Prometheus was the Caucasian Orpheus, the benefactor of humanity, whom he taught skills he had learned from Athene (whose birth from the head of Zeus he had assisted). The skills were those such as architecture, astronomy, navigation, mathematics, metallurgy, medicine and such like. In Attica he was worshipped as the god of craftsmen.

Zeus wanted to destroy humanity and spared them because of Prometheus’s plea. But Prometheus was getting too clever and suffered the fate of several saviours who upset Zeus. The legend of Prometheus justifies the sacrificial practice in the ancient Near East of offering fat (for the fire) and bones (for the sweet smell) to the gods while the lean flesh is reserved for the priests. In particular, Prometheus stole the fire of the sun from Olympus by hiding a glowing charcoal in a stalk of fennel and taking it to mortal beings who had been condemned by the angry Zeus to eat their flesh raw. So, the cause for which Prometheus suffered was his love for the human race. Humans were punished by Zeus but Prometheus took pity on them and gave them warmth. He was therefore punished too by Zeus.

Prometheus was an Indo-European sun god, as his procurement of the sun’s energy as fire shows, and his depiction as Zeus Prometheus at Thurii where he holds a swastika (Sanskrit, pramantha—prometheus), the symbol of the sun and fire—produced by a fire drill (swastika), often a tedious process which made the Aryans prefer to keep their fires permanently alight.

The punishment of Prometheus was described by Hesiod, and other writers. He was crucified on a symbolic tree, depicted as a post, situated near the Caspian Straits. Hesiod writes:

With shackles and inescapable fetters Zeus riveted Prometheus on a pillar.

The illustration is of an ancient Laconian bowl with Prometheus on it, tied to a pillar, a symbolic tree like the cross, while the eagle eats at his liver. The point about the carrion eating birds in these legends is that the crucified corpse was left hanging to be pecked by birds, doubtless a familiar sight at one time, and deserving a mythical explanation. An anonymous poet describes a scene like it, thus:

Lo! streaming from the fatal tree
His all atoning blood,
Is this the Infinite?—Yes, ’tis he,
Prometheus, and a god!
Well might the sun in darkness hide,
And veil his glories in,
When God, the great Prometheus, died
For man the creature’s sin.

Christians complain that Prometheus is not “crucified” here, because “a real crucifixion is on a cross, and Prometheus is not on a cross. He is just tied to a tree, with his feet on the ground, and is is not nailed to anything”.

The word crucifixion refers nowadays to a cross, but the ancient punishment which it represents is most commonly hanging on a tree, a form that applied to several ancient gods. Most scholars, even Christian ones, recognize that the cross is a symbolic tree. In Justin Martyr, thinking he is quoting from a psalm, tells us that Jesus was considered to have been hung from a tree:

Let them rejoice among the nations. The Lord hath reigned from the tree.

1 Apology 41

Indeed the scriptural reference in Deuteronomy 21:22—often taken as prophetic of Jesus—is to hanging on a tree, and Peter and the apostles (Acts 5:30; 10:39) say Jesus had been hanged on a tree. Crucifixions generally did not involve nailing but tying, and tying even when the hands or wrists were nailed to make sure the weight was carried even if flesh yielded. Ultimately, the point is that the saviour of mankind, here the Titan Prometheus, was cruelly punished, or at least had to suffer cruelly in the myth.

The story of Prometheus’s punishment, burial and resurrection was acted in pantomimes written by the great Aeschylus in Athens, five hundred years before Christ, which proves its great antiquity. The modern story of this crucified God, which has him bound to a rock for thirty years, while vultures preyed upon his vitals, is a Christian fraud, inasmuch as the crucifixion aspect of the drama was omitted. Yet even in the extant translations of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, the god is plainly crucified, albeit on a rock:

Force: Seize his hands and master him.
Now to your hammer. Pin him to the rocks.
Drive stoutly now your wedge straight through his breast, the stubborn jaw of steel that cannot break.
Now for his feet. Drive the nails through the flesh.

When Prometheus is crucified in this way, Force taunts him just as Jesus was in the gospels:

Run hot now, you there on the rocks,
Go steal from gods to give their goods to men
What will they do to lift these woes from you?

Prometheus, whose name means “forethought”, had foreseen it all, just as Jesus was supposed to have, and muses to himself in his agony that he had:

Nothing, no pang of pain that I did not foresee.

A chorus of maidens lament his agony and desolation, weeping in sorrow. Soon we hear the very line that is attributed to Christ addressing Paul (Acts 26:14), proof enough that the author knew the play:

Don’t kick against the pricks.

The version of Prometheus given by Aeschylus has Prometheus bound for eternity, because as a god, he was immortal and his liver grew again every night, but Zeus fired a thunderbolt that sent the captive to Tartarus still bound.

Zeus’s thunderbolt shook the earth, rocks were rent, the whole frame of nature became convulsed, and in a storm, which seemed to threaten the dissolution of the universe, the solemn scene closed, and Prometheus departed to the underworld in death. Tartarus is the abyss of the underworld—the equal of the Christian Hell—and to go there means death! Prometheus had told Zeus the secret he wanted to know, and Zeus, responding to his son Herakles’s pleas, allowed Herakles to kill the eagle and free the captive. Prometheus was freed from Tartarus, and later was elevated to Olympus. Confinement to Tartarus is death, liberation from Tartarus is resurrection. Christians find it impossible to understand this.

The dismissal to the underworld after the crucifixion suggests that Prometheus was crucified at the autumn equinox. He is therefore the beneficial summer sun of cool countries being sent back to Hades at the end of the summer. Prometheus is only restored to Olympus because the centaur, Cheiron agrees to lose his immortality to allow Prometheus to regain his. So here the redeemer of humanity is himself redeemed by the self-sacrifice of his personal redeemer Cheiron!

Several other benefactors of humanity—and therefore saviours—were cruelly punished by Zeus. At one time they were the gods of foreign, rebellious or defiant people and so have been punished in hell in the myths of the Greeks.