#75 | Prometheus & Chiron | Live from Greece! (Thessaly)

This runs contrary to the modern notion that the imagination gets its information by going up and out . Instead , stories are gathered by going down , and in this episode is about that tension between these two ways of knowing . In it , I will discuss two wounded mythological figures Prometheus and Chiron .

Prometheus is wounded in his upper body as punishment from stealing fire from the gods and giving it to us , the humans . Chiron is wounded on his animal side accidentally by the great heroic force of Hercules . This tension between the upper and lower ways of knowing can be seen in the sky .

Right now , chiron and Jupiter have moved into a sex style with each other and will be dancing their dance until well into 2025 . Along the way in this episode , I'll reflect about my journey in Greece , and we'll also meet a few more characters , such as Pholos and Pandora , amongst others . I hope you enjoy the show . Welcome to On the Soul's Terms podcast .

Thanks a lot for joining me for this special edition of the show , and it's special because I am tuning in live from Greece . I have come here about a week ago now . I flew in with my family in fact , my mum , my sister , my brother-in-law and my three nieces are all around but for the last five days I've taken a little side quest .

I've taken a little journey up into this arena or this area of Greece , the Pelion region and the Olympus region it used to be known the Pelion region as Thessaly in ancient times and I've taken a little side quest , a little journey up here , just to have a look around , as I like to do , feel the land where all of these old stories and myths were made and

see if I can get a feel for you know , the really embedded , ensouled stories , as they are still here in the land . They're under a lot of layers , a lot of layers of all sorts of things , a lot of concrete in the way , under a lot of layers , a lot of layers of um , of all sorts of things .

A lot of concrete in the way , a lot of concrete , literally of concrete , and also the concrete of ideas that , um , that are also in the way of us really enlivening and animating these old gods and old figures and old forms and nymphs and and fairies and all these ones that live off of the land .

So I've been trying to really sink myself down into this place and get a feel for what is really here , because you know , I'm on this podcast with you guys , I'm talking and I'm teaching and I'm referring to all of the myths and you know I keep going back to the Greeks , especially from the classical period , and all of the myths , and I keep going back to

the Greeks , especially from the classical period , and all of their stories , insisting that there's knowledge and wisdom to be found there . But sometimes you have to actually go to the land itself to get a sense of .

You know what is this place in which these stories were conjured up or felt or experienced , lived , animated all of these things that happened here , where I am . So it's a delight to join you from this place . So I'm looking for ways that the stories of the land might be able to come through into the podcast .

I thought it was a great opportunity to record an episode while I'm here and , um , you know this , this realm that I've been traveling through over the last five days . In ancient times it was known as thessaly .

It's still understood as this thessaly region here , but thessaly was an area of greece where you this is where Chiron and Asclepius and these healing gods were essentially from . This is where the centaurs were from , and it was also known as a place where the witches were , where the witchcraft would happen .

There's magical herbs around here and you know a lot of the places that I've been . There has been a real emphasis on the herbs and of this region . You do get a sense that the land here is is wanting and trying to heal . It's wanting participation with the humans and maybe that's an element . You know .

This is the fascinating thing about myth , about greek myth in particular . You know you can think that there's timeless wisdom to these stories . You know they could . They ultimately could exist anywhere in the world and would be equally true of the human condition and human experience . You know that in that way , they truly timeless .

And yet when you go to the actual place last year I went through around the Peloponnese where I went to places like Epidaurus and Delphi , where the Oracle was of Delphi and Epidaurus , the temple to Asclepius , and the thing is , when you're in the actual land you can get a sense of maybe , that the land was dreaming it up .

That's definitely an idea or a lived reality . In Aboriginal culture is that land dreams up the humans that are on that land rather than you know , I think as modern minds we think of the imagination as just something that just goes into space . Maybe or no , it's not really something that we associate um directly with the land .

But in indigenous cultures it's very much the dreaming of the land that comes through the humans and the stories that they want to tell .

