every reality, erasing it. In the hindū tradition, the frontal eye of Śiva, invisible, represents the sense of eternity: it is said that a glance from this third eye reduces everything to ashes, destroying every illusion.

Know this briefly: everything that men know comes from Prometheus.10

Prometheus is condemned to be chained to a rock because he has broken a perfect balance, that of the cosmos desired by Zeus and governed by Dike, justice. He assertively stands before Zeus, mocks him with the deception of the bull, arrogantly disregards the prohibitions, and gives fire to mankind.

He is the fatal Demiurge, an indispensable architect of form, the one who sets in motion a new cycle in which the dissolution of the end is enclosed. He is the ἀνάγκη (anankē), it cannot be avoided. It is the eternal struggle between perfect balance and its rupture.

Prometheus, pointing to the stars, the planets, πλανητά (planētai), literally the “wanderers,” gives them the perception of time “mobile image of eternity,” which proceeds according to number, as Plato says11.

Time originated together with the sky, in the image and according to the ideal model, which is eternal, of which eternity represents a copy. Through this knowledge, man can, according to his means, escape from the temporal prison and know the divine.

What leads Prometheus to break the dharma, the perfect universal order, is an act of ὕβρις (hubris)12. of violence, of overstepping, of self-assertion, that is, the assertion of the individual who shamelessly deludes himself into being omnipotent thanks to the knowledge stolen from the Gods. He acts against the dharma and shapes man with the attitude towards action and audacity, with all the connected consequences.

Prometheus is the assertion of separateness that he transmits to the human being, created in his image and likeness. This is what drives Adam to taste the fruit of the tree of Good and Evil; then man opens his eyes and distinctly sees outside of himself the forms and the world of duality and relation.

From a profane point of view, it is the awareness of being “this and that” in the world, felt as separate, other, no longer part of an indivisible and eternal Whole.

“They had eyes and did not see, they had ears and did not hear, they resembled images of a dream”13. As images of a dream, they had no autonomous existence, they were still part of the Whole, devoid of form. “From the same lineage, the Gods and mortal men were born”14. But through the action of Prometheus, the eyes open, what was interior becomes exterior. Beings are clothed in forms that define their existence, limiting it.

Formless Reality is immutable, timeless, perfect: it is the eternal present. “This sign I give you that my mind sees far, beyond what is clear”15: Prometheus, on the other hand, knows the past, as he himself narrates, and the future (Προμηθεύς = Prometheús), the fleeting and illusory world, which is his realm.

As Aeschylus also says, man has been instructed by Prometheus on all that will help him to observe, discover, invent: science is born. Man acts, produces because action is inherent to individual beings. He transforms the world in function of himself.

Through science and art, man acquires the increasingly proven affirmation of his own individuality, the illusion of power, he is the Demiurge of himself: it is the predominance of the ego at the expense of the Self.

Prometheus symbolizes analytical, relative, and limited science. Is he truly a benefactor, as he claims to be?

You, the first of the wise, you, the bitterest of bitter hearts, you who have sinned against the Gods by giving ephemeral men the stolen fire […],16

Hermes tells him. From an exterior point of view, certainly: he is generous, altruistic, he nurtures a great love for the human race from which he has given origin, shaping it. He is the first of the wise, possessing the knowledge he has transmitted to men.

From a higher perspective, beyond appearances, Prometheus-Demiurge is the Prince of this world spoken of in the Gospels; the bitterest of bitter hearts, the sinner, because, by cunning and dishonesty, he has brutally shattered the perfect order, outrageously offending with his shameless work Zeus hyperuranios, ὑπερουράνιος (hyperuranios), he who reigns beyond the heavens, beyond manifestation as a beautiful Orphic hymn clearly states17:

Zeus was born first, and last, Zeus from the splendid lightning;
Zeus is the beginning, Zeus the middle: everything is made by Zeus;
Zeus is the support of the earth and the starry sky;
Zeus was born male, Zeus divine was a maiden;
Zeus is the vital breath of all things, Zeus is the vigor of the unceasing fire.
Zeus is the root of the sea, Zeus is the sun and the moon;
Zeus is the king, Zeus from the splendid lightning is the guide of all things;
hiding all things, he then led them to joyful light from the sacred heart, accomplishing great deeds.

