Reading H. D. Thoreau’s translation of Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”- which one day came into my bookstore - was what got this project started. I was struck by the resemblance between Aeschylus’/Thoreau’s Prometheus and the Sumerian Enki, or EA, as he is sometimes called. Maybe that’s not stated strongly enough. I recognized Prometheus from my research on Gilgamesh. Prometheus was Enki.
Have others recognized this? Research began. What can be known about Prometheus begins, of course, with the sources in Ancient Greece. But comparative mythology indicates sources behind/older than these… in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Levant, and elsewhere, including possibly Atlantis.
To move ahead with intelligence requires an understanding of the past. “Without history we are nothing,” is how Abdullah Ocalan puts it.
The creation of man, theft of fire from the gods, the gift of that fire to man, and further, the gift of hope… this is called the myth of prometheus.
What can be the value of mythic thinking for modern man?
This work takes seriously the reality of myth in general, and in particular, explores origins and implications of the myth of Prometheus until, finally, a fresh imagination is achieved.
Arriving at imagination is seldom a stated goal of scholarship, but gradually, it came to make sense to me. In the arts one doesn’t set out with the result in hand… the result is, rather, uncovered, recovered, and discovered, often to the artist’s (or historian’s) great surprise.
It became my goal to pursue a course of historical research which might further imagination. This book, representing a decade of spare time scholarship, is the result.