Elementals from before the first age. Primordial deities, children of Chaos, conceived in the dawn of creation. A mother, a father, children… infighting and more. A mythological codex illustrating the Universe for simple folk interpreting a cosmic mystery in oral tradition. From the first born onward one assumes this hereditary narrative describes the social dynamics of political intrigue. Love, war, death and rebirth. Power and game theory. I suggest there is a deeper message. Something intended for the orators themselves. A hidden code of sorts, or a partial description that when combined with certain modern conventions reveals a profound truth.

Gaia materialized spontaneously from Chaos having no mother or father… something from nothing.

Ouranos was the first born of virgin Gaia who would ultimately sire the Titans and Cyclops. “The heavenly gods were descended from Gaia through her union with Ouranos (Uranus) (Sky), the sea-gods from her union with Pontos (Sea), the Gigantes (Giants) from her mating with Tartaros (the Pit)”, and mortal creatures, each unique in their time, born directly from Gaia’s earthy flesh.

Many of the Titans were beautiful and strong but they were just as primitive as any of the primordial children. Incapable of progress or growth. Perpetually immature and their children the Olympians would fare no better. Doomed to fight forever among themselves over petty insults and treasures they can’t truly appreciate anyway. Ironically, of all creatures in mythological creation the only ones capable of overcoming this predetermined fate are the mortals. We maintain the one thing Gaia held back from the rest of her creations. The ability to grow beyond preconceptions thanks to our biological form… our life-form.

Here and gone, leaving behind the consequences of our choices like painted strokes across a canvas. While immortals remain unchanging, cursed to watch helplessly as mankind casts sails for the enduring unknown of new frontiers. Like all mortal kind who are made of choices, our ever changing biology provides a foundation for reliable production. We innovate and the gods have no choice but to wait for us to do it. Mortals are the producers of new ideas… choice… behaviour and death. You just can’t have one without the other.

If you can’t die then you’ll eventually undermine yourself having no lasting consequence. Without enduring consequence to inform significant relativity your choices don’t matter. Without the accountability of mortality you’re not really alive in the first place. You’d be no better off than a god trapped in a constellation.

The Mutilation of Uranus (Ouranos) by Saturn: fresco by Giorgio Vasari and Cristofano Gherardi, c. 1560 Much like his great-grandson Zeus would fear his own son displacing him, Uranus began eating his own children angering Gaia, ultimately leading to his castration and being thrown in the sea where his blood spawned all sea life.

The Protogenoi (also known as the primordial gods) are the first race of immortals to come into existence, the majority of whom were born directly from the void of Chaos who we might now call for our purposes Unrealized Potential. Gaia (Life), Tartarus(Entropy), Eros(Love), Erebus(Shadow), Hemera(Day) and Nyx(Night). They practically spell out a production formula.

Life produces new ideas in its bid to survive the diminishing return Entropy inflicts on all forms of production and product. Whether commodity or capital in nature Entropy is trying to push everything back into Chaos even Gaia herself. Love is the strongest motivator toward anthropic appraisal; shadow timely knowledge, and day/night is the most basic of production cycles. The ancients either encoded this information on purpose in fables full of interesting, but fictional characters, or they stumbled upon these “just under the surface” secrets by virtue of trial and error through fevers of allegorical histrionics.

Don’t get confused by hereditary differences in kind. The heavenly gods and titans are the same species if you can call these things a species since they aren’t alive in the biological sense. It’s easier to picture them as metaphors or personifications of elemental forces and ideas. Or maybe as technology or physics. Yet we’ve given them names and history which is anthropic. We’ve preferred a hereditary family model for describing these celestial forces and that tells me this isn’t ancient physics. This is ancient Capitalism.

While Protogenoi were the first, the Othrysians or Titans were their children living on Mount Othrys and the Olympians or Gods were their grandchildren on Mount Olympus. Heavenly gods atop their mountains while the sea-gods swam the deep waters, the giants slept in their vast caves, and the surface world belonged to the mortals where the sun would grow food and rain water crops. The mortal realm is the market of divine providence and frankly without a living ecosystem to test the power of gods they’d persist with no purpose whatsoever. At least for now they’re content to amuse themselves laughing at mankind’s futile imitations.

Though it may not be immediately obvious Mortality is its own branch of creation as old as the Titans, or Giants, or ancient monsters of the seas. Of the mortal branch, mankind constitutes only one family and a rather late arrival as animals were created first from feather, fur, etc. Mankind was formed from clay by the Titan Prometheus when Zeus, drunk on victory over his father Cronus and the Titan forces during the Titanomachy, was looking for more subjects to subjugate. Let’s just say Zeus overestimated himself.