Epimetheus welcomed as his wife the maiden shaped by Hephaestus at the command of Zeus, the woman, Pandora, “because all the inhabitants of Olympus gave this gift, a calamity for men”18. In some now-lost tales, Pandora was a creation of Prometheus or Epimetheus. In this version of the myth, preserved only in vase representations, Pandora emerges from the earth, sometimes only with her head; the earth, however, had been worked on by Epimetheus, who still holds the tool used, while the creature emerges from the earth before him. Eros flutters above her head with the ribbon that alludes to marriage. Hermes arrives with a flower, sent by Zeus, the hidden craftsman of all this19.

Epimetheus did not think of what Prometheus, the foreseeing one, had advised him, not to accept gifts from the Olympian, but to send them back, so that no misfortune would befall the mortals he protected.

At first indeed the races of men lived on earth free from evils, and free from heavy labor, and from bothersome diseases, which bring death to men. But the woman, removing with her hand the great lid of the jar, caused them to scatter, thus pouring painful troubles upon men. Alone, inside, in that unbreakable dwelling, under the rim of the jar, Hope remained, and could not fly out, since she [Pandora] managed to put the lid back on the jar first, at the will of the cloud-gathering Zeus.20

This text discusses a fall of humankind, of Adam before the creation of Eve, of a world prior to the male-female distinction. “[…]men of a time were born generated from the earth and did not reproduce from one another”21. Another yuga, age of gold, perhaps.

When Pandora opened the lid of the jar, all the evils that afflict humanity came out, and with diseases, death also entered the world22. Thus, the distinction between mortal men and immortal Gods was complete. The lesser-known version of the myth related to Epimetheus, now mentioned, emphasizes the negative role of the character who, by shaping Pandora, will mark the difficult life of mortals during the age of iron, but above all, it will be through him that work, diseases, and thus death, will forever torment humanity.

Epimetheus has brought death into our world; he is its cause and can be identified with it.

Prometheus is neither good nor evil; rather, he encompasses both aspects. The absolutely negative aspect is represented by Epimetheus, the one who thinks after23, without any sense, the brother paredro, the one who causes trouble. Prometheus is the first sacrificer, thus the sacrifice itself24.

We shadow in him Manu, the model sacrificer, the first man of Vedic India who offered an oblation to the Gods, considered the progenitor of a new human race like Adam of Genesis. In Epimetheus, however, as in a mirror, we glimpse Yama, the God of death and, from a biblical perspective, the tempting serpent, the architect of Adamic ruin.

By order of Zeus, the only one to remain segregated in the jar was hope, ἐλπίς (elpis). It was not to come out; it was not to be granted to men whom, through Pandora, the Omnipotent wanted to weaken and make suffer, out of revenge. Therefore, for the human being of the age of iron, there is no hope, clearly referring to his state of distancing from primordial bliss and the difficulty of coming into contact with the divine, increasingly indirectly, through arduous sacrifice and through an intermediary. A privileged path, but not for all, will be in the Greek world the great and small mysteries.

The kingdom of the Demiurge is the lower world, opposed to the Upper World or principal universe, from which it appears separated.

According to what has been said, we can consider Prometheus-Demiurge as a dark reflection of the undivided Unity. Precisely by virtue of this opposition, he is multiplicity, he is the ensemble of beings as distinct, since they have an individual existence. We are distinct to the extent that we ourselves create the distinction.

Thus, Prometheus has given humanity a κακόν δῶρον, an evil gift, and since he knows the future with all that will happen, this gift offered to mortals is truly diabolical.

At this point, it is appropriate to make some considerations. The most well-known version of the myth narrates that Prometheus was condemned by Zeus to be chained to a rock in the tightest of shackles, standing, without the possibility of any movement. The landscape, evoked in the Aeschylean tragedy, is that of remote Scythia “the farthest corner of the earth, solitary Scythia, inaccessible”25. Between sky and sea rises the rocky cliff designated for the punishment. Around him howl the winds, the heat of the blazing sun, the biting cold of long nights: no mortal has traversed those lands nor will they. Everything is silence and space. The cliff indicates fixity and Prometheus is immobile with it. There is here an allusion to an axis, to the centrality of the protagonist who, through this immense vertical, is connected to what lies beyond the sensible, beyond the formal of which he is the artificer. Supporting this hypothesis are the words of Hesiod: “And He then bound Prometheus, the crafty one, with indissoluble bonds, in hard chains, suspending him in the middle of a column” (μέσον διὰ κίον)26. But there is more. Aeschylus, at the beginning of the only tragedy that has survived from the trilogy on Prometheus, has Violence say, urging Hephaestus mercilessly to carry out the task assigned to him by Zeus: “‘And now, come on, drive the steel wedge into his chest from side to side, so that it pierces his flesh without mercy!’”27.

