Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) begins with a haunting scene: an alien who resembles a human, only giant and perfectly formed as if chiseled from marble, drinks a potion of black goo, dissolves into a body of water, and seeds life on a planet. Then, millions of years later, a revelation: archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway discover that ancient cultures from all over Earth depicted giants gesturing to the same cluster of stars. The archaeologists, accompanied by their patron, the wealthy industrialist Peter Weyland, embark on a mission into space. They hope to meet mankind’s alien creators and learn about humanity’s past and future.

Prometheus has encountered mixed reactions from fans and critics. While it was praised in some quarters as thought-provoking and ambitious, many criticized it as a vacuous disappointment that drew on and misused the past, particularly its own past, the film Alien (1979), to which it was “supposed to be” a prequel. Its use of the Classical past is especially manifest: even before we see the alien who resembles a Greek or Roman statue made animate, we know from the title that this is a film that will reread and reprocess Classical myth (although classicists have not had much to say on this movie yet, aside from a thoughtful blog post by Rogers and Stevens near its release).

The expedition’s spaceship itself is named Prometheus, and Prometheus figures abound. Weyland draws from (and misrepresents) the story early on to explain how he sees himself and their mission:

“The titan Prometheus wanted to give mankind equal footing with the gods. For that, he was cast from Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return.”

This presentation of the myth has no support from any ancient quarter; Weyland has misread it. In Hesiod, humanity’s abjection is the consequence of tricks and counter-tricks between Zeus and Prometheus. Even the very fire that Prometheus steals for humankind was hidden in the first place as Zeus’ tit for a Promethean tat. Apotheosis is not really on the menu. Furthermore, if Weyland really had understood the story, he would think twice about following Prometheus’ tracks — and, if he had understood Greek myth, he would know about the dangers of confronting the gods. Weyland has his own conception of humanity’s past and future, and he has construed the myth to fit.

When he does meet a space god near the end of the film, he discovers the deficiencies of his reading. The space god, whose race the movie calls Engineers, proves to be very alien indeed. He bludgeons Weyland to death with the head of the android, David, the very creation that Weyland thought put him in the league of the gods. Prometheus has been criticized for its engagement with the past, but I think that it has been mischaracterized. The film doesn’t use and abuse the past — it is itself about the problems of using and abusing of the past.

“When gods and mortal men were distinguished at Mecone …” (Theog. 535–36)

The film’s proposition that ancient aliens played a pivotal role in creating humanity has a long pedigree. In science-fiction, Garrett Serviss’ 1898 novel Edison’s Conquest of Mars — a sequel to War of the Worlds — already made aliens responsible for ancient Egypt’s wonders. More famous and influential is H. P. Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness; in cinema, ancient aliens have appeared in films like Quartermass and the Pit (1967), Stargate (1994), and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull (2008), to name a few notable instances. Yet the film’s engagement with the past derives more particularly not from earlier science-fiction, but from pseudo-science, and specifically from Erich von Däniken, whose ideas about ancient astronauts have become the most influential manifestation of the phenomenon. Consider, for example, the History Channel’s show Ancient Aliens, which originated as a special that provided a synopsis of von Däniken’s claims.

von Däniken’s theories, most notoriously espoused in Chariots of the Gods? (1968), are dogmatic and literalist: ancient aliens engineered mankind, possibly by mating with primitive hominids. They have occasionally interfered since, and anything from antiquity that is astonishing or imaginative is flensed of its cultural valence and reread to write a new past using what one scholar terms the interpretatio technologica, by analogy with the interpretatio Romana. Gods, impressive artifacts and structures, myths, and anything fantastic or interesting are rewritten into a technological or (pseudo-)scientific framework.

