Man's descent from the gods

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Adam: a Promethean, 218;

because he hearkened to the voice of his wife, 219

Æschylus: his Prometheus Bound, 27;

regarded as responsible for portraying Prometheus as a blameless hero, 35;

the fallacy of this view, 35, 36;

only one play of his trilogy survives, 37;

knew of the vast antiquity of the gods, 173, 184

Alcohol: not bad for the human body, 150;

percentage of, in modern drinks, 151

Ale: its value in old England and ancient Egypt, 152;

thought as necessary as bread by our forefathers, 153;

kept our ancestors healthy and sexually potent, 155;

a powerful anti-scorbutic, 157;

valuable properties of, 160

America: the home of the worst cooks, 84;

abounds in Prometheans, 221;

abandoned nobility and honesty in order to survive, 231 n.;

leaders of, interested only in output and turnover, 242;

and never concerned with humanity, 243;

the land of Puritanism, slave-driving and machinery, 245

Ancestor worship: the root of religion, 23

Aristotle: on honey and wine, 144

Arnold, Matthew: protested against nineteenth century optimism, 68

Artist: superseded by the clumsy scientist in Protestant countries, 84

Aryans: mixed with the Cro-Magnons, 183, 184, 209;

their antiquity, 183, 208;

a brachycephalic race, 182, 184;

the possible reason for the superiority of the Greek branch of, 210 n.

Atlas: the brother of Prometheus, 25, 45;

the supporter of the heavens, 45;

came to a bad end, 49

Bacchantes: description of, 165

Belgium: marked decline in health and beauty with increase of population, 233

Bell, Dr. Robert: on relationship of diet to cancer, 85;

on killing the vital element in food by cooking, 86;

his insistence on uncooked food, 87

Blackie, J. S.: unable to explain seeming injustice to Prometheus, 32;

his insight, 37

Brain: large size of, in Cro-Magnon race, 181, 189, 190, 191, 192;

a large, a sign of superiority, 191, 192

Broadmindedness: means degeneracy if it leads to cross-breeding, 49

Browning: his class the only one that flourished in the nineteenth century, 68

Bushmen: did not boil food, 207

Butter: rich in vitamines, 94

Byron: worshipped Prometheus as a boy, 33;

his schoolboy conception of Prometheus, 33;

failed to grasp Greek view of Prometheus, 34;

protested against nineteenth century optimism, 68;

on the fall of man, 74

Cæsar, Julius: account of the Druids, 9

Cancer: increase of, 88 n.;

due to cooking food, 108

Cannibalism: wrongly interpreted as a sun myth, 16;

practised by modern Eskimos, 17;

practised on account of human flesh being the best food for men, 17

Carlyle: stupidly honoured by the nineteenth century, 65

Catholic Church: her wisdom regarding food, 82;

the storehouse of mediæval and ancient wisdom, 83;

her moderate view regarding butcher meat, 88;

had certain Dionysian principles and spread culture of vine, 236 n.

Children: their alleged innocence the foolish belief of English Protestants and old maids, 4

Chinese: wine drinkers till the fifteenth century, 156;

their refusal to adopt new discoveries, 176;

believe their ancestors were better than themselves, 186 n.

Christ: compared with Prometheus, 32

Christian: does not question his god’s justice in punishing the fallen angels, 2;

his difficulty in explaining the “sons of god” and “giants,” 46;

the nineteenth-century optimists, 68

Christianity: growing indifference of proletariat to, 68;

radically Puritanical, 135, 136;

resembles Prometheanism in ignoring æsthetic-survival-values, 236 n.

Church of England: her indifference to the degradation of the masses, 234

Civilisation: responsible for cancer, 88 n.;

fortunately does not necessarily mean mechanical devices, disease and female suffrage and suffering, 206;

the Promethean, erroneously supposed to be the only kind, 226;

does not necessarily develop from lower to higher, 228;

varies according to the type of man producing it, 229

Clock: “setting it back,” a fallacious argument, 238–241

Cobbett: protested against nineteenth-century optimism, 68

Coffee: a harmful drug, 158;

contains no vitamines, 159 n.

