MD - Gemininity

[David Morris]

"Who should be listening to a Tale of Geminity," explains Pliny, "if not 
Twins." (315.10-11)

Another primordial pair has come to my attention, and this one seems to bear 
directly on the Gemininity of Mason & Dixon:  Prometheus & Epimetheus.

http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-Sept-1996/malouf.html

Epimetheus, or The Spirit of Reflection
David Malouf
©all rights reserved

We have all heard of Prometheus, great rebel against the gods and bringer to 
earth of a commodity, fire, which we have depended on from earliest times 
for much of what makes us human: campfires, cooked meat, the forging of iron 
into ploughshares, horseshoes, swords. What is not so well known is that 
Prometheus had a brother, also a titan and demi-god, but as his name 
suggests quite opposite in nature and habit of thought. Prometheus means 
he-who-thinks-before, Epimetheus he-who-thinks-after. Before and after. That 
seems clear enough. If Prometheus was quick and decisive, thinking ahead, 
his mind leaping swiftly to the essence of things, then Epimetheus must have 
been slow, perceiving only later or too late where events had been leading 
and what might have been required of him. His nature was sluggish. He had 
always to catch up slowly with what had already occurred.

But is this really what is intended by thinking-after? Mightn't it equally 
suggest the opposite? That Epimetheus was not slow but on the contrary 
impulsive, acting first and only later grasping, by reflection, the 
significance of what his eager spirit had done. Clearly Prometheus was a 
rebel and Epimetheus was not. Perhaps it is here that we should seek the 
difference between two brothers whose stance with regard to the world and to 
the gods who are supposed to govern it has had so large an influence on our 
lives.


It was natural to Prometheus, whose spirit was always in search of something 
to oppose and act upon, that he should see the gods, and especially the 
chief among them, Zeus, as hostile, an embodiment of everything that stood 
between him and the world. He needed to see the gods as being outside 
himself, separate and above, before he could break free of them. And 
afterwards, to justify his rebellion, he had to proclaim them tyrants, 
unwilling to relinquish even a crumb of their power.

But Epimetheus thought otherwise. The gods for him were within. They were 
projections of the contradictory forces that made up his nature. Once named 
and given body, they could be grasped, contemplated, so that a man could 
deal cleanly and in the light with what otherwise might remain murky and 
confused. The gods for Epimetheus were aspects of his own life as thought. 
There was no line that could be drawn between what belonged to the gods and 
what was strictly his own, so the dark and sometimes risky business of 
dealing with them, all the details of observance, but of avoidance too, were 
for him ways of handling, in a dramatic way, the forces that were at work in 
his own soul. His awe before them was a proper, though cautious attention to 
the mystery of his own being, the secrecies of the heart and the crooked but 
crookedly straight ways in which his mind worked. He was impressed by his 
brother's capacity for resentment but did not share it. As for the 
punishment Prometheus had incurred, the plunging hour after hour for all the 
hours of daylight of the eagle's beak that tore at his liver, the growing 
back of the organ each night so that the torment could begin all over again 
at dawn--well, he had doubts about who it was exactly who was responsible 
for that, but grieved in a brotherly way for the affliction and out of 
loyalty and old affection spoke up and took his brother's part.






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