And I wonder that about thessaly and being here , you know , going to all these shops where there's , where there's still herbs for sale , you know all these places where you can get the sense of the healing qualities of this land , and then from that you can sort of see why it would be that centaurs such as Phallus and Chiron are from this land , you know .

But even the wild centaurs are from here too , you know . So there's this sense here of this connection of the healing side of nature and the wild and really solid side of nature that I talked about in the last episode , really living and breathing here .

So yeah , I'd love to delve a little deeper into what I'm experiencing here and as a as a theme for the episodes .

You know , I know that we are in the midst of our our hercules series , um , but I find it very and a really interesting co-incidence or coincidence that just as I'm at that point in the story of hercules where he's actually in Thessaly , you know he's gone to Phyllis' cave and then run all the way to Chiron's cave injured , chiron Phyllis is being killed .

You know we have this big dramatic moment with the opening of the Dionysian wine . Just as I'm at that point in the podcast , I've also been drawn to this area of the world , so it's a pretty remarkable thing . It's not something that I'd actually planned , but I just happened to be here as all of that is going on .

So I have had the privilege called the Centaur's Pathway and it was a rocky path that goes up a stream and I sat there and I meditated and I got in touch with these centaurs of the land and you could kind of feel them , these centaurs running up and down the land and , you know , frolicking and having a grand old time up in that area .

And just at the front of uh of the centaurs pathway was nephile cafe .

Nephile was , uh is the mother of the centaurs , of the regular centaurs , of the wild centaurs of the wild centaurs . The story goes that she was a cloud and Zeus was suspicious of Ixion . He thought he might have his eyes on Hera and his wife , zeus' wife .

So to see if this was the case , he changed Nephileeli , the cloud , into the shape of hera , and ixion indeed did come and uh and seduce hera in that form , thinking it was hera . It turns out that that was just a ruse and it was a way for zeus to catch him in the act in which he in which case he was punished uh , he was put in a wheel of fire .

It was turning and turning and keeps turning for all eternity . Uh , that was his punishment . But it turns out that ixion in fact impregnated nephile in this act and the union of Ixion and Nephile gave birth to the wild centaurs , all of them just in this massive hit .

Of course that does not include Phallus , it does not include Chiron , because they are a breed unto themselves , they're a completely different form of centaur , but it does include pretty much all of the other centaurs .

So that's also an interesting piece there that the centaurs are born from this titan named ixion , who gets together with a cloud nymph who's in the shape of hera . So try to get your head around that one . What does this mean for our wild centaurs ? They're kind of partially illusion , given that they're , uh , clouds .

You know , they're the , the offspring of clouds , and maybe it it's a question for us of . You know just how wild and unruly are these actual centaurs ? They seem to be , uh , connected to chiron . They they treated chiron as their king . They had a lot of respect for him . Yet in the stories they tend to go pretty crazy .

Especially when this Dionysian wine comes through the forest , when they can smell that , they go a bit crazy . Plus , they started an entire war , basically the Lapiths versus the Centaurs . That's one side of the pantheon .

Actually in athens is is painted with that particular story where they just wreak havoc on this particular wedding , um , tearing everything apart , causing absolute mayhem . That was kind of their role in in mythology , but I wonder if we're also getting a piece of that that .

You know , one of the things I've been paying attention to on this trip , or really feeling into , is this I think it's a big element of our times . Maybe , as Pluto goes into Aquarius , we'll see a little bit more of this as well . It's like the tension of epistemologies .

You know how we know what we know , and on the one hand of that there's the Promethean knowing . Prometheus is that titan who stole fire from the gods to give to mankind . You know , this is very much the Christ story and this is the story of consciousness .

So when Prometheus steals that fire and gives it to all of us , we then you know , it's sort of like the myth of Adam and Eve . It's like we eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil , which means we eat the fruit of knowing what is what we even eat the fruit of knowing that we die . That's a big element of consciousness .

That is a great wound and Prometheus is wounded for giving us this knowledge and he remains that figure of that essential first wound . When we do get the fire of knowledge , we end up a bit like Prometheus .

