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| ==Primary Gods and Legends== | | ==Primary Gods and Legends== |
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| ==Legend of Prometheus==
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| The Legend of Prometheus is often equated to the Story of Lucifer. As [H. P. Blavatsky] comments:
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| <blockquote> Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the divine fire so as to allow
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| men to proceed consciously on the path of spiritual evolution, thus transforming
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| the most perfect of animals on earth into a potential god, and making him free
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| to "take the kingdom of heaven by violence." Hence also, the curse pronounced by
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| Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah-Il-da-Baoth against his "rebellious
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| son," Satan.</blockquote>
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|
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| (Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Volume II, pg. 244)
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| <blockquote>The name of Prometheus, to those who
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| had nought to do with the physical body, yet everything with the purely
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| spiritual man...Each class of Creators endows man with what it has to give: the one builds
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| his external form; the other gives him its essence, which later on becomes the
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| Human Higher Self owing to the personal exertion of the individual; but they
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| could not make men as they were themselves -- perfect, because sinless; sinless,
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| because having only the first, pale shadowy outlines of attributes, and these
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| all perfect -- from the human standpoint -- white, pure and cold as the virgin
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| snow. Where there is no struggle, there is no meritThe first
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| humanity, therefore, was a pale copy of its progenitors; too material, even in
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| its ethereality, to be a hierarchy of gods; too spiritual and pure to be MEN,
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| endowed as it is with every negative (Nirguna) perfection. Perfection, to be
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| fully such, must be born out of imperfection, the incorruptible must grow out of
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| the corruptible, having the latter as its vehicle and basis and contrast.
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| Absolute light is absolute darkness, and vice versa.</blockquote>
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| (Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Volume II, pg. 95)
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| <blockquote>This drama of the struggle of Prometheus with the Olympic tyrant
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| and despot, sensual Zeus, one sees enacted daily within our actual mankind: the
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| lower passions chain the higher aspirations to the rock of matter, to generate
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| in many a case the vulture of sorrow, pain, and repentance. In every such case
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| one sees once more --
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| "A god . . . in fetters, anguish fraught;
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| The foe of Zeus, in hatred held by all. . . . "
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| A god, bereft even of that supreme consolation of Prometheus, who suffered
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| in self-sacrifice --
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| "For that to men he bare too fond a mind. . ."
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| as the divine Titan is moved by altruism, but the mortal man by Selfishness and
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| Egoism in every instance.</blockquote>
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|
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| (Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Volume II, pg. 422)
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| H. P. Blavatsky refers to Prometheus in her Theosophical Glossary as the following:
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| <blockquote>Prometheus (Gr.). The Greek logos; he, who by bringing on earth divine fire (intelligence and consciousness) endowed men with reason and mind. Prometheus is the Hellenic type of our Kumâras or Egos, those who, by incarnating in men, made of them latent gods instead of animals. The gods (or Elohim) were averse to men becoming “as one of us” (Genesis iii., 22), and knowing “good and evil”. Hence we see these gods in every religious legend punishing man for his desire to know. As the Greek myth has it, for stealing the fire he brought to men from Heaven, Prometheus was chained by the order of Zeus to a crag of the Caucasian Mountains.<ref> Blavatsky, Helen Petrovna. Theosophical Glossary (Los Angeles, CA: Theosophical Company, 1973), 263.</ref></blockquote>
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| ==H. P. Blavatsky and Myths== | | ==H. P. Blavatsky and Myths== |
