Prometheus As A Trickster

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Recommended: Relevance of the trickster archetype

Bre Edwards
Mythology 1000
June 24, 2017

Prometheus was a trickster, and not in a funny way. You have some trickster such as magicians who can trick people with magic that can be funny. However a trickster is far from simple they are however greedy, lustful, childish and even nasty. Let’s not forget clumsy, clownish and even foolish Prometheus was all of theses things. Nobody wins when a trickster is around everyone gets hurt Promethus was a mean trickster, let’s discuss. Prometheus, in Greek religion is one of the titans, the supreme trickster and a God of fire. He was a master craftsman and was associated with fire and creation of morals. Everyone knows a trickster in their life, whether it be a friend, family member or an associate I think …show more content…

The trickster is an archetype that surfaces in many culturals and religious stories and is unique to it’s own cluture however all trickers have a certain characteristic no matter what culture they are from. Prometheus was given the task to create man whom he made out of mud and another Greek by the name of Athena breathed life into the mud figure Prometheus made. Prometheus made another Greek God named Epimethus give out the qualities on earth and by the time Epimetheus got to man he had no more good qualities left, therefore Prometheus gave man the ability to stand upright and give him fire. When Zeus first learned of man he stated to Prometheus that the man must present a portion of each animal he scarified to the Gods. This is when Prometheus decided that he wanted to trick Zeus because he loved man more than the Olympians who Zeus was apart of and who Prometheus had to fight in war. So wanting to get revenge on Zeus, Prometheus decided to deceive the mind of Zeus. He decided he wanted to present to Zeus an animal to scarified to the Gods; He created two …show more content…

Zeus became so upset that he decided to inflict terrible punishment on both man and Prometheus. First in order to punish man, Zeus created a beauty named Pandora. Pandora however was created with deceptive heart and lying tongue. Resorting back to how Prometheus was chained to the rocks to begin with was because of his trick on Zeus. Zeus had his servants force and violence seize Prometheus and take him to Caucasus mountains where Prometheus was chained to a rock with unbreakable chains and was tormented day and night by a giant eagle tearing at his liver. Seeing how tormented Prometheus was, Zeus then decided to give Proetheus two options to get out of the torment. One was since Prometheus knew which of Zeus children would eventually dethrone him, he asked Prometheus to tell him or lastly meet two conditions which was a immortal on earth must volunteer to die for Prometheus and then secondly that mortal must kill the eagle and unchain him. What eventually happened was Chrion the Centaur decided he would agree to die for Prometheus and then Heracles killed the eagle and unbounded Prometheus from the rock he was chained from. As you can see being a trickster never

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