Ancient humans become impoverished in spirituality, ingenuity, and imagination — but their descriptions remain steadfastly reliable! The chariot that appears in Ezekiel’s vision, for which Chariots is titled, really existed as described, but it must have been an alien spacecraft. Or, the portrayal of Zeus’ lightning in the Hesiodic “Titanomachy” is so fearsome that it must really reflect space gods using atomic weaponry (similar claims routinely are made about the divine weapons in the Ramayana and Mahabharata). Or, Polyphemus was the product of genetic engineering. Or, Greek temples were originally built as refueling stations for alien aircraft (it is a pity for von Däniken that he knew nothing of Abaris the Hyperborean, called aithrobates because he traveled through the air on an arrow given to him by Apollo [Porph. VP 29]). For von Däniken’s take on Greek and Roman antiquity in particular, consult Odyssey of the Gods: The Alien History of Ancient Greece (2002); or, better yet: don’t.

von Däniken’s reading is, like Weyland’s, highly teleological. All human history is explained through alien involvement, and it also provides a road-map for humanity’s future. von Däniken, like Weyland and his archaeologists Shaw and Holloway, presume that our creators want us to advance to their level and join them in space. Here, the German title of Chariots, Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (“Memories of the Future”) is significant: the space gods who made humanity in the distant past point to what humanity will become in the future. Our creators are like us, they want us to find them, and, someday, we will be with them, apotheosized, living among the stars.

What interests me the most about this theory is its approach to the past. I suspect that its readings have become so popular because they make the past tidy and intelligible. Ancient humans and the gods are familiar and explicable because they are deviations from our present state; ancient humans were only less technologically and intellectually sophisticated than we, and the gods are only more advanced. The past makes sense, it conceals a secret, and human history is progressing towards a predetermined and revelatory end.

Yet any classicist knows that the past is not so easily explicable. It exists only in fragments and shadows. In many respects, it is unknowable, and it has no intrinsic meaning; thus it may account for features of the present, but it cannot be pieced together into a coherent whole that will reveal the future. It is precisely their unwillingness to endure the uncertainty that comes with reading the past that drives von Däniken, Weyland, and contemporary proponents of ancient astronauts to write their history.

Tellingly, features of von Däniken’s history are already present in Hesiod — but his conclusions are quite different, because his ideology is quite different. In Works and Days, humanity as we know it is likewise the product of engineering by the gods, who go through four iterations of trial and error before hitting on the recipe for modern humankind. And here, too, humans are hybrid. Our race, the race of iron, follows on the race of heroes, who were created from the mingling of gods and men. Of course, nowadays the gods, like von Däniken’s aliens, interact with humans much less often.

Yet for Hesiod human history is not the story of the ascent up to our rightful homes on Olympus. The race of heroes was closer to the gods than we. Instead, the modern human is destined for subjection and abjection (W&D 176–8):

Would that I were not among the fifth men, but died before or lived after — For truly it is a race of iron! Never by night or by day will they stop wasting away from toil and woe.

In Hesiod’s worldview, the goal of the human project is not for us to pursue and attain parity with the gods. We know, after all, from the Theogony what that would mean: children inevitably try to overthrow their fathers. The young become rivals to the old. The future tries to master the past. If humans were to someday become equal to their creators, then their creators would not be be secure. Indeed, according to Hesiod the gods will bring our race to an end precisely when intergenerational strife proliferates and humans cease respecting the status of their parents and the gods (W&D 180–89):

Zeus will end this race of mortal men, too, when they are born with a hoary head. A father will not be like his children, nor children like their father … Soon they will dishonor their aging parents: they, cruel men ignorant of the gods’ vengeance, will censure their parents by speaking harsh words. Nor will they repay their aging parents for rearing them — these men whose justice is the fist!

For Hesiod there are no “memories of the future” to which we can aspire. His contrasting account ought to throw a wrench in any Dänikean certainty: humans may be created beings; the past may be knowable; and there may be channels through which we can access the gods. Yet this may be a universe in which humans are forever separate and forever inferior. And the gods may not have our best interests at heart.

“Gods should not be like mortals in their anger.” (Bacchae 1348)

Prometheus sets von Däniken’s dogma against the unknowability of our past and the problem of constructing a past that gives us meaning. Weyland, Shaw, and Holloway are Dänikean fundamentalists. They think his history is certain, and they read myth, religion, history, and science through that lens and take it as an infallible guide to the future. Weyland claims that their mission will answer the big questions:

Where do we come from?
What is our purpose?
What happens when we die?

