So, where does all this obsession with thieves start? Lord knows where mine came from, I haven't the money nor time to get that much therapy, but culturally, why is the Thief such a figure in our collective psyche? Or is it even? Am I exaggerating the place of the Thief because of my fondness for the archetype? To answer that question let's go right back, to the beginning of thievery.
Who was the First Thief? From a purely historical point of view, I don't know if that question can even be answered with accuracy from any kind of perspective, but we are talking culture here. For this post at least, I am going to stick with Western culture, and delve back into the roots of what our current society would at least like to think of as its forebears: the ancient Greeks.
And if you ponder it only for a little moment, you will easily come to the same conclusion that I have: once of the earliest described heroes was a thief: Prometheus.
The son of two Titans, who stole fire from Zeus to deliver it to the mortals of the world. But if we look at him further, the story becomes even more interesting....
Prometheus is only the best known of the Titans, and they themselves are an interesting piece of mythology. Basically, they are a group of gods who existed before the gods of Olympus, who are the actual focus of worship of the ancient Greeks. So they are a set of gods who were around before the gods that the society worshipped and had all its temples to came along, and kicked them out. It might seem a little weird, but there was quite the tradition of it in European and "Near" Eastern mythology. The Norse gods (Thor, Odin etc...) did the same thing with a group of brutes called the Jotuns, as well as the strange mix of gods in Ireland, ending with the Tuatha Dé Danann being apparently the fifth set of conquering deities. They trounced the fourth in line - the Fir Bolg.
Of course, cultures make up their mythologies based around the structure of their current society, and long lost almost forgotten historical events. So in settled and conquered and re-settled areas of the world like Europe, it isn't really surprising to find a common theme in your god-stories. What is interesting is that in most cases, the conquered proto-gods are normally giant, unwashed, brutish figures, who the more sophisticated gods of the current occupiers nobly vanquish, and then imprison or wipe out. This is not necessarily pure self aggrandisement, or typical xenophobic demonisation either, of course. In virtually all historical cases, the only way that one culture can entirely supplant another is by being the possessors of a more advanced set of technologies, and subsequently a more sophisticated society. So in a way the mythologies of all these ancient peoples are simply recording an understandably biased account of the likely true history of events.
In the case of Prometheus however, we get something a little strange. The tale was first recorded in the 8th century BCE, probably by a writer named Hesiod. In his tales, the Titans are all named figures, and when the Gods of Olympus come and conquered them, there followed a sort of peace treaty. It is described in Hesiod's work as the "settling of accounts" between mortals and immortals, and it is where Prometheus plays his first thiefly trick on the Gods of Olympus.
He presents a pair of sacrifices to Zeus, I guess as a sort of peace offering, and asks Zeus to choose which one he would like. The two choices are from the same animal, and one is the stomach of the beast, all stuffed with something. The second is a bulging parcel, all wrapped up in glistening fat.
Zeus (predictably) chooses the more appetising fatty parcel, but it is revealed to be the bones of the animal that were contained inside, while the less appealing looking stomach was of course stuffed with all the good, edible cuts of meat. Interestingly, this is related as the precedent for why when the ancient Greeks made sacrifices to their Olympian gods, they gave over the fat and bones, but kept the good edible meat for themselves. A nice piece of sophistry perhaps, but note that it is attributed to one of the conquered Titans, and not made out as a generous act of the gods who the writer and his audience were actually supposed to be worshipping.
It is this first, lesser know piece of trickery that actually leads to the better known one - stealing fire from the gods. See Zeus, angry at this deception, takes fire away from the mortals, in retaliation. He always was a capricious and high handed guy. So Prometheus goes and steals it back, so that human kind need not live in comfortless poverty for all eternity. Zeus then enacts the famous punishment on the young titan, of chaining him to a great rock at the end of the world (well, the Caucuses, to be precise. But that was the end of the world, to the ancient Greeks. It was also the location of the kingdom that Jason sailed to, with his Argonauts to steal the Golden Fleece.) There an eagle comes to eat out his liver from his living body each day, which then slowly heals itself overnight, only to be re-torn from his living flesh the next day.
Interestingly, the story doesn't end there. Herakles (possibly known to some of you by the Anglicised spelling Hercules) the most renowned and admired hero of the ancient Greeks, set Prometheus free from his punishment, killing the Eagle and breaking his chains.
Now, the "Trickster" god, or something like him is not uncommon in many cultures, but I find the Prometheus version compelling for several reasons. Firstly, as the "Fathers of Democracy" and founders of the civilisation that the Roman empire went on to model itself on, they have this place in Western society as a sort of founders of our culture. We have to take all that brings with it though, and Prometheus is one of their earliest myths.
What I find really fun about it all though is this: remember I said before that cultures model their mythologies on the structures of their own society? That is a well understood rule in sociology. Cannibalistic tribal societies universally give themselves angry, vengeful gods, who need to be appeased. Pastoral societies of wandering herdsmen give themselves "shepherd" gods - or often a single all powerful god - with the best interests of its flock of worshippers in mind. And what the Greeks did here is really interesting.
They were a society with democratic input, but still nonetheless ruled by a powerful elite of dynastic families that owned most of the land and businesses. Sound familiar? And what did they give themselves, in terms of the earliest myths of their gods and rulers?
A squabbling, self interested set of gods, who were out-smarted by the ancient people who they had supplanted - and all for the benefit of the little mortals who the current gods ruled over. The original hero of our ancient forebears was a rebel, a trickster, a thief, and he was not alone. Remember what those Argonauts were up to, now. I think in the Prometheus myth we can see the earliest strands of our culture's love affair with the thief. So what better place to start our journey, really?
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