Presentation 3 — Prometheus Bound in the Flesh for Our Sake

Dr C.A. Bartzokas · Atlantean Realities Series · 12 slides · White Lotus Day, Athens, 14 May 2006

The third White Lotus Day presentation takes a single myth and follows it through two and a half thousand years of images. Its subtitle carries the reading: Prometheus bound in the flesh for our sake — the Titan's punishment understood not as a story about fire and theft but as the descent of mind into matter, and the gift for which the descent was made.

The sequence opens on the fall of the Titans and on Prometheus forming man from clay, then reaches its earliest and most valuable image — an Attic black-figure kylix showing Atlas and Prometheus with the eagle. Later treatments follow: the binding of Prometheus with Hermes looking on, the Titan on the shore beneath the eagle's wing, Gustave Moreau's version, and a nineteenth-century engraving of the same scene. The presentation ends on two modern echoes — the gilded Prometheus of the Rockefeller Center fountain in New York, and Rossetti's Pandora, the answering figure in the myth.

View the presentation (PDF, 1.6 MB, 12 slides)