On Vulcan and the Fingers of Fire and Metallurgy

That Prometheus was Hephaestus was Vulcan was Agni.

You might recall that I wrote a series talking about “gender” as a concept in the pagan occult.

In particular, after I got done bashing the Christians and the womens, I honed in on the concept of a fiery, male, internal subtle energy force. The only reason why I wrote all those essays was to share with my Stalkers and include them in the epic intellectual quest that I had been on for many years. I was tracking down the elusive and missing male subtle energy principle in the pagan Greek world. I knew that it should be there, because the other surviving pagan traditions have this principle in some form or another.

Only the Ancient Greeks seem to be missing it so completely …

Then, I pointed out that in the traditions of the northern peoples of Skyrim, the power in question was referred to as Odr, and was related to Odin. I say “related”, but in reality, Odr was Odin and Odin was the embodiment of Odr in anthropomorphized deity form. That is an important concept to understand and it will come up again and again.

To that end, I then tried to find the deity that was embodied the Greek version of the male subtle energy principle, like the Menos, a form of spirit energy used by Achilles to take on the gods and their proxy forces in the battles for Troy. I speculated that it could have been a Chthonic, earlier version of Ares that had been displaced by the later Classical Greek emphasis on Zeus and Apollo.

My evidence for the thesis was based on several suppositions:

• that many of the High Gods had a chthonic, earlier or folkish form, even a “snake-Zeus”

• that Ares, being the god of war from an older version of paganism, would be a suitable candidate for the position of Menos principle primogenitor

• there were mentions of Ares in his chthonic form in the spells of the Greek Magical Papyri, in the Scholia (scribbled notes) and later occult revivalist traditions

Perhaps we will return to the concept of Chthonic Ares, but I admit that my speculation proved fruitless and yielded no results thus far. Ares is also ritually humiliated in the Iliad and eventually replaced in the same way that many of the older deities are.

With Ares, something totally impossible and extraordinary happens in the story.

Diomedes, a mortal, wounds Ares with a spear. A god being injured by a human? Unheard of and humiliating and impossible and also inherently illogical, even by the world-building rules of the pagan universe we are in. It is like believing that your god can be killed on a wooden cross by nails — it makes no sense and violates the definition of the concept of “god”. Anyway, Ares flees in pain and shame and the scene is almost a source of comic relief.

Zeus then rebukes him for being a crazed berserker and for his bad influence on warriors.

Classical Greek religion then marginalized and almost outlawed Ares, almost certainly because he was associated with martial, ecstatic frenzy and their entire religious reform effort was oriented around doing away with that sort of thing. Rome, in contrast, held Mars in great esteem and the Greeks in contempt for having sidelined their warrior deity in favor of Philosophical pedophile nonsense.

A chthonic Ares may be the missing Odin equivalent in Greek for primogenitor of the occult male energy principle.

But we will return to that vein of investigation later.

For now, I returned my attention to Prometheus and the subversion and obfuscation of his story by the Olympian cult and their rewriting of the primordial myths.

Let me explain my thought process and what I discovered.

The Missing Prometheus and the Humiliated Hephaestus

By the time we get to the narrative of the Iliad, we have a Prometheus that is conspicuously missing in action.

The very first Greek tragedy, which deals with the story of Prometheus, places him in shackles in the Caucasus, having his liver eaten by Zeus’ eagle. The liver is significant and worth its own essay. Put simply, it is the seat of animative vitality in Greek pagan thought. So, by having an eagle eat the livers of Prometheus and the giant Tityos, the two are kept permanently drained of their spiritual prowess and unable to escape their bonds. Another time in another essay though.

The story of this fire-god who created and then granted humanity divine power to challenge the Olympians begins with Prometheus Bound. He is then freed by the hero Herakles, who uses chthonic hydra snake venom to slay the god-eagle gaoler. At least, that is what we have been able to reconstruct of Prometheus Unbound. And what happens next, we simply don’t know, because the third book in the trilogy, Prometheus the Fire-Bearer is missing.

Thanks, Christians!

Now, Prometheus apparently spent his time in captivity fruitfully, and had used his gift of foresight to predict a future replacement of Zeus. Recall that Zeus was supposed to rape Thetis, who would then give birth to an Achilles that possessed Olympian powers. Achilles would have then surpassed and overthrown Zeus. Fearing this sequence of events, Zeus uses Hermes to torture Prometheus into somehow letting slip this foresight-derived prophecy/plan. Or, alternatively, he strikes a bargain with Prometheus … possibly. What we do know is that Zeus then refrains from raping Thetis. Achilles is then born to her, but without Olympian powers, only the chthonic powers of his sea serpent mother.

But we are skipping all over the place here in terms of sources.

Because what I just summarized cannot be found in just one place or source.

We are talking about Homer’s version of the Iliad (already almost certainly censored in parts by the Olympian cult), Aeschylus’ famous tragedy about Prometheus which is missing huge swathes that have been “inferred”, and then later Scholia (margin scribbles) and fragments from authors of even later centuries. If you were ever to inquire into how our reconstructions of pagan antiquity were done, how any of it got dated, well, you’d be left with sleepless nights wondering just the how the hell we know anything about the ancient world at all. The Christians were more barbarous and destructive than the Bolsheviks could have ever dreamed of being. There has never been a greater tragedy than the triumph of neo-Judaism over the ancient world and the destruction that followed.

But I digress.

Let us simply merge these sources into one coherent story as best we can and pick up where we left off in our examination of the Iliad. You will recall that I referred to Achilles as being no different from a northern berserker warrior, his myrmidons being his shield-brothers, who personally called on the power of chthonic daimons and wielded his own Odr/Menos to fight Zeus, Apollo, and their Trojan proxies.

A curious episode occurs before Achilles’ cousin Patroclus is struck down by the Mesopotamian plague-demon known as Apollo …

… and before Achilles unleashes his howl of phobos-inducing dread upon the Trojans and before he engages in a magical wizard duel with the river god, Scamander.

For someone who figures so importantly in setting the stage for events to come, Prometheus’ absence in the Iliad is puzzling. Perhaps he was a much later, foreign deity that came to Greece in the classical period as some scholars suggest. Or, most intriguingly, Prometheus is to be found in the Iliad, albeit in the form of Hephaestus. Because from the very beginning of the story of Achilles, we have Hephaestus in the margins, making plays and helping Achilles stay one step ahead of Zeus.

Traditionally, Hephaestus represents:

• Fire controlled under divine order

• Technology kept inside the cosmic elite

• Subordination to Zeus

In contrast, Prometheus represents:

• Fire stolen from under divine monopoly

• Knowledge freely given to mortals

• Defiance of Zeus

They are almost mirror images.

But the revisionist argument in comparative mythology is that Hephaestus was rewritten to be that way by the Olympian cult to undercut the Promethean version of the story. In the same way that, say, the rebel Bellerophon storming Olympus on the back of a winged horse was rewritten into the pliant servant Perseus, meekly giving Zeus the sacrifices that were his due.

Elements of their shared original story still shine through the doctored texts.

First of all, Hephaestus, like Prometheus (and Lucifer), incurs the wrath of Zeus, and is cast out of the heavens. He falls for nine days until he hits the Earth. In one version of the story, Thetis, the mother of Achilles and the sea-serpent daimoness, cushions his fall and then hides the injured Hephaesus under the sea in a cave, away from the search parties of Zeus. Hephaestus is lamed by the fall and limps from that point onwards, a characteristic that he shares with Vulcan as well.

DEPICTED: Hephaestus preparing to lead a proletarian revolution against the bourgeois Olympians.