Proposition 3: Prometheus, Titan and Hierophant

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 34 pages

Thirty-four pages with an abstract and train of thoughts. *Prometheus is the presiding figure of the whole Third Proposition* — the one who brings fire to a creature that has none — so this file is the mythological statement of what the other files in this section argue doctrinally.

The identifications come first and are made rapidly: Prometheus is the Greek Logos and the original Kabiric deity; he is Poimandres, the Egyptian Prometheus who instructs Hermes Trismegistus; and he is the Adam Primus or Kadmon, the Logos of the Jewish mystics, who breathed immortal spirit into mortal men so that they might return to their primal spiritual state while still on earth, without losing their individuality. That last clause is the point of the section, and it is what distinguishes this account from a simple story about stolen fire. The chronology given is characteristic — the fable is put at more than seventy millennia old — and the list of the figure's other names widens it further: Liuchan, Loki, Lux, Lucifer, and Phosphoros, the Light-bringer, which connects this file directly to "Lucifer is Christos, Inner Light" in the same section. The most striking passage reads the punishment as an initiation rather than a sentence. Prometheus's crucifixion on the cross of love is symbolised by the swastika; the Titan was chained to man so that Chrēstos, the neophyte, might find the Initiator willing to descend into the crypts of initiation and walk around Tartarus with him — and then the vulture of passion will cease to gnaw his vitals, and he can elect to become what he was meant to be. The chaining, on this reading, is voluntary and is the mechanism of the whole Third Proposition.

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