Prometheus Found

Preamble : The other week I was reminded of this blog's existence following a surprise visit from my niece which then led to me attempting to revive this thing with a new post (it's only been in stasis for 3 years after all..) and see if there's some life left in it. Technical difficulties prevented me from churning this post out sooner but aside from a few dead links here and there that I've fixed..I think.. everything looks fine with the blog itself so let's get started.

While wandering the net I came across a trailer for a documentary called We are Legion : The story of the hacktivists.


N.B. : The documentary is being screened at various film festivals but I have not yet found a general release date for it.

This all started snowballing for me with thoughts on Anonymous (more here) as well as the Occupy movement and their relation to mythology. In mythology it's a common theme for a hero to take up arms (and/or wits) and attempt to defeat a tyrant-king or a monster of some sort. However in the case of Anonymous and Occupy there is no singular hero, no modern Theseus or Heracles leading the way. In the case of Occupy it resonated more for me with a mob of angry villagers armed with torches and pitchforks, like the ones that take the fight to Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he created. Though of course in this case the 'fight' takes the form of civil disobediance and pitchforks have been replaced with protest signs.

I then decided to see what further connections could be found in looking at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I did not have to look hard at all as perhaps the most interesting link is the book's subtitle; "or the Modern Prometheus". In Greek mythology Prometheus (from pro = fore and metis = thought making Forethought/thinker) is a Titan, moreover he is a Trickster-figure. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind which really didn't sit well with Zeus who subsequently punished him severely for it. Oh, and yes the title for this entry is a very bad pun on 'Prometheus Bound'.

Although the Promethean link applies more in relation to Anonymous than it does to Occupy for with their use of 'tricks' Anonymous shows it's dissatisfaction with how companies and/or governments or even religious institutions conduct their business and seek to change this by throwing a monkey wrench into the proverbial works.

While Prometheus may not be the typical Trickster figure he certainly shares the characteristics. Another telltale sign of Prometheus' Trickster qualities still survives today in language, as in Promethean which means: of, relating to, or resembling Prometheus, his experiences, or his art; especially : daringly original or creative. These traits are always found with any Trickster, but not all Tricksters are created equal for they can be demigods or gods, anthropomorphic, spirits, shapeshifters etc.

Regardless of what form they take a Trickster's actions will (un)intentionally reshape matters in a local, cultural or global sphere and regularly will suffer repercussions for it themselves. Some are more dark or destructive like Loki, whether from the original Norse myths or a reimagined version in blockbuster movies like The Avengers or Thor (thunder deities are previously discussed here).

Much like Prometheus, Loki was bound to a rock and suffered recurring torment. In his case it was for scheming to get another god, Balder, killed.

In Native American mythology Trickster often takes the form of Raven, Hare or Coyote depending on the region and at times they play crucial roles in the creation of mankind or they might even be the creator of mankind. Hermes is an example from Greek mythology and highlights another facet of the Trickster, that of messenger between gods and men.
There is an African trickster deity called Eshu who loves to cause trouble, in one story he manages to get a whole town in a fight just by walking along a road one day. As Eshu is walking, farmers working the fields on either side of the road notice him and later that day they meet up in the village and talk to eachother about the stranger that came by. The people that worked on one side are sure he wore a red hat while the farmers that had worked on the other side are convinced he was wearing a black hat and it isn't long before they come to blows over the argument. Eshu ofcourse had orchestrated the whole thing simply by wearing a hat that was red on one side and black on the other.

So under a multitude of forms and guises we can discover the Trickster archetype, but the constant factor is that he is an agent of change, more often than not through the chaos that follows his exploits.
Speaking of guises.. Anonymous has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask made famous through the movie V for Vendetta adapted from Alan Moore's graphic novel of the same name. You can read an interview with David Lloyd, the artist for the graphic novel, about Anonymous here.