Károly Kerényi, without further specification, refers to an ancient vase painting that shows Prometheus with a column in the middle of his body, attacked by an eagle.

Prometheus-Demiurge is fixed at the central point through which the cosmic vertical axis passes: the column, the wedge, planted in the chest, and also the rock, overhanging the abyss, demonstrate this.

Also Er, in Book X of Plato’s Republic, describing what he had seen in the afterlife, speaks of “a straight light like a column, very similar to a rainbow, but more intense and purer. […] It was this light that held the sky captive…”28. In the hindū environment, Rudra-Śiva, with the name Sthānu, (from the root sthā, to stand, to rise) is an immobile pillar that rises in the universe29.

Hyginus in De Astronomia30 transmits that the tragedy of Aeschylus Prometheus Bound, which has been lost, ended with the announcement that the Titan had remained chained for thirty thousand years. In Prometheus Bound, liberation is prophesied for the thirteenth generation31. These are very long times, yet determined. One can discern a reference to the precession of the equinoxes traditionally calculated at 26,000 years.

Empedocles calculates the duration of a cycle as three times ten thousand years, exactly the same period that Prometheus must spend “bound like a column” (axis mundi) to atone for his crime, as the Scholiast (Schol., 4) says in Aeschylus’ Prometheus32.

As already mentioned, Plato in the Statesman asserts that during the reign of Cronos “[…] the men of old were born generated from the earth and did not reproduce from one another” and that many other changes depend on a single event that is its cause.

Sometimes it is God himself who accompanies with his guidance the path of our universe, rotating together with it; sometimes, however, he leaves it free, when the rotations have now reached the measure of time that belongs to it, then it begins to rotate autonomously in the opposite direction, because it is a living being and has received intelligence from the one who conceived it from the beginning. This going in the opposite direction is necessarily congenital to it.33

To always maintain the same state and the same condition and to always be identical belongs only to the most divine objects of all, but the nature of the body is not at this level. […] Hence comes the impossibility of being absolutely free from change.34

Plato tells us that when the times are ripe, the Demiurge lets go, so to speak, of the helm, no longer guiding the cosmos in its circular motion, but rather allowing the sense of rotation to change.

The movement of the universe now proceeds in one direction, now in the opposite direction.

One must consider that this change is, among all the upheavals that occur in the sky, the most important and complete upheaval.35

Thus necessarily at that moment the greatest destructions of other animals occur, and in particular the race of men survives in small numbers.36

The Platonic narrative continues by alluding to a very important fact: when Atreus and his brother Thyestes quarreled fiercely over who should sit on the throne of Mycenae, Zeus, to testify in favor of Atreus, made the sun set in the east and rise in the west37. There is here a certain testimony of the inversion of the poles, a dramatic end of an era with the triumph of death.

There have been many and various catastrophes for humanity, and many more will come, the greatest due to fire and water, others less severe caused by countless other reasons.38

Prometheus also predicts the end of the established time when he speaks of Typhon, born from the union of Gaia, the Earth, with Tartarus. The name Typhon, Τυφωεύς (Typhoeus) from the verb τύφω (typho), means: I send smoke, vapor, I burn, I set on fire.

Terrible is Hesiod’s description:

His hands are made to perform every task with strength, and the feet of the vigorous God are tireless; from his shoulders sprouted a hundred heads of serpents, of a terrible dragon, that vibrated dark tongues; beneath the eyelashes of his eyes, in his prodigious heads, shone a glow of fire, and from all his heads flickered a flame when he fixed his gaze. Voices rose from all those horrible heads, emitting every kind of horrid sound, which sometimes sent sounds to the Gods, comprehensible; at other times, however, sounds of a bull’s high bellowing, proud of its strength, untamed in its fury….39

Under the blows of the Omnipotent, after a long struggle, the terrifying monster was ruined, flogged and mutilated.

