Prometheus
Fire stolen for humankind, and its price.
What does the story of Prometheus say about forbidden knowledge?
Hidden history
Forbidden knowledge
The old stories of the one who reaches past the limit, from Prometheus to Frankenstein. They are told here as the history of a story, each with its source, and none of them is about you.
From Prometheus to Frankenstein
Ask the OracleWhat do the old stories of forbidden knowledge warn of, and what do they ask of me?
The art, in brief
Every age has told a story of someone who reaches past the limit. The Greeks told of Prometheus, who stole fire for humankind. Genesis tells of a tree whose fruit was not to be eaten. The sixteenth century told of Faust, the scholar who trades his soul in order to know, and in 1818 Mary Shelley gave the story its modern form in Frankenstein, the maker who abandons what he has made. The house tells them as the history of a story, each with its source.
They are worth reading together because the warning changes as it travels. It begins as a ban on taking, and ends as a duty to answer for what was taken. None of these stories is a law about what may be learned, and none of them is about the reader: the pact, the stolen fire and the bitten fruit are devices of the telling. What they leave behind is a question worth asking of any new power, who pays for it and who answers for it.
The teaching
As the lore of the limit and the reach from Hesiod and Genesis to Mary Shelley teaches it.
A limit, a reach and a price
Every story in this art has the same bones. There is a limit, set by a power above the one who meets it: Zeus, God, the order of nature. Behind the limit lies a knowledge or a power: fire and the crafts it makes possible, the knowing of good and evil, mastery over spirits, the making of life. Someone reaches for it, often helped by a go-between who stands on both sides of the line. The reach succeeds. And a price follows, which falls on the one who reached and very often on others.
To study the art is to learn to see those bones under very different flesh, and to notice what each telling does with them. The page of what they share sets the pattern out with all its tellings; each of the other branches teaches one story whole.
What lies behind the limit
The stories forbid different things, and a student begins by telling them apart. In the Greek telling what is kept back is fire, and with fire every art: in the play Prometheus Bound the Titan counts them over, numbers and letters, the risings of the stars, the taming of beasts, ships, medicine and the working of metals. In Genesis it is the knowledge of good and evil, which the text never defines. In the Faust book it is everything the schools could not teach, bought from a spirit. In Frankenstein it is the cause of life itself.
Scripture draws two more lines of its own. Deuteronomy gives the hidden things to God and the revealed things to us and to our children, a line between what is given to be known and what is not. And the Qur'an tells of a sorcery taught at Babylon by two angels, Harut and Marut, who warned everyone they taught that they were only a trial, and from whom people learned what harmed them and did not profit them. That is forbidden knowledge in its plainest sense: knowledge that does harm.
A care or a jealousy
The tellings differ most on why the limit is set, and that question is the heart of the art. In Hesiod the gods keep hidden from mortals the means of life, and Zeus withholds fire in anger after Prometheus has tricked him over the sacrifice: the limit belongs to a god guarding his own order, and the poet takes the god's side. In Genesis the command comes with a warning, that on the day of eating they shall die, and it is the serpent who says that God forbids out of envy, knowing that their eyes would be opened and they would be as gods. The Greek story lets the gods guard what is theirs; the Hebrew story puts the charge of jealousy in the serpent's mouth.
Later teachers moved the limit from the thing known to the one who knows it. The rabbis kept the teaching of creation and of the divine chariot for the few who were ready, as a care for the learner more than a ban. Paul warned that knowledge puffs up and love builds up. Victor Frankenstein, telling his tale, bids Walton learn from his example how dangerous the getting of knowledge is, and at the last, dying, cannot quite forbid another to succeed where he failed.
The go-between and the cost
The knowledge seldom crosses by itself. Prometheus is a god who loves mortals; the serpent a beast that speaks; the Watchers of the Book of Enoch angels who come down and teach metalwork, charms and the reading of the stars; Mephistopheles a spirit who serves for a term of years. The cost seldom stays with the one who reached. Pandora's jar falls on all humankind, the ground is cursed for Adam's sake, the Watchers' teaching fills the earth with violence, and Victor's creature kills those he loves. The Greeks called the overreaching hubris and the retribution that answers it nemesis, and the stories ask, every time, who pays.
And what is learned is never taken back. Humankind keeps the fire, and Zeus answers with a gift of his own, not with a recall. The eyes opened in Eden stay open, and the way to the tree of life is guarded instead. Victor cannot undo what he has made. Because the knowledge stays, the question these stories leave is best asked before the reach, where that is possible.
The other voice
The art would teach falsely if it heard only the warning, for the same books praise knowledge as highly as they fear its misuse. Aristotle opens his Metaphysics by saying that every human being by nature desires to know. The Book of Proverbs calls wisdom the principal thing and bids the reader get understanding with all their getting. The Qur'an teaches the Prophet to pray to be increased in knowledge, and Solomon, offered any gift he asked, asked for an understanding heart and was praised for it.