Cooking: a process not dictated by Nature, 81;

Dr. Bell on, 86–89;

Dr. Hutchinson on, 90 n.;

harmfulness of process when repeated often on same product, 92;

may be fatal, 93;

effect of, on vitamines, 101 et seq.;

the easiest form of, and its relation to pottery, 112;

on the Somme, 112;

stewing the easiest form of, 113;

stone-cooking, 113 n.;

restrictions imposed in regard to, 206–208

Cro-Magnons: probably the race from which the gods of Western and Near Eastern religions sprang, 181, 182;

mixed with the Aryans, 183, 184;

god of the Jews and Christians probably a Cro-Magnon, 185, 219;

infinitely superior to modern man, 185;

the discovery of, a revelation to anthropologists, 188;

the superior brain of, 189, 190, 192;

probably exterminated owing to their superiority, 194;

the superiority of their art, 195, 196;

pregnant women frequent in their art, 196;

their simple life of hunting, feasting, art and love, 200;

their chivalrous and noble nature, 201;

their invention of writing, 201;

their deliberate refusal to adopt futile complications, 202, 203, 205;

exterminated by overwhelming numbers, 210;

deified by ancestors of the Greeks, 211

Cronus: mutilates Uranus, 5

Cross-breeding: effects of, 45;

destroys character, 47;

depravity resulting from, 49

Darwin: on the effects of cross-breeding, 45

Deification: instances of, 19 n.;

of conquerors, 42

Demeter: restores Dionysus to life, 134

Devil: see Satan

Dietetics: the necessary creation of Protestantism, 83

Dionysia: the first celebration of the, 164;

some unsatisfactory explanations of, 166, 167, 168;

a new explanation of, 169, 170

Dionysian type: description of, 178, 179;

all gods, saviours, angels, etc., belong to the, 179;

masters women, 214;

and makes them happy, 217;

the only check against Promethean vulgarity, 236;

stoutly denies inevitability of degeneration, 238;

can alone save mankind from Promethean muddle, 247

Dionysus: the Saviour, 118, 170;

his ancestry, 119;

his miraculous birth, 120;

torn in pieces by the Titans, 120;

came later than Prometheus, 121;

his epithets, 121, 136, 137;

the god of “vitamines,” 122;

his worship introduced from Thrace, 123;

taught the use of fermented liquor, 124;

why he was called the son of Zeus, 124;

a divinity resulting from ancestor worship, 125;

saved from fire, 126, 128;

the “twice born,” 127;

Lord of Trees, 129;

the discoverer of honey, 129;

nursed by nymphs, 130;

fed on honey, 130 n.;

his travels, 131;

opposition to his doctrine, 132;

a beneficent deity, 133;

hostile to the Titans, 133;

and torn in pieces by them, 133;

restored to life by Rhea and Demeter, 134;

the Saviour and healer, 135;

the doctor, 141;

taught use of honey, 142;

his remedies, honey, fruit and raw meat, 142;

eater of raw meat, 146, 147;

served only by women and the reason why, 164;

necessary in a Promethean civilisation, 171;

the enemies of, the most savage enemies of mankind, 171

Diseases: of occupation, 70 n.

Dodona: oak-forest at, 130

Druids: their cultivation of memory, 9

Drunkenness: due to adulteration of liquor, 152;

never a serious evil in old England and Greece, 153, 154

Engineers: honoured in Westminster Abbey, 69;

have no regard for the moral and æsthetic consequences of their unscrupulous innovations, 235;

the blind advocate of, 235 n.

England: the home of the worst cooks, 84;

abounds in Prometheans, 221;

to survive had to abandon nobility and honesty, 231 n.;

marked decline in health and beauty with increase of population, 233;

the old peasantry of, formidable because they drank wholesome ale, 244

Epimetheus: the brother of Prometheus, 25;

marries Pandora, 28;

almost half-witted, 49

Eskimos: their cannibalism, 17;

eaters of raw meat, 106

Eve: eats of the Tree of Knowledge, 212;

the first fatal instance of woman’s tastelessness, 218

Fermented liquor: its high value as food, 149, 156;

essential to high civilisations, 157;