He's chained to the rocks so that's our condition chained to this physical world , and the griffon or the eagle comes and pecks out his liver every day , and every day it grows back . So we have this image that's very much like Christ , if you think about Christ on the cross . He's chained to that wood .

He's chained to that wooden cross , just like Prometheus is chained to the rocks , and Christ also has that spear in his side . Just as Prometheus has the spear in the side in the form of the eagle eating out that liver , prometheus has the spear in the side in the form of the eagle eating out that liver . And of course , that myth is really well known .

The Promethean myth is really well known . Prometheus is a name that most recognize . Even many can tell you his story . Less known , or maybe more so these days , is the story of Chiron , who represents the equal opposite wound .

Unlike Prometheus , whose torso is being tortured , it's the lower half of the centaur Chiron that is being tortured with the blood of the Hydra that goes in through the knee , and this is our animal wound . And so Prometheus is representing that consciousness wound and Chiron is representing that animal wound .

We get this particularly poignant moment then when Chiron makes contact with Prometheus . In the myths , this is , of course , facilitated in some ways by hercules , who's the ? Who's the focal point at the moment of of the podcast .

Um , because he's there and you know , he's the one that fires an arrow into that griffin to take care of the most immediate danger that's around and um and after that it's it's really between prometheus and chiron , each able to see a mirroring of their own wound .

And it's funny because some stories say that it's prometheus that frees chiron and some stories say that it's chiron that that frees prometheus . So we get this sense of you they're really mirrored , they're really mirroring each other and it's almost like the Greeks left this one for us .

You know , the Greeks was that very early civilization and the kind of contributions that they made with their early civilization really have rung through to the modern age . We owe so much to them as far as mathematics , sciences , politics , obviously , philosophy , art , literature , mythology , all of these different forms that we owe the greeks .

You know , they , they in some ways they were unsurpassed in just how much progress they made in such a short time and so , but through their mythology they also left us the sense of what the price might be for all of this civilization that's going on and it seems to come to a head in that meeting , in that tension point where Chiron and Prometheus come together

. So I'd love to explore that a little bit more and maybe we can all dream into it together . You know , chiron is really a symbol for the shamanic , knowing , the deep , knowing he's never been separated from nature because he was born horse . You know , he's born half horse , half human , so he never lost touch with any of that .

He was able to talk to the trees and the plants and the other animals . He never got the sense that the world was here and he was on the world . You know , walking , walking around on the surface of the world , he always felt very much embedded in the world and perhaps that's why so much of his wisdom came through . You know , because he had worth wisdom .

That's what made him such a great mentor , a teacher to Jason and Achilles , also a foster father , effectively , to Asclepius , the original god of medicine , the father , effectively , to Asclepius , the original god of medicine . So he had this deep understanding of health , wellness , healing , all of these things .

He had a deep , but he probably wouldn't have said to you , you know , this is what I know he would just have spoken from the deep , knowing that was there , that was running through him as basically a talking animal .

You know , you can imagine sometimes , if you imagine , if you've ever had dealings with horses , you can just see in their eyes quite often there's some very wise horses in this world and you can just wonder what would they say if they were able to speak . Well , the greeks took that one step further and gave us the figure of chiron .

So we know what what he would say , this wise horse . We know what he would say , we know this ancient wisdom that he's got for us and you know , as he's there , he's in Mount Peleon , which is where I have been , and now I'm actually speaking from closer to Mount Olympus , and these are the two sides .

You know , zeus , that lives on Mount Olympus , it's all of the gods , it's this highfalutin society , it's the Olympians , it's that upper world stuff , it's that striving to be better , it's that striving for progress .

Um , it's , you know , wanting to become better and more literate and and have more , more literature , more art , more , all of those kinds of things that civilization give us more structures , more order , you know , a more just society and a better society , and that sense that we're growing and we're becoming and our consciousness as it evolves is becoming more fair

and more kind and more just , and all of these kinds of things . And you know , ultimately Chiron is there to remind us that there's a whole different kind of wisdom to be found . He lives in a cave on Mount Pelion , which is the exact opposite thing of living in the clouds of Mount Olympus .

