44 pages • 1-hour read
Prometheus Unbound
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Symbols & Motifs
The Indian Caucasus Mountains
In Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, the Titan Prometheus is chained to a cliff in the Indian Caucasus, a mountain range now known as the Hindu Kush that stretches from modern-day China through Afghanistan and Pakistan. Aeschylus’ original play also situates Prometheus in the Caucasus, but in what is now the nation of Georgia. Shelley’s decision to move the setting eastward connects Prometheus to knowledge and the rise of civilization.
Eighteenth- and 19th-century scholars like German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel believed in the since-discredited idea of Indigenous Aryanism. According to this pseudoscientific theory, a group of so-called “Aryans” traveled from the Indian subcontinent to Europe, bringing their advanced civilization with them and originating modern European languages. Further, geographers of Shelley’s time wrongly believed that the headwaters of all of the rivers in Asia were in the Indian Caucasus mountains. From these mistaken ideas, we get the term “Caucasian” to denote white people.
Based on these misconceptions about language, geography, and civilization, Shelley set his place in the place from which he believed knowledge stems and life-giving water emerges. Thus, when Prometheus is released and his knowledge is transmitted worldwide, it spreads westward. Further, just as Prometheus brings new intellectual life to the people, the waters flowing from the mountain range bring life to Asia, both the figure in the play and the geographical location.
Water
Water, a reoccurring motif in Prometheus Unbound, promotes the theme of Cosmic Harmony as an Ideal of Human Progress. Water is often used as a symbol for birth, renewal, and life: Amniotic fluid has been descriptively figured as the water that sustains humans before birth; after birth, water is required for life. Rivers and streams are frequently described as a medium that connects natural elements together in movement. Shelley uses all of these associations in the Romantic naturalism that imbues his play.
For instance, in Act II, a Faun speculates that the spirits and voices of the forest live in “water-flowers that pave / The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools” (II.2.72-73). “Water-flowers” here likely refers to waterlilies, another traditional symbol of rebirth and, in Buddhism, of enlightenment. Thus, the spirits and voices of the forest, nourished by their aquatic environment, go forth to spread their light throughout the world before returning to the “clear lakes and pools” to recommence the cycle.
The importance of this motif is also seen in the figures of Panthea and Ione, Prometheus’s constant companions during his bondage, and of Asia, his paramour. Panthea, Asia, and Ione are Oceanids, or ocean nymphs. Thus, Prometheus is attended to by representatives of the Ocean, suggesting that these bodies of water spread his message throughout the world. This idea is reinforced in Act III, Scene 2, when the Ocean celebrates the news of Prometheus’s release and relates to Apollo that the Nereids, or sea nymphs, celebrate as well.
Light
Shelley relies on the traditional association of light with knowledge and insight for his conception of Prometheus Unbound as Myth Rewritten as Political Allegory. Shelley was a proponent of liberal Enlightenment values—a movement whose name reflects this symbolic use of the image of light: Its adherents wanted to illuminate human society with knowledge. Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau promoted scientific reasoning and humanist values as a vehicle for human improvement. However, Shelley also subscribed to a conspiracy theory that held up light as a marker of knowledge: the idea of the Bavarian Illuminati, whose ideas supposedly were a key engine of the French Revolution (see Background).
In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley uses the mythic framework of Prometheus, the light-bringer who rebelled against a tyrant, to explore the utopian possibilities of intellectual and moral illumination. Prometheus is brimming with an “overpowering light” (II.1.71), which eventually flows throughout the world—an image that draws on his mythical role of bringing divine fire to humans. After his release and reunion with Asia, naturalistic depictions are imbued with this light of knowledge, such as the “serener light and crimson air” that surrounds “bright golden globes / of fruit” (III.3.134, 138-39) around the cave where Prometheus and Asia will make their home. The Moon, watching from above, celebrates this light and connects it to the emerging utopia: “On [the Earth] a light, a life, a power” (IV.441). In this way, Shelley suggests that once Enlightenment knowledge is freed from the censorship imposed by tyrannical monarchy, human civilization will flourish.
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