The Trickster archetype goes well beyond the sphere of mythology, Carl Jung ofcourse came up with the archetypes in their relation to psychology but Trickster naturally is found in many other places as well.
The court jester is a good example from history and he is still found in the company of Kings and Queens in just about any deck of playing cards as the Joker.

Perhaps the best known Joker of recent times


In staying true to the archetype the Joker is the wild card, the one card the normal rules do not apply to and thus is able to shake up any game by making an appearance.


NB: There is a whole lot more to be said about Tricksters but since I don't feel like spending several hours amassing sufficient information and shaping it into a somewhat coherent write-up it will have to wait for another time.


Post Scriptum:

Synchronicity (: an acausal connecting principle or an apparently meaningful coincidence in time of two or more similar or identical events that are causally unrelated) does get funny, I'd been typing away at the above posting for a while and had already jotted down some points in the draft that I still wanted to mention and what Trickster/Joker-related video I would end this post with, like Steve Miller - The Joker. As the article was taking me a while to finish I decided to watch the movie Dark Shadows by way of a break.



Within a few minutes of starting it the first sync comes along with the torchbearing mob coming for the monster, later on I see that one of the characters is played by Johnny Lee Miller who, if you're of the appropriate age or perhaps geekiness, you will remember from the movie Hackers, which makes sync #2 .
(Full movie available online here. Hackers looks extremely dated now but there's an odd sense of prescience hanging over it. The hackers being matched against big companies and targeted by law enforcement are still current despite the movies' age. If you have some time to spare watch the movie as it is arguably a classic in it's own right.)
Now back to Dark Shadows as later still, sync number three occurred when Johnny Depp starts singing the lyrics to Steve Miller's - The Joker and this then brings me, in far too many words, to the appropriate ending of this post.

Dawn of Man and Myth - Cult of the Bear - Part 2 of 2

Alright, bear with me (excuse the pun) because we’re making a rather quick leap from Middle Paleolithic Europe (+/- 300k to 40k years ago) to Late Paleolithic Asia(+/- 40k to 10k years ago).

Close to Beijing in China is the cave system of Zhoukoudian, alternatively spelled as Choukoutien. These caves, called the Dragon Bone caves (where have we heard that before?), have been excavated by archaeologists since 1921. The site was inhabited as long as 700.000 years ago as determined from the fossils found of Homo Erectus, the most famous of which was dubbed Peking Man. In the cave called the Upper Cave remains of Archaic Homo Sapiens, Early Modern Humans, have been found as well as a variety ornaments. Estimated age of these fossils has been set to around 30.000 years old. The combination of the fossils, their dates and location support the theory that Homo Sapiens in the area could have taken advantage of the land-bridge that connected Japan to the mainland of Korea some 15.000 years ago during the glacial period.

These people then started what is now known as the Jomon culture around 12.000 years ago. Eventually the Yayoi people coming from China displaced the Jomon culture. Modern Japanese are descended from both Yayoi and Jomon but the ancestry of the Ainu is still being researched and debated. These Ainu, that have lived in Japan and also in Sakhalin, that’s now part of Russia for thousands of years are the focus of this second instalment. The Ainu do not look like the average Japanese or Asian person. In fact they may not belong to the Mongoloid race at all. For a long time the Ainu have been a marginalised culture and officially they were not even recognized by the Japanese government as an indigenous people until 2008.



When genetic testing was performed on them it was discovered that they belonged to Y-haplogroup D.

It is found today at high frequency among populations in Tibet, the Japanese archipelago, and the Andaman Islands, though curiously not in India. The Ainu of Japan and the Jarawa and Onge of the Andaman Islands are notable for possessing almost exclusively Haplogroup D chromosomes, although Haplogroup C chromosomes also occur among the Ainu at a frequency of approximately 10%, similar to the Japanese.

Not wanting to turns this into a paper on genetics I’ll not delve further into that specific side of things here, but it should illustrate that Ainu are rather unique and present a problem in determining their ancestry that has not yet been settled. There is a fair amount of information to be found on it however, if you feel like untangling the DNA strands.