You know , up above everything , in the banquet halls , that's where the gods live . Chiron , that wasn't his thing , you know , and it wasn't that . He was against that , obviously because he was the teacher of so many , uh , so many , gods and demigods .

You know , he wanted , he wanted , um civilization to succeed and that's why he always felt like he held a key , and he is a key as a symbol astrologically . He holds a key for civilization to actually work and it will work only when it's connected to the truth and the beauty of the land , the wisdom of the land .

And so you can see it in the world right now . You know this tension that is there . You see so much more in this year 2024 . There's just so much more reverence given to indigenous cultures .

Um , you know , when I was growing up , it was so easy for the collective consciousness just to dismiss that and to say , you know , that was something primitive or something . Change in the tide of that , we're realizing that our ways as civilization that don't really work , they're not really sustainable . Uh , the the conversation around climate change .

And you know , all of these lost species , you know , I hear that there's like 200 species a day that are getting lost , and so we're in this condition now where we realize that we're on a we're on a fast train that's going off a cliff .

I mean , I think we've realized that for a while , um , but it's slow to catch up to the collective consciousness , you know , and but it's interesting in that time there's just , there's so much more , even if a lot of it is on the surface layers , you know it's just on the surface level , but still those are signs that there's more reverence going towards

indigenous cultures .

You know people are starting to realize that the aboriginal people of australia , for instance , are the oldest culture in existence , at 60 000 years , you know , way , way beyond the few hundred years of the United States or Australia or these kinds of places that have really just kind of wandered in to these lands and taken over , and so there's an understanding that

something's gone wrong here and that there's something that is uninhabitable about it . We're going to effectively destroy the earth if we keep on this direction , and we all kind of know that on some level we may argue against that and say , no , this is the best that it's ever been .

And you know , look at , look at this world and look at , look at the lives that we live , we live longer and all these kinds of arguments , and I get those arguments , but within those arguments it also has to be accepted that the destruction of this planet is also occurring at the same time , and I think that's anything that's really up for debate .

And so the question is you know , how do we move actually forward , not just in the direction of progress , not just in the direction of more and more order and more and more control and these kinds of things , but in the direction of something that actually works ? And it's kind of like the metaphor in the labyrinth with Ariadne's thread .

You know , when you realize you've gone the wrong way and you may have gone a long way the wrong way we have to always be able to feel that thread and follow it backwards until we made that wrong choice and then make a different choice . And I think one of the big , big elements of that in the world is that you , we made a choice .

I mean , it's a very big one . It's a long time ago that we , we made it , but we continue to make that choice , in some ways , of going in the direction of civilization and away from the primitive

. As we say it , you know , as we refer to it , and you know these myths , these old myths . They give us a way to really inhabit that story .

I believe at this point in Hercules' story where you know that jar of Dionysian wine has been held for four generations it's been , it's been sealed , and of course it's the descendant of hermes and also pan , the nature god , who ends up opening it up .

But of course it's also a descendant of zeus , uh and the , this whole olympian world that eggs phallus on to open it up . Right , so you get this sense of um , that that essentially , if you're going to find someone to blame , it's really hercules who pushes phallus to do it , but then phallus as well is uh , is guilty of opening it up .

And you know , so we get , we don't get a one-sided view through mythology . It doesn't give us that kind of like real , simplified view . In fact , the truth is that once that Dionysian wine opens up , the centaurs do attack .

You know , they are wild , they are unruly , they do want to destroy civilization and of course there's an element of this energy that is like that , you know , especially well , not just this energy , it's really any energy that's been exiled for a long time , and it's pretty easy to see that the , the natural wisdom , or the wisdom of nature , has been exiled in

the west for a really long time . That's why we we have , you know , the second century . There's this declaration from Plutarch that the great god Pan is dead , and you know , so , that's nearly 2,000 years ago , and that's to say that the nature , god , is dying . That's what that real declaration is .