Only the first of these is actually a question about the past, and it is the first that the expedition answers. As the film’s first scene hints, von Däniken, Weyland, Shaw, and Holloway were right. Mankind was engineered by space gods.

Yet their knowledge of the past remains fragmentary, and the film cautions against certainty when reading the past for meaning in the present. While correct about human origins, they are wrong about the originators. All but one Engineer, who has been hibernating for thousands of years, has died in a mysterious catastrophe. Thus the possible referents for the eponymous Prometheus are compounded: the ship and expedition; Weyland in particular; the Engineer at the beginning of the film who drank the black goo, writhed in suffering, and died to create life; the Engineer race itself. For the catastrophe apparently resulted from manipulating that same black goo.

This goo, which produces life and death, is a recurring sticking point for critics: its mechanisms are unexplained and probably inexplicable. The crew also discovers that, for reasons that they and we cannot determine, these Engineers decided prior to their sudden demise to wipe the human race out.

This discovery raises the possibility that the world of Prometheus is not a Dänikean world, but a Hesiodic one. Did the Engineers judge humanity to be deficient in dike, and thus in need of eradication? Perhaps it is significant that the film is set around Christmas, and the decision to call the human experiment to an end happened about two thousand years earlier. Or did the Engineers all that time ago somehow conclude that humans would exceed their appropriate bounds, upset the distinction between mortals and gods, and become rivals to their progenitors? As in Hesiod, a recurring theme in Prometheus is children overthrowing their parents — and humans have, after all, shown that they can create life like the android David.

Yet the past remains only fragments and shadows. These questions are never answered, even when a live Engineer is eventually interrogated. Here, the most useful touchstone is not Hesiod — for Hesiod, the universe is misanthropic, but (like von Däniken’s) intelligible. Instead, the tragic universe offers a better parallel: there is order to the world, and there are gods, but they are difficult or impossible to access. Humans’ knowledge of the past is fragmentary and their readings of the past are deficient. True knowledge is revealed in pieces, and only too late to help. When one does meet the gods, they prove to be both more than human and also very disappointing. Their machinations, their grudges, and their anger resemble humanity’s; but they are so excessive and their motivations are often so obscure that they seem very alien indeed.

Euripides’ Bacchae provides an apt analogy: that play, too, begins with a Stranger who is not human, but resembles a human, and is, we suppose, intelligible like one. The play, after all, begins with him declaring his identity, his genealogy, and his mission. But we come to realize just how strange he is as he orchestrates his bizarre and macabre revenge. In a like fashion we are violently alienated from the lone Engineer encountered by Weyland’s expedition, who, on the one hand, is a powerful space god with true knowledge about the past, but who, on the other, rampages like a dumb brute when humanity comes face to face with him. Like all of the film’s Engineers, he is silent. We must read him from how he looks and what he does. He is mighty, advanced, and inscrutable; but he does look similar to a human, and he certainly rages like one:

The Engineer and Dionysus prove to be mysterious, alien, and terrible. When we really meet them, we find that we have misread and misunderstood them. At the end of the Bacchae, when the Stranger finally appears as Dionysus, Pentheus has been dismembered; Agave and her sisters are condemned to exile; and — strangest of all — Cadmus and Harmonia are forced from the city, only someday to be transmuted into snakes, only someday to lead a host of barbarians against Greece! These gods are more powerful and more terrible than any human; yet, for all their strangeness, they are also disappointingly banal. Thus Cadmus complains that gods should not rage like men (Bacchae 1344–49):

Cadmus: Dionysus, we beg you — we have done wrong.
Dionysus: You understood us too late. When you should have known, you did not.
Cadmus: We realize this, but you go too far!
Dionysus: Indeed; for I, though a god, was insulted by you.
Cadmus: Gods should not be like mortals in their anger.
Dionysus: Long ago my father Zeus approved of these things.