In Aeschylus, to Oceanus, who hopes to convince him to adopt an attitude of humility, Prometheus says of Typhon, after he has been defeated by Zeus:

Hit squarely in the chest, he has been reduced to ashes: his strength dissolved in a roar of thunder. And now he is there, lying long, an inert body, near the strait of the sea, crushed by the base of Etna…40

Here now is the most interesting part that indicates the future awakening of Typhon who will destroy the world:

But from there one day a river of fire will emerge, which, with wild fury, will devour the fertile fields of Sicily. Thus, even though the lightning of Zeus has carbonized him, Typhon will unleash his rage: a hail of fire, an incandescent storm that will consume everything.41

The end of the iron age, our age, is foretold, which will close amidst lightning, flames, and telluric roars.

The dragon Typhon was born after the defeat of the Titans, as the last son of Gaia and Tartarus, and from him comes

[…] the power of the winds of the humid breath […] some, then, plunging onto the expanses of the ocean, a great calamity for mortals, rage with a deadly storm. Others blow in other places, smoke for sailors: there is no defense against the malady, for those men who encounter such winds at sea. Others still, in turn, on the limitless land covered with flowers destroy the works of men born from the earth, filling them with dust and horrendous noise.42

Perhaps Prometheus will remain chained to the column until the times are ripe and, as he had already acted for the good of humanity, as Demiurge, he will return to do so according to the ways that, the ἀνάγκη (anankē), Fate, will have decreed.

The reference to the duration of the sentence, the fact that the guilty one is firmly bound to the rock-column, entwined to the axis mundi, suggests a different perspective from which to view this protagonist of the manifested: the cosmological point of view.

Prometheus symbolizes the axis, the central point of the structure of an age of the world. With his titanic body, he weighs down the axis itself, inclining it: this is the angle that marks the separation between the celestial equator and the ecliptic. Thus, time originates, allowing a new sky, a new earth, and a new humanity to assert themselves. As previously mentioned, Plato states that “time is the moving image of eternity” and that, in itself, it is not a confused and random movement, but rather “proceeds according to number,” that is, according to a regular and harmonious rhythm.

Indeed, the days and nights and months and years, which did not exist before the sky was generated, at that moment he [the Demiurge] made them arise, at the very moment he constructed the sky; and all these are parts of time, and the “era” and the “will be” are forms of time that have had birth and that we erroneously attribute, without realizing it, to the eternal being.43

Only the present is suitable for what is eternal. Time is mobile and flows like a river; indeed, it is Ocean, the origin of gods and mortals, according to the movement initiated by the cosmic axis which, very slowly, moves, distancing the two greatest circles from each other. This results in a spiral movement that draws a figure of an hourglass, or the precession of the equinoxes44. This sinuous progression of time brings it closer to the figure, recurring in many traditions, of the serpent. In this regard, one cannot omit a reference to Aion, Αἰών, revered as the lord of light, personification of perfect time, the illud tempus of beginnings, represented as a splendid youth, around whose body a serpent winds, symbolizing the succession of ages. Heraclitus presents him as “a child playing, moving the pieces on the chessboard45”.

Aion is the child who is born every day with the rising of the sun: he marks the days, the months, and the year. And, like the sun, which inexorably determines the passage of time, in antiquity he was also represented as an old man, the lord of completed age: Αἰών τῶν Αἰώνων (Aion of the Aions)46.

Prometheus is tortured by an eagle, an hypostasis of Zeus, which devours his liver for an extremely long and indefinite time. The eagle, like Garuḍa, both solar symbols, attacks and kills the serpents: Prometheus is the serpent. Just as Vāsukī was used in the primordial churning of the ocean of milk, so, but at a lower level, Prometheus initiated a world, an era, the kaliyuga. In support of this, it should be noted that Medea, hopelessly in love with Jason, to help him conquer the golden fleece, provides him with the magical liquid derived from a plant sprouted from the drops of Prometheus’s liver blood. She breaks the plant, which seems like living flesh, and, at that moment, Prometheus suffers unspeakably. Prometheus, like the serpents, secretes poison; the God Śiva drinks the poison raised by Vāsukī to save the world.

Prometheus, as a serpent, symbolizes the time to which he, through his actions, has imprinted the characteristics established by ἀνάγκη (anankē) for the last age:

… sometimes the same God directs this universe on its path, and in its own turning sometimes leaves it free when the periods of time assigned to it have covered their measure.47

In the tragedy of Aeschylus, which we have long examined, other important characters appear: Oceanus, the Oceanids, his daughters, and the unfortunate Io.

