[Prometheus und Arjuna]
Translation from the German by Robert Hütwohl[1]
Two masterpieces, which must be counted among the greatest of world literature because their content and form reflect the deepest spirit of a cultural epoch, have just been published by Eugen Diederichs in Jena. It is the Prometheus of Aeschylus in a German adaptation by Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm[2] and the Bhagavad Gita,[3] the sublime song, adapted and introduced by Professor Leopold von Schröder.
Both are philosophical, in fact theosophical poems, both have classically expressed the highest thoughts of the people in the beautiful language of the two most intelligent peoples, the Indians and the Hellenes. Both deserve a place of honor on the German bookshelf.
If the great Wilhelm von Humboldt could write to his friend Gentz to thank God that he had let him live long enough to be able to read the Bhagavad Gita, then with these beautiful words he said well what every reader must say of her,[4] who penetrated the meaning of the ancient Indian wisdom teachings. You can get by with the Bible, the imitation of Christ and the Bhagavad Gita. Prometheus, however, is the immortal tragedy of genius, of the divine spark which has been cast down on earth and wishes it to burn—but which only finds philistines who do not understand it. Fire is Aryan spirit in both products, but its manifestations differ like evolution and involution.
The fact that the Greek legend is of ancient Aryan origin is evident from the name Prometheus. The same goes back to the Indo-European language root math, which gives the Sanskrit name for the activity of rubbing manthana.[5] A rod was drilled through a hollowed-out disc of wood to generate heat and then fire. The wooden stick was called Pramantha. Hence comes Pramāthyus, the piercer, the robber, since the prefix signifies that the action is done with energy and, for some purpose, with violence, with intention and concentration. This later became Prometheus in Greek and has been explained by folk etymology as the forethinker, as opposed to his brother Epimetheus, the thoughtful. So the name means in a spiritual sense the piercer, the transmitter, the spiritual robber, the prophet, the genius. For the genius always robs a spark of divinity in order to reveal it to mankind and suffers from it until later, in a better time, it redeemedly shares the joys of the gods.
Prometheus is the bold spirit who brings divine wisdom to earth, who wants to deify men, Arjuna, the hero of the ancient Indian heroic poem Mahābhārata (of which the Bhagavad Gita forms an episode) is the pious spirit who is most closely related to the God, who is outside of him, wants to go the way of devotion. Prometheus is the “Protestant,” the free, unbound spirit who wants to stand on his own two feet because it already feels the divine spark within, and Arjuna is the “Catholic,” who in his humility considers himself too small and sinful, too weak and impoverished to attain the infinite by its own power.
Both types still exist today. Prometheus is the ideal of modern man, of the fallen angel, of Lucifer: it is the proud, male soul who doesn’t think much of a god who only “pushes from the outside” because he recognizes that this old god is basically only a product of human longing, and that this god of the theater must eventually perish because mankind is evolving. Arjuna, on the other hand, is the Knight of the Grail, who humbly allows himself to be instructed and guided, he is the mystic, who returns to the original deity through devotion, fasting and penance like Francis of Assisi or the Maid of Orleans.
And so one can say that both figures are present in every human being today as representatives of two great and justified views of life. In every human breast lives Prometheus, the premeditated and chivalrous hero of the Mahābhārata, who does not want to think superfluously, but wants to go the way of karma-yoga, of service, of worship.
Prometheus brings fire to earth. What does this mean? The primal fire is the basis of creation. The Vedas already know that. Heracleitos, the Dark, says that fire is the primary element from which everything springs. It becomes steam (air), this becomes water, this becomes earth. Two developments are taking place: top-down and bottom-up. The first, evolution, is indicated by the name of Prometheus, who assigns the spiritual primordial matter to mankind’s use; the second, involution, the return to unity, represents Arjuna because he makes the human divine.
The world was created by fire and will be destroyed by fire. Fire underlies everything and is in everything. Through fire, matter becomes spirit: the whole cosmos is concentrated fire and consequently spirit enclosed in matter. Hence one understands that the ancient Aryans worshiped fire.
Whoever brings the fire of the spirit to humanity gives it individuality. Because spirit is individuality, personality. That is why it is said that Lucifer, the bringer of light, brought the I to people, the separation of the two sexes, which until then had still been connected. His battle with the other angels is the “war in heaven” mentioned by the Bible. Hesiod knows it as the battle of the gods with the titans. The Jews spoke of the fall of the angels. Lucifer is not the same as Satan, as was later assumed, but rather one of the Elohim who wanted to act independently, driven by pride, who only wanted to follow himself, acknowledging nothing else above himself.
