Mary Daly expropriates ancient myths such as the myth of Prometheus and reworks them to encourage the creative force within the feminine to spin new ideas and encourage radical new journeys. Prometheus was one of the original rulers of the world – a Titan who refused to tell Zeus which of Zeus’s children would dethrone him. Zeus had his servants, Force and Violence, seize Prometheus, take him to the Caucasus Mountains, and chain him to a rock with unbreakable chains. Here he was tormented day and night by a giant eagle tearing at his liver. Zeus gave Prometheus two ways out of this torment. He could tell Zeus who the mother of the child that would dethrone him was, or meet two conditions. The first was that an immortal must volunteer to die for Prometheus, and the second was that a mortal must kill the eagle and unchain him. Eventually, Chiron the Centaur agreed to die for him and Heracles killed the eagle and unbound him.

Daly’s intent was to create a trans-cultural, i.e., metapatriarchal, myth, but her thinking was deeply indebted to one particular strain in the Western intellectual tradition. Using the words of the Marxist Ernst Bloch, one could call this strain “revolutionary Prometheanism.” It goes back at least as far as the Stoic logos spermatikos, the “seed” that links every person with the divine reason. It is closely connected with the medieval mystic’s talk of a “scintilla animae,” the “spark of the soul,” frequently echoed in Daly’s books (e.g., 1978, 183: “the divine spark of be-ing in women”).

Meister Eckhart could write: “I have said that at times there is a power in the soul which alone is free… It is free from all names, and altogether unimpeded, untrammeled, and free from all modes, as God is free and untrammeled in Himself.” For the radical medieval mystic like Eckhart the knowledge revealed in the experience of this divine spark is utterly self -authenticating. Therefore, it need not be subjected to the judgment of an institutional church. So too Daly writes: “she knows that only she can judge her self” (1978, 378). Also important in this strain of thought is the theme of the dispossession/repossession of the true, divine self. It is a powerful theme in Hegel (who was influenced by medieval mysticism) and in Feuerbach, and it also pervades Daly’s philosophy of religion.

Hegel decries human beings who let themselves be “robbed of freedom, their spirit, their eternal and absolute element” and who then take “flight to deity.” He insists that now (ca. 1800) is the time for persons to “repossess the treasures formally squandered on heaven.” Feuerbach takes up this same motif and makes it the dominant theme of his whole critique of religion. Daly refers to “Stolen female energy” (1978, 367), to “our stolen original divinity” (1978, 41) and urges repossession. She does not say what this leaves for men, who have been living off women, the “generators of energy” (1978, 319). Finally, along with Feuerbach, Daly says simply “we are divinity.”

Daly’s philosophy of religion was plugged into the Promethean myth, but she also added an original contribution. She explicitly expanded it to include women. Then she performed a reversal, and restricted it to women—although this reversal, too, has deep roots in the Western tradition, specifically, Iranian and biblical apocalypticism. Daly conveys the impression that only a few women are able to undertake the “Journey” (1978) or to achieve “Quintessence” (1998).

This is not because she was pessimistic about the female Self, which has “immeasurable unique potentialities” (1978, 382), but because she was acutely sensitive to the power of evil, that is, to the power of the male patriarchy to successfully co-opt women. At the same time, Daly could be rapturously optimistic about those women who do escape male power and begin to search and spin. These will find the “real source,” the “deep Background,” the “power of the self’s be-ing,” “the Wild Self,” and spin into a “new time/space,” a “new creation,” and will glimpse a “Paradise that is beyond the boundaries of patriarchal paradise” (1978, 13, 24, 49, 283, 423).

source https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-religion/