So the warning is never against knowing as such. It falls on the grasping, the pride, the secrecy and the harm that can go with a knowledge taken without wisdom, and the wisdom books draw the limit inward, to the fear of the Lord and the turning from evil. Francis Bacon read Eden the same way, as a fall by the proud knowledge of good and evil and not by the knowledge of nature, and the Enlightenment's motto, dare to know, carries the same freedom further. The page of what they share follows these voices through.
From the ban to the answer
Across the tellings the fault moves. In the oldest it lies in the taking itself. The Faust book damns its scholar less for the pact than for despair, the belief that he could not be forgiven, which kept him from asking. Goethe's Faust is saved at the last by his striving and by love. Mary Shelley places the wrong less in Victor's making than in his leaving: he gives life and will not answer for it. The modern form of the warning is not do not know, but answer for what you know.
The same teaching keeps the line from being a trap. In the stories themselves it can be crossed back: in the Qur'an Adam receives words from his Lord and is forgiven; Jewish teaching holds the way of return open to every person; the Faust book's own moral is that its scholar was lost because he would not ask. None of these stories is about the reader, and no one makes a pact or forfeits anything by reading, wishing or speaking carelessly.
How to read a telling
The art's practice is a way of reading. Take the oldest telling first, whole and slowly, in a translation with notes: Hesiod's two short accounts of Prometheus, the two chapters of Genesis, the Faust book before Marlowe and Goethe. Mark the limit, who sets it and the reason given; the reach and the go-between; the price, who pays it and what remains. Then set a later telling beside it and note where the tellers disagree, for the disagreement is where each age speaks. A story that is scripture is read next with its own tradition's commentary, since it is theirs first.
Last, put three questions to your own reach: what am I reaching for, and who says I may not; if I get it, who else pays; and what would it mean to answer for it afterwards? They suit a new skill, a new tool or a piece of news that cannot be unlearned, and they are the whole of what the art asks a reader to practise.
The branches and how they stand
Prometheus and the tree in Eden are the two roots, the Greek and the Hebrew, and are read first. Faust carries the story into the age of universities and print, with the pact at its centre. Frankenstein gives it its modern form, the maker who will not answer for what he made. What they share sets all four beside the Watchers, Icarus, Babel and the rabbis' orchard, and draws the common lesson.
Before you practise
These are stories, told with their sources. The Oracle will never tell you that you have made a pact, lost your soul or crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed. If that fear stays with you, speak with someone you trust in your own tradition.
Its branches
Each one is a question you can ask.
The tree in Eden
The telling most readers know first.
What does the story of the tree of knowledge in Eden say about forbidden knowledge?
Faust
The scholar who signs away his soul to know.
What is the story of Faust and his pact with the devil, and where does it come from?
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s maker who will not answer for what he made.
What does Frankenstein say about forbidden knowledge and responsibility?
What they share
Not “do not know”, but “answer for what you know”.
What do all the stories of forbidden knowledge have in common?
Its words
Each opens its page in the dictionary.
- Prometheus
- The Titan of Greek myth who stole fire from the gods for humankind and was chained to a rock for it. The Greeks took his name to mean forethought.
- Pandora
- The first woman in Hesiod's telling, sent as the price of the stolen fire. Her jar let loose the ills of life and kept hope inside.
- Hubris
- In Greek, insolent outrage that shames another; in modern use, the overreaching pride that ignores limits and goes before a fall.
- Tree of Knowledge
- The tree in the garden of Genesis 2 and 3 whose fruit the first pair were told not to eat. The text does not say what fruit it bore.
- Pact with the Devil
- The bargain of the Faust story: a soul promised in return for knowledge or power. It is a device of legend and literature.
- Mephistopheles
- The spirit who serves and tempts Faust. The name first appears in the Faust book of 1587, and its origin is unknown.
- Galvanism
- The moving of muscle by electric current, shown by Luigi Galvani in the 1780s: the science Mary Shelley names behind Frankenstein.
- Watchers
- The angels of the Book of Enoch who come down to earth and teach humankind crafts and secrets it was not meant to have.
More of its words 10
- Icarus
- The boy of Greek myth who flew on wings of wax and feathers, climbed too near the Sun and fell. His father had warned him against flying too low as well.
- Faust
- The scholar of German legend who signs away his soul to know more. A real astrologer of that name died about 1540; the pact was first printed in 1587.
- Frankenstein
- Mary Shelley's novel of 1818, and the name of the student in it who makes a living creature and deserts it. The creature itself has no name.
- Forbidden Fruit
- What the first pair eat in Genesis 3 against the command. The text names no kind of fruit; the apple is later tradition, and the phrase now means any banned delight.
- Tower of Babel
- The tower of Genesis 11 that a people of one language begin to build towards heaven, until their speech is confused. Its likely model is the ziggurat of Babylon.
- Tantalus
- The king who dined with the gods and abused their trust, and stands for ever beside water and fruit that draw away from him. The word tantalise comes from his name.
- Index Librorum Prohibitorum
- The Catholic Church's printed list of books its members were not to read without leave, first issued at Rome in 1559 and given up as church law in 1966.
- The Sorcerer's Apprentice
- Goethe's comic ballad of 1797, after a tale in Lucian: a pupil sets a broom to carry water and cannot make it stop. The master comes home and ends it.
