The Art of Stealing Fire: Uranus in the Horoscope
by Liz Greene
Prometheus the Titan
Prometheus is a kind of inspirational daimon. He is a force within the psyche that has access to knowledge of how the cosmic system works, and how to apply it to the everyday affairs of human beings.
In understanding this, we gain a truer sense of what Uranus is about.
What lies at the core of Uranian intent, and what is the nature of the god? We will start with Prometheus, because amongst more discerning astrologers he is the figure that is most often associated with Uranus. You should all read Rick Tarnas’ excellent little book, Prometheus the Awakener. It is very useful to approach Uranus through exploring this figure. Although in myth there is no story involving a direct connection between the heaven-god Ouranos and Prometheus the Titan, all the Titans, including Prometheus, are the descendants of Ouranos. I think you probably all know the general outline of the main Prometheus myth. Is there anyone who doesn’t know it? Good, that saves me having to go through the entire story. But we might fruitfully focus on certain important features.
First of all, we should consider his Titanic nature, and what that implies. The Titans are not ‘gods’ in the same sense as the Olympians, such as Zeus-Jupiter or Aphrodite-Venus. Myths, like dreams, are extremely precise when they describe something. They are not woolly or sloppy or loose, even though they evolve over time and change as they are adapted by the needs of different cultures throughout history. Myths are very specific in the way they put things, so if a divine figure in myth is a Titan and not an Olympian, then this is telling us something very important.
The Titans are the children of heaven, but they are earth spirits and are embodied, because their mother is Gaia, the earth. So, Prometheus is not really a denizen of the celestial realm. He has a Uranian spirit, but his body is made of earth, and it can suffer pain, as it eventually does. We could say that he is somehow connected with the heavenly or divine spirit in incarnation – in other words, with the aspirational or visionary side of human nature, contained in the world of form. In fact, Prometheus, whose name means ‘foresight’, is credited with the creation of human beings, whom he forms out of clay, after which Athene breathes life into them to animate them. Prometheus is a magician, an artist, and a culture-bringer. He teaches human beings astrology, architecture, and navigation – everything, in fact, that involves knowledge of how the cosmic or holistic system operates.
In this respect he is different from other culture-bringers, who offer very specific arts or crafts, such as weaving (which is Athene’s gift). Prometheus’ knowledge always involves something heavenly or cosmic, translated into earthly form. Architecture requires an understanding of geometry, which, as any Platonist knows, is ultimately cosmic in nature; astrology and astronomy are obviously aspects of cosmic knowledge. One must have a broad understanding of the entire system to make these arts and sciences work. So, Prometheus is a kind of inspirational daimon. He is a force within the psyche that has access to knowledge of how the cosmic system works, and how to apply it to the everyday affairs of human beings. Most importantly, Prometheus steals cosmic fire, and gives it to human beings against the wishes of Zeus. This is a theme that has fascinated artists and writers over the centuries.
What does this mean, the stealing of fire?
If we can grasp it, we have got hold of what Uranus is really about. In Prometheus the Awakener, Rick Tarnas associates Prometheus’ fire with
the creative spark, cultural and technological breakthrough, the enhancement of human autonomy, the liberating gift from the heavens, sudden enlightenment, intellectual and spiritual awakening.
I would add another interpretation to this list: Prometheus steals the potential of consciousness from the gods. The fire he appropriates is solar; it is the divine spark of immortality, of awareness of the Self, which exists within each human being. It is also the fire of imagination and vision, through which solar divinity and individual creativity make themselves known.
Fire in the world’s mythologies is always associated with divinity and with the eternal spirit, and we still preserve this symbolism in such expressions as the ‘eternal flame’ at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. These flames, because they burn perpetually, remind us that, although the individuals have died, they have eternal life.
In the Prometheus story, when human beings were created, they were not given the gift of fire, because if they had fire, they would be godlike. They would possess the power to create like the gods. Zeus prohibited this, and as a result humans were like the beasts, collective in nature and utterly subject to the forces of nature. In other words, they had no consciousness of themselves and their creative power. Prometheus, with his gift of foresight, saw the potential of human consciousness. That is another extremely important feature of this Titanic figure. He had a vision of what human beings could be, if they were allowed to fulfil the potential they were given. So, he went against the dictates of Zeus and stole a tiny spark of solar fire. He hid it in a hollow fennel stalk and brought it down to earth and gave it to human beings as a collective. He didn’t give it to one special or chosen person; he gave it to all. As a result, he was punished terribly for the sin of his theft, and so were human beings, through Pandora with her famous box of woes – although, once humanity had the fire, it couldn’t be taken away again.
There are a lot of powerful interconnected themes in this myth. The theft of solar fire, divine retribution, and a vision of human potential are fundamental archetypal images. From them we can begin to get a sense of what Uranus’ core might be about. Uranus can see what is possible because there is knowledge of how the cosmic system works. This is not ‘psychic’ foreknowledge. Prometheus’ ‘foresight’ is exactly that – the ability to ‘see ahead’. It is visionary, rather than psychic or instinctual. Uranus sees things clearly and recognises patterns and potentials that can be defined. Prometheus, who is a Uranian spirit, can see ahead, based on his knowledge of how the cosmic evolutionary process works. He knows that if fire is given to human beings, certain things will happen; certain potentials can be fulfilled. He has full knowledge of what those potentials are because he created human beings in the first place. Because he has brought fire to them, they are able to learn the sciences and arts that he teaches, and apply them with intelligence and creativity, rather than merely parroting by rote. They can grasp what he teaches, with all the implications and possibilities, because they have the spark of solar fire. The knowledge and the fire go together. On the deepest level, they are the same thing. What Prometheus teaches is the solar fire.
Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan
Source: by Dirck van Baburen, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
In Aeschylus’ play, Prometheus Bound, the Titan soliloquises while chained to his high mountain. First, he speaks of the sorry state in which humanity found itself before his intervention:
For first, though seeing, all in vain they saw,
And hearing, heard not rightly. But, like forms
Of phantom dreams, throughout their life’s whole length
They muddled all at random; did not know
Houses of brick that catch the sunlight’s warmth,
Nor yet the work of carpentry.
Then he speaks of all the things he has given to human beings:
...I showed the risings of the stars,
And settings hard to recognise. And I
Found Number for them, chief device of all,
Groupings of letters, Memory’s handmaid that,
And mother of the Muses.
He has, in effect, given men and women the means of mastering nature, through the power of vision and the knowledge of higher patterns and laws. This allows humans to free themselves from bondage to the instinctual cycles of the earth and take mastery of the planet on which they live. They can create what we euphemistically call civilisation. That is the result of the fire he steals. Or, as Aeschylos puts it, offering us the real Uranian punchline:
I made men cease from contemplating death.
If we look at Prometheus as a psychological image, and understand him as something inside all human beings, then we can begin to recognise how this Uranian spirit has operated since the dawn of human history. It has, of course, existed despite the fact that the planet was only discovered in 1784. But since 1784 we have been aware, as a collective, of possessing it – however dimly and clumsily – and the discovery of Uranus coincides with the dawn of what we are pleased to call the Enlightenment. I will talk more about that later on.
George Bernard Shaw once said that the balanced man accepts the world as it is, the unbalanced man is forever seeking to change it, and therefore all progress depends on the unbalanced man. It may be that we have to be a bit mad to receive what Prometheus is trying to teach. If we think about the way in which animals and plants evolve, we can see that they do not move forward in the same way that we do. They are not driven to master nature because of a vision of potential perfection. They evolve out of necessity. Changes in the kingdoms of nature take place very slowly, and in accord with the pressures of climate, available food, and danger from predators; they are part of a vast, interconnected, slowly developing life-web, which the ancients were fully aware of but which we are only recently beginning to recognise as part of our modern world-view.
But human beings, the recipients of the gift of solar fire, have the irrepressible idea that they can, in one way or another, conquer nature’s powers and patterns. We can see Uranus’ workings in history very clearly if we understand the Promethean vision. At various junctures, an individual, or a group of individuals, is suddenly seized by a revelation that something could be improved, bettered, transformed, freed or changed. Previously unrecognised potentials suddenly become obvious. Uranus always seems to carry a vision of human potential – the potential to be godlike, the potential to create a universe.
Here is the human being wanting to be god. The Titan Prometheus himself doesn’t want to be a god; although he isn’t an Olympian, he doesn’t appropriate the solar fire for himself, although he might easily have done so. What he does is give human beings the desire to be god, through providing them with the vision to recognise godlike potentials.
Uranian suffering and the punishment of Prometheus
The Titan’s punishment is brutal. Zeus, the king of heaven, has absolutely no sympathy for what he has done, because human beings now have a little bit of what makes Zeus a god. In characteristic Jupiterian fashion, he is infuriated because now he has to share the stage with ordinary riff-raff. So, Prometheus is chained to a mountaintop, and an eagle comes every day and eats away his liver. And every night the liver regenerates itself, and the next day the eagle comes back and has breakfast again. This is a terrible, savage mythic image – the noble Titan chained to the highest mountain, isolated and deprived of any contact with god or human, suffering perpetual physical and psychological torment, which doesn’t kill him, but keeps him in a state of constant agony. I think we need to explore this part of the myth, because it tells us the price that we must pay for Uranian knowledge. We cannot dismiss it by saying,
Oh well, maybe we can avoid this unfortunate business of the liver if we do enough therapy or meditation or astrological charts, or if we have enough scientific knowledge.
If we are going to profit from stolen fire, which every one of us has done, we must understand this image because the bill will always be due at the end of the month. No one is exempt, because as a collective we have accepted Prometheus’ gift. Those who develop the Uranian spirit very powerfully may get an extra-large bill. However, we can reassure ourselves a little by remembering that, in the myth, Prometheus is not chained to his rock forever. He is freed in the end. But what is his suffering really about? What might it mean on an inner level?
Note:
This extract is taken from The Art of Stealing Fire: Uranus in the Horoscope in Part One, ‘Uranus in the natal chart: The Mythology of Uranus: Prometheus the Titan’, by Liz Greene, reprinted by The Wessex Astrologer. Available from the Wessex Astrologer, amazon.com and other retail outlets.
Published by: The Astrological Journal, Sep/Oct 2023
Author:
Liz Greene is the author of several books including A New Look at an Old Devil, Relating, Astrology for Lovers, The Astrology of Fate, The Mythic Tarot (with Juliet Sharman-Burke), and The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption. She founded the Centre for Psychological Astrology in 1983 with Howard Sasportas and continues to be a director. She holds a doctorate in psychology and is a qualified Jungian analyst. In 1985 she began collaborating with Dr Alois Treindl of Astrodienst (astro.com), and created the first of several computer-generated horoscope interpretations, enabled by artificial intelligence. More information on Liz Greene can be found at cpalondon.com.
© Liz Greene, Astrological Journal, 2023