Lucifer wanted to establish a dominion of himself without God. But he was prevented from doing so by the angels who had remained faithful and fell to earth, which at that time was still united with the moon.
This Lucifer is the same as Prometheus, the propagator of light, liberty, spirit and power, opposed to Christ, the advocate of love. But both were necessary for our development.
According to the great plan of the Creator of the world, the third class of angels, “the beginnings” (archai), who inhabited the planet Venus, the Indian Asuras, had to play an important role at a certain time in the development of mankind. Some of them inhabited the earth in light bodies at the time of ancient Lemuria, which lost part of the world between Asia and Africa. There were the gods of whom so much was later reported.
Prometheus shows up here again. He is only anthropomorphized, humanized, according to Greek usage. The jealous gods send him Pandora, the beautiful woman, to seduce him. He rejects it. But his brother Epimetheus, the thoughtful one, accepts the gift. Then Pandora opens the lid of her casket and all evils that are possible emerge from it and spread over the earth. Only hope remains. The effects of sexual love could not have been presented better. At first it seems like a gift from heaven, but most of the time it ends — unless a higher education of the soul goes hand in hand with it — in suffering. The love of the sexes must slowly develop higher.
Aeschylus revealed the greatest mysteries of cosmology to the Athenians with incredible boldness in his masterpiece Prometheus Bound, so that it is hardly surprising that they demanded his execution. In the mysteries of Eleusis it was taught that man is an ally of the gods. If the gods are cosmic beings who rule the world and are above man, it is no less true that they must make use of man. All mystics have always agreed on this. Just think of the verses of the great Angelus Silesius, in which he speaks of the necessary connection between God and the soul of man.
In the sublime form of the great sufferer, the conscience of the cosmos, the unconscious, appears to us, so to speak. Prometheus sees further than Zeus. That is the God as he appears to man, somewhat as the Jehovah of the Bible appears to an advanced mind. But he already carries the god of the future in his breast. Just as Schiller towered above his time and its naïve worship of God, just as Giordano Bruno was ahead of the orthodox of his time, so the genius of Aeschylus stood far above the level of the Athenians of the time. In Prometheus he gives us the struggle of the old with the new, of the dead with the living, of the mystic with orthodoxy, of the idealist with the existing legal order. He succumbs, and only the daughters of Okeanos, the representatives of charity, weep for his hard fate of being chained to a rock.
“The deepest meaning of the many fairy tales” — says A. von Gleichen-Russwurm — “which Aeschylus condenses into the mighty Prometheus fairy tale seems to me a philosophical thought of slow but steady development, of ever more finely structured order out of the original chaos. This development demands heroes and demands sacrifices. It gradually overturns the relationship of man to nature, nature to man completely; In such philosophy there reigns an unparalleled audacity, and over the millennia it attunes to the newest philosophical beliefs and beliefs declarations of hope.”
Aeschylus had dark knowledge of old sagas from the distant past, and his poetic inspiration gave him material for connecting these various sagas into a single entity. The memory of Lucifer was thus fused with the memory of higher spirits ruling on earth in Lemurian and Atlantean times.
When it is said that Prometheus kneaded human beings from clay, the church father Lactantius already claimed that he did not form human beings himself from clay, but that he was the inventor of the images of clay and stone, under which the human form was imitated. Who does not think that the Atlanteans created large statues (as on Easter Island) of themselves, which they are said to have known how to magically enliven? It is characteristic of such a proud spirit as Prometheus is portrayed that he created “men in his own image, a generation like me” (as our Goethe says), the likenesses of his own personality, witnesses to his arrogance. It is not without good reason that a vulture mauls the liver of the proud man when he is chained to it — similar to Loge in Scandinavian mythology. Because Loge is obviously a very similar character, if not afflicted with the titanic defiance.
It is understandable that the divine hero of the sun and the fair-haired Herakles redeemed Prometheus. For he indicates the Logos, the Redeemer. With the arrow (the symbolized spiritual ray of the sun) of Apollo, he kills the insatiable vulture, i.e., the defiance of Lucifer is replaced by the gentleness and humility of Christ. Thus Prometheus bound and unbound is an image of man. Both forces struggle for dominance within him: independence, selfhood (“Ahankara” [Ahaṃkāra = I-making]) and love for the higher, the eternal. Both combined give the complete human being.
Arjuna the Panduide [Pānḍava], the valiant hero in the battle of the Kuru and Pāndu sons, is the sharpest contrast imaginable to Prometheus. In the beginning, when he sees his relatives, friends and teachers among the ranks of the enemies against whom he is to fight, he is despondent, hesitant and faint-hearted. His tender conscience awakens and he wonders if he has a right to kill. He is the idealist with the tender mind of a woman, one of those beautiful souls who suffer in this life. For example, if one can think of Schiller as a warrior, he would be like the hero of the Mahābhārata.