It's like there was the sense , even 2,000 years ago , that nature is starting to pull away from that . Nature is starting to to pull away from us , and we are starting to pull away from nature . And , uh , that was quite a prophetic statement , because a few hundred years later , christianity would take over .

You know , a thousand years after that we'd move into the industrial revolution . You know all all these things that happen , and , of course , what happens in the meantime is the great god Pan , who was the goat god , does actually become symbolic of the devil . So we really have demonized and devilized and made evil nature .

And so how do we come to terms with that nature ? And so how do we come to terms with that . You know , how do we come to terms with with the kind of um , the kind of mess we've left indigenous cultures in all over the world . You know , how do we carry on our civilization with that in mind ? Um , of course we can .

You can introduce the sporting events with a call to country or whatever it might be . We can do the honoring , at least in the pageantry of it all . But can we do the honoring as far as the running of societies ? Can we do the honoring as far as the importance of village and song and spirit and story ? How far down can we go ?

You know , can we , can we do all of that ? Or , and I guess you know , are we willing to do that ? And are we ? Are we willing to see that there's something in this indigenous knowing , uh , that is incredibly important for us to move forward really as a species .

If we just try to continue to integrate that into civilized life , is that really going to do the job ? I don't think so . It's just going to make things more and more and more civilized . But what if we really do open that jar ? What would happen if we really do open the Dionysian wine ? That would mean Dionysus .

He was a god that reminded us of the agony and ecstasy of nature , that having a body was incredibly fun and enjoyable . You know it . Take , take people out into the forest and and uh and experience the , the absolute oneness with nature , drumming and singing and dancing and imbibing and all of these things . So that was the wine that was opened .

It's almost like Aphrodite comes back to Earth , but then of course , that's going to take the lid off that jar . That's going to create chaos .

One of the other sides of the Prometheus story is actually Pandora , because on the one hand , he was punished in the rocks , chained to the rocks and his liver being in and out , and on the other , there was the introduction of Pandora to the earth and Pandora was given a jar , not a box , as otherwise thought .

She was given a jar and all of the gods and goddesses whispered something into the jar and then she was given strict instructions do not open this jar under any circumstances . And of course we know that storyline that's like do not hit the red button . So we're very familiar with what will eventually happen .

And of course , eventually she does open the jar and in modern days we think of a Pandora's box as releasing all the demons into the world . That was a part of her story , but it's interesting because her name , pandora , means all the gifts .

So it's very clear that there's an element of Pandora consciousness where she was there to also to unleash not just all the curses but to unleash the gifts as well . So you know , in this context , in this way of imagining this Pandora story , really all of the gods and the goddesses , they've all whispered into that jar like a curse-gift combo .

So you can think of what might the gods and goddesses this can be an exercise that you can do for yourself with whatever gods and goddesses you want to use what would be their gift-curse combos ? And it would mean that you would have to work through the curse in order to reveal the gift . That would be the essential message from pandora .

And so you can imagine let's take aphrodite , she's , her gift is , uh , beauty and pleasure , and she may curse you with , say , addictions and vanity . So you would have to work through the addiction , the addictive tendency , and you would have to work through the vanity in order to arrive at true pleasure and true beauty . So what else could we do ?

We could take Mars or Ares . You know , he's obviously got the curse of aggression and frustration , you know . But maybe we need to work through aggression and frustration in order to have the gifts of , of areas or mars , which is purpose and drive . You can take any of them . We could take hermes .

Hermes is a trickster , so it's like the mind can trick you and take you the wrong way and and make you all confused . But maybe , maybe we have to move through that confusion in order to have that clarity and that ability to go to all worlds that Hermes helps us with .

I just invite you to take that exercise and to go as many places as you like with it . So this is the true story of Pandora . It's the releasing into the world the curses that come with the gifts , and it's the same with anything that's repressed .