the valuable properties of, 159

Fire: stolen by Prometheus, 1 et passim;

withheld by Zeus, 55;

fetched in fennel stalk, 56;

granted by Zeus on wise terms, 57;

produced by friction, 59;

not an unmixed blessing, 75;

introduced agriculture and industry, 76;

ills resulting from, 76–80;

destroys food value, 88, 89;

destroys vitamines, 100;

date of discovery of, 173–177;

restricted use among savages, 205;

often coveted and stolen by inferior races, 208

Food: harmed by fire, 80–82;

ignorance regarding, 81;

the wisdom of the Catholic Church regarding, 82;

better uncooked, 87–90;

the poisonousness of twice-cooked, 92

Frazer, Sir James: interpretation of the mutilations, 6 n.

Frederick the Great: restorer of order, 50

Germany: the home of the worst cooks, 84;

had to abandon nobility and honesty in order to survive, 231 n.;

marked decline in health and beauty with increase of population, 233

Giants: mentioned in the Bible, 46;

their depravity, 48

God: the sons of, marry the daughters of men, 43

Gods: deified conquerors, 43;

were cultured strangers, 44;

probably tall, 44;

belief in personal, correct, 224

Goethe: his atheistic view of Prometheus, 33, 34;

failed to grasp Greek attitude to Prometheus, 34

Golden Age: longing for, 73;

preceded the fall of man, 74

Gorilla: and his kind possibly the degenerate descendants of men, 187

Greeks: their remote ancestors probably cannibals, 17;

and guilty of incest, 22;

regarded Prometheus as the founder of civilisation, 26;

accepted Prometheus myth humbly without understanding, 31;

their love of Zeus, 35, 36;

did not worship Prometheus, 36;

and regarded his punishment as deserved, 36;

trusted Zeus, 38;

deified superior race, 65;

did not regard Zeus as responsible for their civilisation, 69;

would have been staggered at belief that a good god was responsible for modern civilisation, 70;

our predecessors in stupidity but wiser than ourselves, 71;

their pessimism, 198, 199;

their remote ancestors mingled with Cro-Magnons; hence their superiority, 210

Health: appalling state of national, 237

Heaven: believed in because it is pleasant, 140 n.

Hellenes: see Greeks

Hera: her jealousy of Semele, 125, 126

Heracles: releases Prometheus, 51, 117, 118

Hesiod: his fidelity to tradition, 29;

his veneration of Zeus, 36;

on the decline of men, 72;

on the Iron Age, 72;

his pessimism, 73

Honey: use of, discovered and taught by Dionysus, 142;

used as a medicine by antiquity, 143, 144, 145;

the food of the gods, 145

Human flesh: the best food for men, 171

Human sacrifice: in time of Themistocles, 167 n.

Influenza: a deficiency disease, 110

Iron Age: Hesiod on, 72

Jehovah: probably a Cro-Magnon, 211 n.

Kuhn: his interpretation of the Prometheus myth, 39, 40;

Andrew Lang’s objection to his theory, 40

Lang, Andrew: does not attempt to explain Zeus’s anger against Prometheus, 2;

regards the mutilations as too abominable to explain, 6 n.;

shows hopeless disagreement of scholars, 6 n.;

his objection to Kuhn’s theory, 40

Lloyd George: on appalling state of national health, 237

Luther: translates giants as tyrants, 46

Lyell, Sir Charles: an eminent Promethean, 203;

his admiration of ridiculous complications, 204

Madness: usually ascribed to creative genius, 131

Maistre, Joseph de: his belief that modern man is a disease, 225;

his belief in the superior science of antiquity, 241

Man: fall of, 74;

his “Gadarene Progress” to degeneration, 224

Margarine: deficient in vitamines, 94

Max Müller: his false interpretations of myths, 17, 18;

regards unsavoury myths as the disease overtaking religious ideas, 22

Mecone: the meeting at, 26, 29, 30, 54;

the meeting at, probably not religious, 53;

the dispute at, 55

Memory: modern disbelief in, 7;

bad, the feature distinguishing modern man from animals and the ancients, 8;

bad, one of the unmistakable signs of progress, 8;

robust, of the ancients, 9;

impaired by writing, 9;

historical facts preserved by, 10;

instances of long, 11, 12;

stronger the further we recede from the age of print, 12

Menœtius: the brother of Prometheus, 25;

came to a bad end, 49

Mill, John Stuart: stupidly honoured by the nineteenth century, 65;

a henpecked Promethean, 122

Mousterians: the remote ancestors of the Cro-Magnons, 205

Murray, Gilbert: leaves the mutilation in the Uranus-Cronus myth aside, 5, 6

Muses: the daughters of Memory, 15 n.