Such people tend to be pessimistic, they find their solace only in the hereafter. If they are more masculine, then they see something great and factual in the hereafter, ideas and a great law and thus come to the atheistic Sāṃkhya philosophy or Buddhism. When they are more feminine, they cling fervently to a personal God.
Both systems are represented in the Bhagavad-Gita, so that it has often been said to be a conflation of two systems opposed to each other. But the poet knows how to combine apparent opposites.
As is well known, the Sāṃkhya system consists in dualism: two great uncreated primordial forces reign in the world: spirit (purusha) and matter (prakriti). On the other hand stands the monistic system of Vedānta, which is explained in the Upanishads. The Ātman-Brahman, the holy spirit, the world soul, is the basis of all being. Our soul is identical with him, which the Indians, as is well known, put in the phrase: tat tvam asi, you are God (“that”).
It is therefore important to recognize oneself as identical with God: then one is redeemed. It is not the dualistic, rationalistic realism of the Sāṃkhya that can save us, but the belief that this world is only appearance, that our higher ego itself lies at the basis of everything. Anyone who can do that is a hero.
But only the idealist can do that. It is not the well-trained non-commissioned officer who gets up promptly at 5 o’clock every morning and who shows physical courage who is a hero, but the weak scholar whose spirit is so high that he makes sacrifices and does good out of higher reasons, out of ideas. Such is a creator.
He who creates moral values and suffers for it, endures persecution, is ridiculed, and yet remains true to his cause, is a hero. Hours of discouragement and weariness of life make no difference. What great man, what prophet would not have suffered from sadness? The non-commissioned officer nature, “the philistine,” as Schopenhauer would say, is incapable of “divine” sadness because he is so content with life. But the higher one stands, the easier it is for him to value his ideas and through non-realization to suffer the same.
Precisely as a result of this pain, however, the longing for the absolutely beautiful, true and good awakens in him. It is not what we should look at “God” like an old, good grandpa, who should fulfill all our little wishes like the children do, but to raise the highest in ourselves so high that we suspect what really lies at the bottom of everything, that incomprehensible supreme primal being which we call God.
“Whoever sees the same supreme Lord in living beings,
Who does not perish when we perish — whoever recognizes that has recognized correctly.
For whoever recognizes the same Lord as the indweller of all,
Do not hurt the Self by the self, and so walk the highest path.”
Thus speaks the divine charioteer Krishna-Vishnu to Arjuna, Bhagavad-Gita 13, 27 and 28 (according to the excellent translation by Schröder). Schopenhauer already referred to these beautiful verses in his treatise “Foundation of Morals.” In all centuries, poor truth has had to blush at being paradoxical: and yet it is not its fault. It cannot take the form of the enthroned general error. Then she looks up with a sigh to her tutelary god, time, who waves victory and glory to her, but whose wingbeats are so large and slow that the individual dies over them. So I, too, am very well aware of the paradox that this metaphysical interpretation of the ethical archetype must have for the Occidental educated, accustomed to quite different justifications of ethics, but I cannot do violence to the truth. On the contrary, all I am able to do about myself from this point of view is to cite how that metaphysics of ethics was the basic view of Indian wisdom thousands of years ago, to which I point back how Copernicus suppressed that of Aristotle and Ptolemy world system of the Pythagoreans. In the Bhagavad-Gita, according to A.W. von Schlegel’s translation, it says: Eundem in omnibus animantibus consistentem summum dominum, istis pereuntibus haud pereuntem qui cernit, is vere cernit. Eundem vere cernens ubique praesentem dominum, non violat semetipsum sua ipsius causa: exinde pergit ad summum iter.”[6]
The highest way, the path, is the yoga recommended by Krishna. According to the learned Deussen (General History of Philosophy I., Verlag von Brockhaus), Sāṃkhya and Yoga are not yet to be understood in our poem as designations of philosophical systems, but are only different methods of attaining the Ātman. On the one hand it can be grasped through reflection on the manifold phenomena of the world and their inner essential identity, and this reflection is called Sāṃkhya, on the other hand the Ātman can be grasped through withdrawal from the outside world and concentration on one’s own inner being, and this is called yoga.
