Everyone is familiar with the Ancient Grecian legend concerning Prometheus’s storming of Olympus in order to bring the gift of fire down from the Heavens. But the story is by no means endemic to the mythological world of the Ancient Greeks. Parallel stories can be found on every corner of the globe. The Zulu Shaman, Credo Mutwa relates an almost identical story in his book, Song of the Stars, in which a trickster hero ascends to the heavens to get fire to warm the people, following a global cold spell in which the sun could no longer be seen as a consequence of a row with his wife, The Earth.
While this particularly variation of the story may be attributable to an historical period in which we were starved of sunlight following a massive ancient cataclysm between the earth and Venus, as posited by Immanuel Velikovsky – the traditional explanation that ethnologists and anthropologists attribute to it as an explanatory story regarding the invention of fire is absurd, and insulting to its deeper symbolic meaning.
‘Storming the Heavens’ was an important pastime to the ancients. In the classic Chinese book Journey to the West, a mischievous monkey king breaks into the palace of Heaven to gain heavenly powers, and to eat from a peach tree that will give him immortal life (sound familiar?) but gets caught by the Bodhisattva Kuan Yin and trapped inside a mountain for an immeasurable span of time, in the same way that Prometheus is tied to a rock for the rest of eternity, and is punished for his intransigence by having his organs ripped out and renewed on a daily basis.
As entertaining as they are, these are both incredibly meaningful stories, super-abundant in esoteric meaning.
“Storming the Heavens” is a reference to the astral flights of both modern and ancient shamans, achieved by meditation, drug ingestion, or torturous shamanic rituals. The shaman is a mediatrix between the astral world and his earthly community. He ‘storms the heavens’ to attain knowledge from the Akashic records, or Library of Babel, which he can use to heal and enlighten his people.
The fire he ‘steals’ is not earthly fire – why would anyone travel to space to steal fire, when it is easy to generate on Earth? – But the fire of illumination and enlightenment that is the aspiration of every spiritual seeker, which he will use to bring light into a world benighted by ignorance.
The turning away of the sun is a reference to this original period of ignorance (the true meaning of ‘original sin’ which, regrettably, mainstream Christianity has taken to mean ‘terminal sin’) – but also alludes to the necessity in meditation to turn attention away from the external world, and to focus one’s inner light on the darkness within, to the find the palace of heaven inside.
The fact of Prometheus being punished was probably a later addition by storytellers who sought to stigmatize the story’s shamanic origins and message. But it is also illustrative of one of the main pitfalls and difficulties of spiritual practice: it is not enough just go to heaven within during meditation – unless we bring it back with us, and find away to incorporate what we have learned into our lives, and the lives of everyone, then we are still chained to the rock, having our organs pecked out by the vultures of time. We must make regular trips to heaven if we are to fully understand or make sense of its infinite realms.
Interestingly, the fact of Prometheus’s disembowelment also makes it a precursor to Alien Abduction Syndrome. As many other researchers have noted, when shamans ‘storm the heavens’ whether from consuming Ayahuasca or any other method, they commonly report being operated on by spiritual beings who disembowel them, and replace their innards with crystals. Recent ingestors of the substance, as well as its chemical compound, DMT, also report being operated on by aliens, and having some sort of surgery performed on them.
Truly, the legend of Prometheus is a shamanic story, as these findings show.
Steal the fire as often as you want.
The only person who will ever punish you is yourself.
A Poet's Life 