Mutilation: in the Uranus-Cronus myth, 5;

its interpretation essential to understanding the myth, 6;

Sir James Frazer’s interpretation of, 6 n.;

reason of, 50

Myths: anything obscure or obscene in them conveniently ignored by modernity, 4;

should be approached reverently, 7;

probably records of actual occurrences, 14;

not to be interpreted as personifications of natural phenomena, 15

Napoleon: restorer of order, 50;

never heartily loved by any woman, 215

Nietzsche: on the fall of man, 74;

his belief that man is in a decline, 224

Nineteenth Century: the Alexandrian Age of Stupidity, 64;

its abuse of everything noble, 64;

enough to make working-classes atheists, 65;

honourable to depart from beliefs of, 65;

regarded gutter-smartness as superiority, 65;

misery during, 67;

its foolish belief that everything new is an improvement, 67;

its resolute optimism Christian optimism, 67;

its gross errors of diet, 92;

produced incurable old sentimentalists, 235 n.

Noah: his immaculate pedigree, 48;

planted the vine, 142

Nomadic life: ended by discovery of fire, 76;

illness due to abandonment of, 76

Nymphs: nursed Dionysus, 130

Odin: mingling of races after his immigration, 47

Pandora: wife of Prometheus and Epimetheus, 25;

creation of, 28;

her casket of evils, 114;

the first fatal instance of woman’s tastelessness, 218

Pelmanism: reason for sudden vogue of, 8

Pessimism: due to ill-health, 198

Phallus: carried by virgins in the Dionysia, 137;

the meaning of, in the Dionysia, 161–165

Plague: the great, probably due to Puritan’s interference with ale, 149 n.

Poets: their obtuseness with regard to Prometheus, 33

Pottery: introduced by fire, 75, 79;

its relation to the easiest and most pernicious form of cooking, 112;

date of invention of, 176

Pregnancy: depicted in Cro-Magnon art, 196;

reason of Cro-Magnon admiration of, 197, 199;

the whole of its associations loathsome to modernity, 198

Progress: bad memory one of the signs of, 8;

every kind of blackguardism regarded as, 65;

the belief in, one of the many nineteenth-century absurdities, 67;

not necessarily to something better, 227;

produces ill-health, 238

Prohibition: a Promethean conspiracy against man, 242;

designed to keep modern slaves below par, 244

Promethean Type: description of its boy-scout mind, 177, 178;

all devils and demons belong to the, 179;

judges by success, 193;

the best worshippers of women, 217;

hearken to the voice of their wives, 219;

never regards æsthetic-survival-values, 236;

sacrifices humanity to “Progress,” 241;

never concerned with humanity, 243;

strong in the innocence of its dangerous stupidity, 246

Prometheus: steals fire, 1, 36 et passim;

supposed to benefit mankind, 2;

Shelley’s shallow view of, 2 n.;

his genealogy, 25;

deceives Zeus, 26, 56, 66;

the founder of civilisation, 26;

his punishment, 28;

impossible to interpret him as a phenomenon of nature, 30;

belongs to the oldest stratum of Greek mythology, 31;

compared with Christ, 32;

not worshipped by the Greeks, 36, 62;

who regarded his punishment as deserved, 36;

a perfect blend of two races, 45;

Zeus’s most powerful rival, 51;

jealous of Zeus, 52;

a revolutionary and demagogue, 57, 58;

divulges secret of fire-kindling, 58;

his torture demanded by his victims, 60, 62;

his supernatural punishment, 60, 61;

a depraved and foolish man, 65;

his theft of fire a calamity to man, 66;

comparison with Semitic story of fall of man, 74;

altar dedicated to him by Athenian potters, 79;

his invention of pottery, 112;

released by Heracles, 117;

the reason of his release, 118;

a malignant power, 133;

the antiquity of his crime, 173;

a half-bred Cro-Magnon, 209

Protestantism: its foolish abolition of fasts and feasts, 83;

dietetics the necessary creation of, 83;

breeds loathing of pregnancy, 198 n.