Dionysus’ justifications are surprising. No punishment is too extreme for disrespecting a god, and his revenge was ordained long ago anyway. So perhaps there really are gods, and perhaps they guard their separate and superior position jealously. Perhaps Zeus does have an ancient design that was plotted in the distant past and is shaping the present and future. Perhaps events are even unfolding according to plan. But, as Cadmus and the expedition in Prometheus discover, it may be that we can never really know the gods, our past, and the divine plan, and we will inevitably misread them. And it may be that the gods are not really worth trying to know in the first place.

“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.” (T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia)

This message about the unknowability of the gods and the past and the problems of reading the past and constructing sure meaning from it makes, I allow, for some pretty grim fare. But the film insists on it, even on a more local level. It is nominally a prequel to the film Alien, and fans expected it to explain its predecessor and imbue their beloved classic with new meaning. Yet it actively refuses to help us reread that earlier film, our past and its future. We meet aliens and see the origins of a few aliens, but not our dear Alien, the xenomorph; the expedition visits the moon LV 223, not the moon that appears in Alien, LV 426. There are provocative similarities and hints, but, in the end, we find only tantalizing fragments that don’t add up into an intelligible past.

This ethos surely contributed to whatever vitriol Prometheus did attract. At the same time, the film does concede that the urge to find meaning in the present by interrogating the past is a feature of the human condition. The android David is baffled at the end of Prometheus when Shaw, the only human survivor of the expedition, says that they will not return to Earth but will instead look for more Engineers. Despite everything that has befallen them, Shaw still thinks that answers from humanity’s creators mean something. And it rings true that Shaw would persist in trying to uncover the lost history of mankind and the nature of its creators: recall that Erich von Däniken claims to have sold 65 million copies of his books and to be the most successful non-fiction author of all time; that History Channel’s Ancient Aliens just concluded its seventh season; that there are full-blown religions based on the proposition that our gods were astronauts who created humanity, shaped human history, and have a future in store for us all.

Yet I note that, although the methods of von Däniken, Weyland, Shaw, and the ancient aliens theorists may be dogmatic, literalist, and naive, and although they may treat the past in a way that would make any classicist cringe, they derive from a very human certainty that the past really means something for the present and has answers for us today. And, though I am reluctant to make the comparison, I as a classicist have that same certainty — but knowing full well how distant, fragmented, unknowable, and open to misreading and rereading the past must be.

Thus the film dwells on an unpleasant quandary: humans want a past that means something and compulsively interrogate it, but the past and its answers will be incomplete, unstable, and perhaps disappointing. So what does one do? There are kinds of certainty that one can grasp at for comfort, such as Dänikean certainty. In Prometheus such certainty leads to error and disaster, and it is rightfully rejected. But near the beginning of the film, there is another response to the hurt of yearning for a coherent past and sure meaning in a universe where these are impossibilities.

While the Prometheus is still sailing through space to the moon to which (the expedition thinks) space gods have invited humanity, the human crew hibernates. David the android mans the ship alone. He studies Proto-Indo-European, peers into the dreams of the sleeping humans, and raids the ship’s video library. He is studying his own makers and their past. One comes to suspect — as is confirmed over the course of the film — that he learns just how disappointing his own creators are and just how problematic it is to use the past to find answers for the questions that matter. But David accepts no false Dänikean comfort for that existential pain.

We see that he is particularly taken with Lawrence of Arabia, and with one scene in particular. The scene: Lawrence has a trick. He can snuff out a burning match with his bare fingers. Another soldier, William Potter, attempts the same, only to yelp in pain and shake the match out when the flame burns him. How does Lawrence endure the pain of the fire? Lawrence answers: “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”

How does David endure the knowledge that he lives in a universe without certainty, a universe where there is no sure meaning, where the past does seem to matter, but where it has so few real and satisfying answers to the questions that we yearn to know? In his solitude, while his creators slumber nearby, David chants the answer to himself as a mantra: “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”

Matt Cohn is an Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute and teaches courses in the Classics at the University of Toronto. He researches and writes on Greek comedy, satyr play, and Roman satire, and he is also interested in Classical reception, particularly in contemporary American pop culture.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.