Prometheus addresses Oceanus, who has come to offer his advice to the prisoner:

“Have you left the current that bears your name and the natural caves of stone to come to this motherland of iron?”.48

The Earth first generated the Sky equal to itself, so that it covered her in every part, to make it the secure eternal dwelling of the blessed Gods, […] also generated the sparkling sea, boiling with waves, the Sea, without the help of tender love. Then afterwards, united with the Sky, she generated Oceanus from the deep whirlpools […].49

Thus speaks Hera:

“I go to see the boundaries of the fertile land, Oceanus, the source of the gods, and mother Tethys”50 and thus Sleep: […] I would put to sleep without pain, even the currents of the river Oceanus, which was the origin for all the gods”.51

Oceanus had an inexhaustible creative power, but he was not an ordinary river god, because when everything had already originated from him, he continued to flow at the farthest edges of the earth, flowing back into himself, in an uninterrupted circle, and the rivers, the streams, and the sea itself continued to spring forth from his vast course. “To all the gods he was the origin”: he is the celestial equator that limits everything, but upon which the constellations shine, cold and mute, that is, the divinities.

Hesiod narrates that the Oceanids, his daughters, were three thousand: they, with their slender ankles, are scattered everywhere, equally watching over the land and the depths of the sea. With a light hiss, they arrive, flying, on their chariot from Prometheus chained by his own daring, from ὕβριϛ (hubris): they are the countless stars.

Io is the unfortunate creature transformed into a cow by the jealousy of Hera and, as if that were not enough, condemned to be tormented by an unstoppable gadfly. Fleeing desperately and mad with pain, she reaches the cliff of Prometheus, who predicts her future wandering, until the liberation that will occur in Egypt.

We will see how these characters are closely united to one another by important characteristics52.

Traditionally, bovine horns are a symbol of the lunar crescent. In Iranian planetary theology, in Mithraic representations of the bull, always white in color, it bears engraved on its back a crescent moon or travels on a boat shaped like a lunar crescent. Even the funerary paintings in ancient Egypt represent the boat that carries the soul of the deceased in the shape of a lunar crescent.

In Hebrew, the association Moon-Bull is expressed by the letter aleph. The association Aphrodite-Moon-Bull appears in Isis53: she is the moon, the feminine part of nature.

The bull is therefore a lunar animal, it is the moon itself, and its horns are symbols of the lunar crescent. However, the bull is a bipolar symbol, in fact, it also has a solar aspect, emblem of life and death.

Io, considered in light of such observations, is the moon. The horns, lunar crescent, attest to this; her incessant wandering symbolizes the lunar phases.

It should also be remembered that the moon is closely linked to the humid, watery element: the tides, fertility. Not by chance, Iō is the daughter of the river god Inachus.

Oceanus, the Oceanids, and Iō share the watery element, belonging to the same realm: the upper waters symbolized by the celestial vault.

In the uncontaminated, profound sidereal silence, as deep as a sea, “the dances of these stars”54, χορείας δὲ τούτων (choreias de touton), mark millennia and eras, regulate the life of the world and, when the perfect time is fulfilled, purify it by destroying the degenerate lineages. Thus did Zeus, who, indignant because Lycaon had served him a dish of human flesh, that of his own son, to restore order and justice, overturned a table that caused the flood of Deucalion and Pyrrha. The table is the terrestrial plane passing through the ecliptic. Once again, it is evident that “of necessity in that moment the greatest destructions of other animals occur and in particular the race of men survives in scant quantity.”55

After these observations, one might venture the hypothesis that the Aeschylean tragedy was not simply a dramatic and engaging narration of the myth of Prometheus, but a true teaching that the Greek audience of the 5th century B.C. was still able to grasp. From the verses emerges a cosmological picture rich in implications, thanks to which the spectator could reflect on the origin of times, on the nature of divine and human lineages, and on the inescapable end: it was catharsis.

We can conclude by stating that Prometheus gave humanity of the Iron Age a κακόν δῶρον (kakon doron), a malignant gift, but with it, for those who wish, the possibility to “open their eyes” and, finally, to see.