Protestants: their foolish belief that children are innocent, 4

Puritanism: despises the body and censures the pleasures connected with it, 91;

ignorance regarding food, 92

Puritans: their adulteration of ale, 152;

an unscrupulous commercial and industrial class hostile to the body and sex, 234, 235

Raw meat: medicinal value of, 146;

eaten at the Dionysia, 164

Religions: traditional records of man’s past greatness, 224

Rhea: restores Dionysus to life, 134

Romans: allowed father to decide which children should survive, 215

Ruskin: protested against nineteenth-century optimism, 68

Satan: punished for a crime, 2;

Shelley’s shallow view of, 2 n.;

the Archetype of Promethean men, 218

Scholars: their stupid superciliousness towards antiquity, 3;

their foolish belief that we are superior to the ancients, 4;

their hopeless disagreement, 6 n.

Scientist: the substitution of the clumsy, for the artist, 84

Scurvy: due to absence of vitamines, 97;

symptoms of, 98;

mild forms of, 99;

the cure for, 100;

undiagnosed, very prevalent, 103, 108;

recent outbreaks of, 104, 105;

due to potato famine, 110

Semele: the mother of Dionysus, 118, 119, 120;

a simple Greek maiden afterwards regarded as half divine, 125

Sex: joys of, dependent on good health, 161;

associated with guilt only in stupid Promethean age, 213

Sexual potency: reduced by mistakes in diet, 90;

impaired by lack of vitamines, 96, 108;

restoration of, 118;

secured by drinking good ale, 155

Shelley: his shallow view of Satan and Prometheus, 2 n.;

his schoolboy view of Prometheus, 33;

failed to grasp Greek view of Prometheus, 34;

his foolish conception of Zeus, 51

Silenus: taught Dionysus, 129

Smiles, Samuel: with resolute vulgarity wrote the Magnificat of the Engineers, 235 n.

Socrates: as an inveterate old moralist and Puritan has set the tone of much in modern Europe, 5 n.

Spencer, Herbert: regarded ancestor-worship as origin of myths, 15;

his masterly interpretation of myths, 19;

regarded ancestor-worship as the root of religion, 23;

on parasites, etc., being examples of successful adaptation, 193

Stew: the worst form of cooking, 112, 113

Success: vulgar modern belief in, 193;

erroneously identified with superiority, 232

Survival values: vital: enumeration of some, 230;

may mean abandoning some form of superiority, 231;

æsthetic: enumeration of some, 232;

disregarded by Christianity and by Prometheans, 236;

incomprehensible to Americans, 243

Tea: a harmful drug, 158;

contains no vitamines, 159

Temperance: true, should aim at producing pure drink, 154

Tennyson: stupidly honoured by the nineteenth century, 65

Titans: their descent, 44;

a mighty race, 45;

tear Dionysus to pieces, 120, 133;

hostile to Dionysus, 133;

hostile to man, 134;

half-bred Cro-Magnons, 209

Trepanning: performed by the Cro-Magnons, 200 n.

Tylor: instances of truth of old traditions, 10, 11

Uranus: mutilated by Cronus, 5;

probably a Cro-Magnon, 184, 201

Vineyards: round monasteries, 236 n.

Virgin-birth: the interpretation given by the Puritanical bias of the Christian investigator, 5

Virginity: a negative ideal, 197;

admiration of, due to modern pessimism, 198

Virgins: carried the phallus in the Dionysia, 137

Vitamines: the imponderable elements in food, 93, 95;

diseases due to absence of, 96;

the anti-scorbutic, 97;

killed by modern cooking, 100, 101;

Dionysus the god of, 122

Westminster Abbey: honours many votaries of Prometheus, 69

Wine: Persian legend of origin of, 148 n.;