Because that's what happened Pandora's jar was repressed or pressed down , depressed maybe , and when she opened it up , everything came out in chaotic form and had to be worked through in order to be integrated back into existence . The same mirrored story is with phallus . Phallus has a jar of disney dionysian wine .

That dionysian element has been , has been stored there , it's been repressed , she's told . He's told , don't open it , don't open , it , don't open . And then , when he does open it , whoa , all hell breaks loose .

And that's essentially what has to happen in order to , you know , come back to our true natures and our wild natures and have that also with us in uh , in civilization . But , of course , just as the story says , if we do unleash that , people can go absolutely crazy . And they don't go crazy just because you know it's dionysian wine they couldn .

And they don't go crazy just because you know it's Dionysian wine , they couldn't handle it . They go crazy because there was repressed stuff in that jar , and when we let it out , everything goes wild .

And so , you know , the answer of civilization , as it is now and as it will continue to be , is like well , let's really make sure we seal that jar of dianism wine shut , really seal it up , maybe bury it somewhere in the labyrinth .

We'll make some really confusing ways in which we can hide it , some confusing maze , and we'll hide it in the middle of that , and then we'll put it under . You know , we'll bury it under the earth and then we'll put all sorts of guards in the way of it , and that's how you create a treasure map .

So , yes , here I am and here I've been in Greece tracing back the stories and winding back the clock a bit , seeing if I can feel underneath the layers and underneath the concrete um , what's there , what's still there .

You know , I think one of the things that has been very encouraging is to is to listen to , to books on history and audio books and things like that . And you know what ? What do we actually say ? You know , I think what we do say in the West , that it's the Greeks that we do go back to .

You know , it's the source of most of the material that comes to our philosophy and our medicine , and you know the rules of our civilization and if we really take that seriously , we can go back and discover from there a few storylines that may help us make it through very , very difficult times , very strange times in the world .

You know , you get the sense that the center isn't holding anymore and maybe the center isn't meant to hold anymore . You know , maybe we're meant to have a wider , bigger center that also can take in this , uh , ancient knowing and that is going to affect all areas .

You know , it's going to affect education , it's going to affect medicine , it's going to affect politics and law , it's going to affect all these kinds of things . Um , and it's a slow burn , it's a slow process . That's why these things , they're just , they're not going to happen overnight , they're going to happen slowly .

But I think if we get a sense of being in the same story together , as I talked about with Michael Mead six months or so ago , that idea of sometimes it's okay to all have , you know , differing perspectives , but if we forget that we're in the same story , then that's when it becomes really dangerous and myths like this help us to understand that we are in

the same story , that we're still here on the earth , that there's layers and layers and layers to get down to .

And if we forget about these layers that come back to hybrid animal humans , then we're in some trouble because there's these other hybrids in the world right now the machine humans , and , without coming back to the animal humans , I think we're at risk of just being swept away like anameed stolen , taken into the upper world and and stuck there in these , in these

worlds that become more and more empty and more and more numb . And so if there's an option here to , you know , take that risk and be egged on by hercules the big instigator and open up that dionysian wine , you know , and I think I'm up for it . I think I'm up for , uh , seeing what might happen when that dionys .

I'm up for seeing what might happen when that Dionysian wine opens up , seeing what might happen .

And , of course , the myth they give us a hint that it leads to this meeting of the wound of consciousness and the wound of the animal , those two getting together and just sort of like being in the same place , willing to take each other's place , and thus being freed from their predicaments and sent up into the constellations to remind us all that this isn't

something that just happens one day . It's something that's got to happen all days , every day . It's a timeless story and it's a timeless story that speaks to our times in a very beautiful and profound way . So thank you for joining me today from Greece .

I hope you've enjoyed the show and some of these reflections and I hope some of the Greek , some of the land underneath the concrete , has been able to talk through me in this episode . I look forward to seeing you next time on the Soul's Terms . Thank you for listening to On the soul's terms podcast .

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