  1. The ether is present throughout space, but particularly in those hollow places, commonly considered empty (Filippi, cit., p. 19).[↩]
  2. They were subjected to karma without being able to change it as happens in the prenatal state, the piṇḍa, or in the post mortem (cf. Filippi, The Mystery of Death, cit., p. 30).[↩]
  3. Aeschylus, cit. 442–461.[↩]
  4. Cf. Filippi, cit., p. 32.[↩]
  5. Plato, Phaedo, 176-177.[↩]
  6. Man lives in the cosmic cave like a turtle, between the celestial shell and the earthly one.[↩]
  7. Filippi, cit., p. 19.[↩]
  8. Aeschylus, cit. 484-499.[↩]
  9. St. Augustine, On the City of God, 4.11; 7.3.[↩]
  10. Aeschylus, cit. 505 – 506.[↩]
  11. Plato, Timaeus, 37 d.[↩]
  12. Cf. A. Camerotto, cit.[↩]
  13. Aeschylus, 447–448.[↩]
  14. Hesiod, Works and Days, 108.[↩]
  15. Aeschylus, 842–843.[↩]
  16. Aeschylus, 944 – 946.[↩]
  17. Orphic Fragments, XXII.[↩]
  18. Hesiod, Works and Days, 80.[↩]
  19. Cf. K. Kerenyj, cit., p. 183.[↩]
  20. Hesiod, Works and Days, 90 et seq.[↩]
  21. Plato, Statesman, 269 b. Cf. Paolo Accattino (ed.), Plato, Statesman, Bari, Laterza, 2010[↩]
  22. “I will multiply your sorrows, and your pregnancies: you will give birth with pain to children, and you will be under the power of your husband, and he will dominate you…” and to Adam he said: “Cursed is the ground for what you have done; from it you will draw food with great toil for all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the grass of the field. You will eat bread with the sweat of your face, until you return to the ground…”. Genesis, III, 16-19.[↩]
  23. Hesiod, Theogony, 507.[↩]
  24. “Prajāpati offered himself to the Gods. The sacrifice was for them, for the sacrifice is the food of the Gods. After having offered himself to the Gods, he emitted an image of himself, which is the sacrifice; through the sacrifice he redeemed himself before the Gods.” ŚB, XI.1,8,2-4.[↩]
  25. Aeschylus, 1–2.[↩]
  26. Hesiod, Theogony, 521–522.[↩]
  27. Ibid. 64–65.[↩]
  28. Plato, Republic, X, XIV, 616 b, c. Cf. Franco Sartori, Mario Vegetti, Bruno Centrone (eds.), Plato, Republic, Bari, Laterza, 2011.[↩]
  29. Cf. Stella Kramrish, The Presence of Shiva, Milan, Adelphi, 1999, p. 133.[↩]
  30. Hyginus, On Astronomy, 2.15.[↩]
  31. Aeschylus, 774.[↩]
  32. Nuccio D’Anna, The Cosmic Game, Rome, Mediterranee, 2006, p. 114.[↩]
  33. Plato, Statesman, 269 d.[↩]
  34. Ibid. 269 d-e.[↩]
  35. Ibid. 270 c.[↩]
  36. Ibid. 270 d.[↩]
  37. Ibid. 269 a.[↩]
  38. Plato, Timaeus, 22.b.[↩]
  39. Hesiod, Theogony, 820-835.[↩]
  40. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 361-372.[↩]
  41. Ibid.[↩]
  42. Hesiod, 869-880.[↩]
  43. Plato, Timaeus, 37 d-e.[↩]
  44. The hourglass drawn by the precession of the equinoxes recalls the χ of Plato which, originating the circle of the ecliptic and the equatorial plane, inclined to one another, generate time. Cf. Plato, Timaeus, 36. B-c.[↩]
  45. Heraclitus, 123.[↩]
  46. Cf. D’Anna, cit., p. 152.[↩]
  47. Plato, Statesman, 269. C9.[↩]
  48. Aeschylus, 299-302.[↩]
  49. Hesiod, Theogony, 126-133.[↩]
  50. Homer, Iliad, XIV. 200-201.[↩]
  51. Ibid., 245-246.[↩]
  52. As will be said, the commentary of Laura Simonini on The Cave of Nymphs by Porphyry, Milan, Adelphi, 2006, has been followed.[↩]
  53. Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, 359 b, 368 c.[↩]
  54. Plato, Timaeus, 40 c.[↩]
  55. Plato, Statesman, 270 d.[↩]