- Bluebeard
- Perrault's tale of 1697 of a husband who forbids his wife one room, where his earlier wives lie dead. Here the looking is what saves her, and the ban is the wrong.
- Necronomicon
- A book that does not exist: H. P. Lovecraft invented it for his horror stories in the 1920s. Volumes sold under the name are modern works written decades later.
Its history, in dates
- Hesiod tells how Prometheus stole fire in a fennel stalk, and how Pandora was sent to humankind as its price.
- Genesis 2 and 3, in the form we have them, tell of the garden, the two trees and the fruit that was not to be eaten.
- The tragedy Prometheus Bound, handed down under the name of Aeschylus, makes the Titan the giver of every human art.
- The Book of the Watchers tells of angels who come down and teach humankind crafts and secrets.
- Rome issues its first Index of Forbidden Books; the list is kept up, in changing forms, until 1966.
- The Faust book is printed at Frankfurt: the scholar, the spirit, the pact of twenty-four years and the bad end.
- John Milton publishes Paradise Lost, the retelling of the fall in Eden that shaped how English readers picture it.
- Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein, subtitled The Modern Prometheus, without her name on it.
- The second part of Goethe's Faust appears after his death; in it the scholar is saved at the last.
Books to read
- Theogony and Works and DaysHesiod, c. 700 BCEThe two oldest tellings of Prometheus and Pandora, short and severe, by a poet with little sympathy for the thief.
- Prometheus Boundattributed to Aeschylus, 5th century BCEThe Titan chained and unbowed, listing the arts he gave to humankind. Whether Aeschylus wrote it is disputed.
- Doctor FaustusChristopher Marlowe, c. 1592The Faust book made into an English tragedy within a few years of its printing; the scholar is lost at the end.
- FaustJohann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808 and 1832The work of a lifetime in two parts, in which striving itself is weighed and the scholar is finally saved.
- Frankenstein; or, The Modern PrometheusMary Shelley, 1818The modern form of the story: a maker who succeeds, takes fright and will not answer for his creature.
- Forbidden KnowledgeRoger Shattuck, 1996A literary scholar's history of the idea from Prometheus to the present, asking whether some things are better left unknown.
Its roots: the lives to read with it
- PrometheusGreek myth; first told by Hesiod, about 700 BC
A Titan of Greek myth. In Hesiod he tricks Zeus over the sacrifice and steals fire for humankind, hidden in a fennel stalk; Zeus chains him to a pillar where an eagle eats his liver each day, and sends Pandora to men in return. In the tragedy Prometheus Bound, handed down under the name of Aeschylus, he has given humans every craft and suffers for loving them. Heracles frees him at last.
- PandoraGreek myth; Hesiod, about 700 BC
The first woman of Greek myth, made by the gods at Zeus’s order as the price of the stolen fire. In Hesiod she opens a great storage jar and lets out every ill; only Hope stays under its lid.
- IcarusGreek myth; best known from Ovid, about AD 8
Son of the craftsman Daedalus, who built the Labyrinth of Crete. To escape the island Daedalus makes wings of feathers and wax, and warns his son to fly neither too low, where the sea will wet them, nor too high, where the sun will melt them. Icarus climbs, the wax softens, and he falls into the sea that takes his name. Ovid tells it in the Metamorphoses.
- FaustJohann Georg Faust, about 1480 to about 1540, and his legend
A real man stands behind the legend: Johann Georg Faust, a wandering German astrologer, alchemist and fortune-teller of the early sixteenth century, named with scorn in a handful of letters and town records. Within fifty years the chapbook Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) had him sign away his soul for twenty-four years of knowledge and pleasure. Christopher Marlowe put it on the English stage about 1592, and Goethe made it his life’s work (Part One 1808, Part Two 1832), in which Faust is saved.
- Frankensteinthe novel by Mary Shelley, 1818
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel by Mary Shelley, begun in 1816 by Lake Geneva when she was eighteen and published in 1818. Victor Frankenstein is a student, not a doctor: he reads Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus as a boy, turns to modern chemistry, and gives life to a creature he then abandons in horror. The creature, who has no name, learns to speak and read, asks for a companion, is refused, and destroys those Victor loves. The experiments of Galvani and Aldini with electricity and dead tissue stood behind it.
- The GolemJewish legend; the Prague tale is first printed in the 19th century
In Jewish tradition a golem is a figure of clay brought to life by the letters of a holy name; the word is in the Psalms, and the Talmud tells of sages who made such a creature. The famous story sets it in Prague, where Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal (died 1609), makes a golem to protect the Jewish quarter and must unmake it when it grows beyond control.
More lives read with this art
Joseph CampbellEnochNarcissusCupid and PsycheLokiThe Monkey KingJekyll and HydeDorian GrayGiordano BrunoTommaso CampanellaJohann Wolfgang von GoetheRobert TaylorEdward Bulwer-LyttonAldous HuxleyGilgameshSisyphusThe Sorcerer’s ApprenticeSimon MagusRoger BaconThe SibylKing Midas