Most of the pictures here of the Ainu are taken between 1880 to 1930. In the time when westerners came upon them while travelling around Japan and became intrigued by tales of strange, extremely hairy folk living on the island of Hokkaido in Japan. They don't however have inordinate hair growth, the males simply stop shaving after a certain age. Rumours and superstition probably took care of the rest. The Ainu had been living in a manner that had gone virtually unchanged for millennia. Aside from perhaps the addition of trading and some domestication of animals and metal tools their mode of life was like that of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer people. But what has also carried over from those times to the present is their mythology, and the central character of that is the bear.

“Particularly instructive and well reported is the instance of bear cult of the Ainu of Japan, a Caucasoid race that entered and settled Japan centuries earlier than the Mongoloid Japanese, and are confined today to the northern islands, Hokkaido and Sakhalin--the latter now, of course, in Russian hands. These curious people have the sensible idea that this world is more attractive than the next, and that godly beings residing in that other, consequently, are inclined to come pay us visits. They arrive in the shapes of animals, but, once they have donned their animal uniforms, are unable to remove them. They therefore cannot return home without human help. And so the Ainu do help--by killing them, removing and eating the uniforms, and ceremonially bidding the release visitors bon voyage.”

Joseph Campbell, Myths to live by – p.33

A great many rituals are, or were originally, intended to appease the gods or at least waylay their wrath or vengeance. The Ainu beliefs have some similarities with the Shinto (Way of the Gods) religion of Japan. ‘Ainu’ means human, as opposed to ‘kamui’ (compare to Shintos kami) which means spirit. Everything that is not 'ainu' is thus 'kamui', so there are kamui of nature, animals, plants and objects. In the Shinto religion reverence for life and paying proper respect to all things spiritual is of great importance. The same we find here in the Ainu with this wonderfully complex yet basic ritual. What this ritual and its accompanying belief allow for is that they are no longer just killing sacred life and damning themselves in the process of survival. Instead they are performing a service of reciprocal nature to the animal. What was at some stage guilt or fear of retribution is transformed into a life-affirming ceremony where the victim is now the sacrifice as well as the deity, he is both dinner and the guest of honor.

Now while I wish I came up with that all on my own, I took a page from the book of Joseph Campbell, literally. So here is him filling you in on the rest of it.

“We have a number of detailed accounts of the ceremonials, and even now one may have the good fortune to witness such an occasion. The bears are taken when still cubs and are raised as pets of the captor's family, affectionately nursed by the womenfolk and allowed to tumble about with the youngsters. When they have become older and a little too rough, however, they are kept confined in a cage, and when the little guest is about four years old, the time arrives for him to be sent home. The head of the household in which he has been living will prepare him for the occasion by advising him that although he may find the festivities a bit harsh, they are unavoidably so and kindly intended. "Little divinity," the caged little fellow will be told in a public speech, "we are about to send you home, and in case you have never experience one of these ceremonies before, you must know that it has to be this way. We want you to go home and tell your parents how well you have been treated here on earth. And if you have enjoyed your life among us and would like to do us the honor of coming to visit again, we in turn shall do you the honor of arranging for another bear ceremony of this kind." The little fellow is quickly and skillfully dispatched. His hide is removed with head and paws attached and arranged upon a rack to look alive. A banquet is then prepared, of which the main dish is a chunky stew of his own meat, a lavish bowl of which is placed beneath his snout for his own last supper on earth; after which, with a number of farewell presents to take along, he is supposed to go happily home.