But the most beautiful yoga is bhakti, the worship of God. Garbe is right when he says that the Bhagavad Gita is “the song of praise to bhakti, the believing and trusting love of God. Both on the path of knowledge and on the path of selfless fulfillment of duty, love for God leads to the goal with absolute certainty. The whole poem is filled with this thought, it was composed to proclaim it” (Richard Garbe, The Bagavadgitā, translated from Sanskrit, with an introduction about its original form, its teachings and its age. Leipzig 1905).[7]
“Whatever is done without faith, be it sacrifice, donation, penance, deed,
This is called “non-being”—is nothing after death—still here” (17:28).
The difference between sat and asat, being and non-being, i.e., between “good” and “bad,” permeates everything. The victim is satisfied when he establishes the connection with the hereafter on this level. And so it can be said that every man who in right opinion (as the Catholic says) sacrifices is a hero and benefactor of mankind.
The difference between Prometheus and Arjuna is essentially that the one makes the sacrifice without the ruling “Dharma” i.e., considering the God manifested in the visible world and relying on his own advanced dharma, and the other performs the sacrifice in accordance with the common belief. Both are great and both methods are correct. But everyone should decide whether they can stand on their own two feet and renounce a “church” with its regulations.
I believe that it is good to walk both paths side by side and to decide in each case which one to choose. True progress consists on the one hand in observing and considering everything that human wisdom has established so far and not ignoring it lightly, and on the other hand that one has the courage to leave tradition and to obey the God in one’s own breast. Zeus is the “outer” god, Vishnu the god within. But Socrates also wanted to slaughter a rooster for Aesculapius before he died.
How many people forget this “rooster” and soon after fall into the snares of evil because they trusted too much in themselves and their low, weak ego! Then their bad nature really awakens and “the vulture” feeds on their heart’s blood. If you want to stand alone, you have to be perfect. Anyone who is a one-sided idealist and not at the same time a realist in the good sense of the word will be strongly attacked and harassed by evil forces. Idealists in particular suffer often enough from the vulture of sensuality and cannot get rid of it.
Only “the one” can help here, as Richard Wagner says in Parsifal. But this One is near to everyone who turns to him like Arjuna. The divine charioteer Vishnu, the Sustainer of the good to be transformed for the better, is the same Logos who redeems through his word, because it still becomes “flesh” in the one who is ripe for it.
But that requires sacrifice. “By the absence of the moral principle — says Burnouf, in his glorious preface to his French translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Paris 1905 — our society is headed for ruin. Neither science, nor industry, nor commerce can save them, nor could they save ancient society. It was killed by the Christian principle, which in turn has since been cast out of our laws and our customs. So read this little book! You will see that there were people who could think better than we do, and they also showed the way to salvation.”
The way of salvation is in our hearts. Unite like the spirit of Prometheus and Arjuna — and we find in us the Christ spirit with the Luciferic touch. The future rests on the synthesis of both principles.
Notes
[1] Prometheus and Arjuna. [Prometheus und Arjuna. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Neue Lotusblüten 6, no. 3-4 (March-April 1913), 65-82] {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hütwohl, ©2024}
[2] {R.H.—Prometheus des Äschylos, in deutsche Nachdichtung aus dem Griechischen übertragen. Von Alexander von Gleichen-Russwurm. Jena: Diederichs Erschienen 1912. [Heinrich Adalbert Carl Alexander Konrad Schiller, Freiherr von Gleichen (b. 6 November 1865 at Greifenstein Castle, d. 25 October 1947) He was a grandson of the German poet, Friedrich Schiller.]}
[3] {R.H.—Bhagavadgita — Des Erhabenen Sang. [Bhagavadgita of the Exalted Song] Von Leopold von Schroeder. Jena: Diederichs Erschienen 1912. (b. December 24, 1851 in Dorpat, d. February 8, 1920 in Wien.)}
[4] {R.H.—Gītā is a Sanskrit word meaning “song,” and is a feminine noun. Thus the German pronoun, which Dr. Hartmann uses, is feminine.}
[5] {R.H.—The act of kindling fire by rubbing pieces of wood together. It has occult relevance as being one of the three fires, being the lowest: fire by friction.}
[6] {R.H.—“He who sees the same supreme Lord, standing still among all living things, who perishes, truly discerns those who are not perishing. Truly, seeing the same Lord everywhere present, he does not violate himself for his own sake: thence he proceeds to the highest journey.”}
[7] {R.H.—Die Bhagavadgītā aus dem Sanskrit übersetzt mit einer einleitung über ihre ursprüngliche gestalt, ihre Lehren und ihr alter. [Bhagavadgītā translated from Sanskrit with an introduction about its original condition, its teachings and its age.] Richard Garbe, Leipzig, 1905.}