Prometheus and the Great Goddess

Edward C. Whitmont's The Alchemy of Healing: Psyche and Soma

Mythological awareness tells us:
One of the conditions for Prometheus' release from bondage to the rock of materiality was that he reveal to the gods a vital secret upon which the continuity of the world depended, that only he, the representative of mankind, not the gods, knew about. This secret referred to the need for having the Great Goddess joined in marriage to a human mortal, not to another god; the transpersonal must connect with the individuating human consciousness.

For the person, the difficult and often painful, "nearly too difficult" assignment of becoming what one potentially "is" includes alternating phases of illness and healing, of experiencing guilt and redemption, egotism and sacrifice, and thereby integrating one's separatist or destructive drives into the "formal order of the cosmos." (221)