Now a leading theme, to which I would call attention here, is that of the invitation to the bear to return to earth. This implies that in the Ainu view there is no such thing as death. And we find the same thought expressed in the final instructions delivered to the departed in the Ainu rites of burial. The dead are not to come back as haunts or possessing spirits, but only by the proper natural course, as babies. Moreover, since death alone would be no punishment for an Ainu, their extreme sentence for serious crimes is death by torture.
A second essential idea is that of the bear as a divine visitor whose animal body has to be "broken" (as they say) to release him for return to his other-worldly home. Many edible plants, as well as hunted beasts, are believed to be visitors of this kind; so that the Ainu, killing and eating them, are doing them no harm, but actually a favor. There is here an obvious psychological defense against the guilt feelings and fears of revenge of a primitive hunting and fishing folk whose whole existence hangs upon acts of continual merciless killing. The murdered beasts and consumed plants are thought of as willing victims; so that gratitude, not malice, must be the response of their liberated spirits to the "breaking and eating" of their merely provisional material bodies.”

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By p.33-34


Some other important facts to mention are that the Ainu consider the bear to be a mountain god which has led some to argue that this may have been why the cave bear skulls are found high in the mountains as well. Furthermore the Ainu preserve all the skulls of the sacrificed bears, so too we have seen in the caves of Europe, but here they are put up for display on poles. Also during the bear feast the goddess of Fire, Fuji, is invited to join the celebrations and in the Neanderthal caves as well as those of Zhoukoudian, fire hearths been found.



There is one final interesting connection with the Ainu and bears. The Ainu brought a breed of dog with them which is known the Ainu-ken but the Japanese call it Hokkaido-Ken. This dog has been with the Ainu since their arrival in Japan and is important enough to them to receive the same burial a human gets.

You would not say it by looking at it but this dog has the ability to take down brown bears, it manages to do this by climbing on the bear’s back and then biting down into its neck until it leaves or possibly dies. It also helps the Ainu with catching salmon.

To summarise: between the Neanderthals and CroMagnons of Europe and the Ainu of Japan I think there is a fair amount of material available to support the notion that mythology and mankind developed side by side from the beginning. There exists of course a great variety of ancient mythologies, but few (that I can think of) that date as far back as that of the cult of the bear.

Thunder on the mountain

As one of the impressive natural phenomena thunder and lightning have been ascribed to the domain of many different deities by many cultures since time immemorial. But just where do all these different gods come from and are they really all that different?

Everyone will be familiar with the image of Zeus hurling thunderbolts at mortals and deities alike for overstepping their boundaries or meddling in divine affairs. But while Zeus may be the most well known he is but one such example and far from the oldest. Usually the deity of a specific pantheon that has control over thunder and wields the lightning bolt as a weapon is also the head of that pantheon; Zeus as ruler of Olympus being case in point, although he did have to overthrow the Titans first but that is where the thunderbolt came in handy. They are also invariably male deities. While for instance solar deities can be male or female in various cultures, the thunder deity is always a god and never a goddess.


The Greek Zeus was the same as the Roman Jupiter, also head of the pantheon, and this applies to the Etruscan Tinia as well, both a result of syncretism. Syncretism in mythology is a form of assimilation, occuring when different cultures adapt one anothers' deities or and equate them to their own.
Zeus likely originated in the Hurrian deity Teshub. The Hurrians in turn probably borrowed him from Hattians who called him Taru and the Hittites used the name Tarhun. The Hurrian, Hattian and Hittite peoples inhabited northern Mesopotamia, (present day Anatolia , Turkey). Teshub’s origin myth is closely resembled by that of Zeus. Teshub was often depicted with a triple thunderbolt and a mace or axe. And it is the axe that also stands in relation to various other thunder deities. Of particular interest here is the double-headed axe, which is also called a labrys. The African thunder deity Shango from the Yoruba religion is associated with a labrys. The Minoans of Crete in particular often made use of symbolic axes of this type. Though the word labrys is not Greek but possibly Lydian in origin. There is no surviving mythology from Lydia (also present-day Anatolia, Turkey) save for various characters of Lydian origin that appear in Greek mythology, such as Omphale who is given a labrys by Hercules, a son of Zeus.