Controlling vast elementary forces created by another is one thing but composing those elements into a non-elemental form takes something else entirely. He hadn’t produced his way to victory over the Titans. He instead leveraged Prometheus’s gift of foresight to superior strategic advantage over a diminished Titan force and then it still took 10 years of constant fighting to secure unchallenged control of the known Universe.

The inherently unpredictable yet productive nature of biological Gaia remains an intrinsic component of the mortal form. We are made of her earthly flesh lacking the permanence of the heavenly realm. No “living” creature survives long without producing more than they consume. The mortal literally innovates or dies; produces our great work and then dies anyway.

We don’t have wings, but we found a way to fly. We always find a way around our limitations. We aren’t just the eternal material of atomic timelessness. We’re the compounding progress of choice driven behaviour; constantly in motion. Moved by and moving all movable things.

“Because Prometheus assigned Epimetheus the task of creating the qualities of wings, fur, strength, cunning, swiftness, and other various traits, by the time he came to working on man, there was little left. So, Prometheus decided to make man stand on only two feet. Prometheus also gave man fire, the means to produce civilization.”

From the very beginning mankind’s unique character can be defined by the ability to leverage opportunity from its limitations and to go beyond them. Where gods represent sovereignty of divine power and animals, perhaps, survival. Man represents higher potential realized through productive behaviour rooted in the impermanence and anthropic appraisal of life. This is why we created civilization in the first place. To get more out of life with what little time we have. To enjoy it by compounding achievements so we don’t have to repeat the mistakes of our past.

Hypetia, 1st known female scientist, Library of Alexandria, Raphael’s School of Athens fresco at the Vatican.

Let the gods run in circles…

Our organizing principal is applying capacity to opportunity thus elevating us beyond mere survival like the animals. With fire we forge the tools that build the future. We extend our will through forces greater than ourselves by understanding nature and collaborating with it. Aligning our interests with nature herself. This is the true science. If only the gods had shown Gaia the respect she deserves how things might have been different for them.

When Zeus refused mankind fire mankind went to war such is our reverence for the freedom the mother of mortality instilled in us. Unlike Zeus or his Titan cousins. We’d rather be destroyed than live under the yoke of a god’s power trip for we are defined by our unstoppable journey onward. Without change we have nothing.

In this spirit our kind has been completely wiped from the earth at least once. Restored by the grandson of Prometheus, Deucalion, in the wake of a world destroying flood invoked by Zeus, or Jove, or Yahweh (name your faith) to punish mankind for rising so quickly in competitions with the Eternals. Displacing power of strength with production through competence. As we started eying that mountain… Zeus got nervous and now I hope you understand why.

We are living clay, constantly reforming, reshaping… compacted and dispersed.

Our independence and fate-less destiny… compelled Prometheus to sacrifice everything to protect us not because he could see great things in our future but precisely because he couldn’t see our future at all. To a genius with perpetual foresight the most exciting thing is NOT knowing something. For the first time in all of creation tomorrow held something new. The Forethinker was almost free.

Prometheus realized the future he conceived with his godly intellect was incomplete. Critical pieces didn’t yet exist. That while he knew he would face torment for eons siding with mankind… Zeus was overstating eternity because Zeus wasn’t capable of making that claim. Not in absolute terms.

You think Prometheus saved us out of love? Think again. This is an immortal being with no concept of relative value. He doesn’t form new ideas. He can only act out his destiny. The difference between him and his brothers and sisters is that he knows the destiny he’s bound to before it happens. Yet as we learned with Cassandra. For several different reasons, some covered here, knowledge of the future is not enough to change it.

The production cycle cannot be denied and knowing how to write isn’t the same as composing an original story. While forward thinking may signify the first step toward production, it isn’t quite far enough. Yes, it helps to think about the future, but without skin in the game… and without the limitations of opportunity’s window… without accountability… free choice… without cycles imposed by necessity there can be no growth.

Godly nature disqualifies from the problems you’d need to experience if you ever want to learn how to solve them.

The artificial (political) problems gods create for each other just aren’t sufficient. Great achievements are reserved for those who overcome great adversity. A mortal being, here in this world for mere moments, can produce something near eternal (now and forevermore through impact on future works and artists), but not the other way around. We are always just moments away from producing the most important contribution of our lives. In this very real way, mankind is more powerful than all the gods.

While it may seem impossible today, people once built massive cities and states reflective of our rightful place as masters of the mortal realm. Instruments of pure will and ambition determined to produce in the face of impossible odds. If the gods couldn’t stop us when we didn’t have cars or telephones then what’s holding you back now?