"[W]e look for the 'culture heroes' who have persisted in imagination as symbolizing the attitude and the deeds that have determined the fate of [humanity]. And here at the outset we are confronted with the fact that the predominant culture-hero [of class society] is the trickster and (suffering) rebel against the gods, who creates culture at the price of perpetual pain. He symbolizes productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life; but, in his productivity, blessing and curse, progress and toil are inextricably intertwined. Prometheus is the archetype-hero of the performance principle.
...If Prometheus is the culture-hero of toil, productivity, and progress through repression, then the symbols of another reality principle must be sought at the opposite pole. Orpheus and Narcissus (like Dionysus to whom they are akin: the antagonist of the god who sanctions the logic of domination, the realm of reason) stand for a very different [eco-socialist] reality. They have not become the culture-heroes of the Western world: theirs is the image of joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives; the deed which is peace and ends the labor of conquest; the liberation from time which unites [humanity] with god, [humanity] with nature.
...[This is] the view of a non-repressive order in which the subjective and objective world, [humanity] and nature, are harmonized. The Orphic symbols center on the singing god who lives to defeat death and who liberates nature, so that the constrained and constraining matter releases the beautiful and playful forms of animate and inanimate things. No longer striving and no longer desiring 'for something still to be attained,' they are free from fear and fetter — and thus free per se."
—Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