To name some other examples: In Gaul and Britain there was Taranis, here too the name can be traced to Tarhun/Taru. But also Thor and his hammer (which is also called an axe at times) Mjöllnir, in Germanic/Nordic mythology. Thor, known also as Donar, from which are derived 'Donner' meaning thunder in German and the English word thunder itself. From India we have the god Indra* and in Japan there is Susanoo as the god of storms. It is not solely by the attributes that these deities are connected, many of their respective myths have close resemblances with their counterparts. Teshub/Tarhun fights and kills Illuyanka, a great serpent-dragon. Zeus at one points wages a hardfought battle against Typhon a Titan whose upperbody is that of a man and his lower halve that of a serpent. While Indra has to do battle with Vritra, another evil serpent deity and Thor clashes with Jörmungand the giant sea serpent. Even Susanoo fights and kills a serpent-dragon, Yamata no Orochi, the Eightforked Serpent.
In both Tarhuns and Zeus' battle they lose the first encounter. Zeus' sinews are cut and taken by Typhon into his mountain and Tarhun loses his eyes and heart. Also their lost bodyparts are retrieved by intermediaries, after the return of which they again face the serpents and finally defeat them. (The giant serpents are another ubiquitous mythological element which likely will be featured seperately here at another time.)





A further commonality lies in the meaning of Vritra, ‘the enveloper’ and Jörmungand is so large that he encircles Midgard with his body. If we look further into these stories some other related details appear. The number 3, and its multiples, being one such detail. For instance Indra has a three-headed elephant as a mount and Vritra himself has three heads. In one of the stories Vritra has 99 castles that Indra destroys while fighting the serpent to release the primordial waters that he had stolen.
Thor, when fighting Jormungand at Ragnarok, will kill the serpent but will be poisoned by the serpent and then die himself after having taken 9 steps. While Thor is not the head of the Nordic pantheon, the deity that most resembles him is. The god Perun from Slavic mythology is the chief god and wields thunder and lightning.
Perun rides a goat-drawn chariot and carries an axe or hammer that when thrown returns to his hand, all of which goes for Thor as well. Further their respective mythologies include the oak as being important to them and their ability to level mountains. Also like Thor/Donar the word ‘perun’ today still means thunder/lightning in the slavic languages. Both these deities are traced to have originated from Perkunas a Baltic thunder deity. Here too we find the goat-drawn chariot, the axe, the oak-tree and mountains connected to the deity. Similarly the name survives in common usage in Lithuania and Latvia as a word for thunder. Yet Perkunos is not the proverbial ‘pater familias’ of all these deities, for that we need to go even further back in time to the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE) date to the Bronze Age or the late Neolithic. This an area of history that is fairly foggy. The currently accepted ideas are mainly arrived at through a combination of comparative linguistics and archaeological data from the Indo-Europeans as well as tracing genetic groups and distribution. What does seem certain is that the PIE had a sky deity called Dyeus Phater, meaning Sky Father. It also becomes clear that Dyeus gets turned into Zeus by the Greeks and Dyeus Phater into Jupiter by the Romans. The concept of Sky Father is wide spread and occurs in many mythologies, the Egyptians being a notable exception. And while the term is of considerable antiquity it continues to find contempary use in the Vedic religion as Dyaus Pita.
Since we are now on the Eastern side, here are some more words on Indra.
Indra’s weapon is called a vajra in Sanskrit and dorje in Tibetan which means thunderbolt and diamond and is symbolic for spiritual power and indestructibility.
It’s name is also lend to the Diamond Cutter Sutra, a 9th century copy of the Sutra is the oldest known printed book in existence, which at the end reads:

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

There are other sky/thunder deities in just as many cultures and they all have different inflections where they occur but I think the above should be sufficient to illustrate the commonalities between them and their likely origin in Dyeus Phater.

Chaiten volcanic eruption May 2008 -click picture to enlarge