Appearance
11.2 — Greek I: The Beginning, the Titans, and the Olympians
The main source is Hesiod's Theogony, around 700 BCE, and it is a genealogy of the gods presented as a history of how power changed hands.
And it is a violent story about sons overthrowing fathers, three times in a row.
The beginning
First Chaos — not disorder, but a gap, a yawning void.
Then Gaia, Earth, and Eros, desire, and Tartarus, the deep place below.
Gaia produces Ouranos, Sky, and then lies with him, and they produce the Titans.
And Ouranos hates his children and pushes them back inside Gaia as they are born, so that she is in constant pain and they cannot emerge.
She makes a sickle of adamant and asks her sons to act. Only the youngest agrees.
Kronos castrates his father with the sickle and throws the parts into the sea.
From the blood that falls on the earth come the Furies, the giants and the ash-tree nymphs. From the foam around the severed parts in the sea comes Aphrodite.
Love is born from a mutilation. The Greeks put that at the beginning on purpose.
The second overthrow
Kronos rules and does exactly what his father did.
Warned that a son will overthrow him, he swallows each child as it is born.
His wife Rhea, at the sixth, hides the baby and gives Kronos a stone wrapped in cloth, which he swallows.
The baby is Zeus, raised in secret in Crete.
Grown, he forces Kronos to disgorge the others, and the war that follows — the Titanomachy — runs ten years and ends with the Titans imprisoned in Tartarus.
The same story twice: a father who fears his children, a mother who conspires with a son, and a violent transfer of power.
And it happens because the myth is describing something real. This is a Bronze Age transition myth — an older set of gods displaced by a newer set, remembered as a war — and it very likely encodes the arrival of Indo-European sky-god religion (11.1) over an older, more earth-centred one. Gaia, the earth, is on the losing side both times and keeps generating opposition.
The Olympians
Twelve, roughly, with some variation, and each has a domain and a set of characteristic failures.
Zeus — sky, thunder, king. Enforcer of oaths and protector of guests and suppliants, which makes his own conduct in the myths deeply ironic, since a very large part of his story is the pursuit of women, frequently by deception or force, and the persecution of the resulting children by his wife.
Hera — marriage, and Zeus's wife and sister. Her characteristic activity is revenge on his lovers and their children, which is unjust and is also the only power available to her.
Poseidon — sea, earthquakes, horses. Bad-tempered.
Demeter — grain and agriculture. Her story is in the next section and it is the best thing in Greek myth.
Athena — wisdom, strategy, crafts and the strategic side of war. Born from Zeus's head, fully armed, after he swallowed her pregnant mother. The virgin goddess, and Athens' patron.
Apollo — light, music, prophecy, healing, plague. The most "civilised" god, whose oracle at Delphi carried the two maxims that summarise Greek ethics: know thyself and nothing in excess.
Artemis — hunt, wilderness, childbirth, and the moon. Fiercely protective of her independence.
Ares — the brutality of war, as opposed to Athena's strategy. Disliked by the other gods, and the Greeks did not much like him either.
Aphrodite — desire. Married to Hephaestus and unfaithful with Ares.
Hephaestus — the forge, craft, fire. Lame, thrown from Olympus, and the only Olympian who works. The god of the disabled craftsman, which is a genuinely interesting thing for a warrior culture to have produced.
Hermes — messenger, travellers, merchants, thieves, and the guide of souls to the underworld. The trickster (11.10).
**And Hestia, hearth, or Dionysus, wine and ecstasy, depending on the list.
What kind of gods these are
And this is the important thing about Greek religion, and it is genuinely unusual.
The gods are not good.
They are powerful, immortal, beautiful and frequently petty, vindictive, jealous and cruel. They take sides in wars for personal reasons. They punish mortals for their own quarrels. They destroy people who beat them at contests.
And the Greeks knew this and said so. Xenophanes, in the sixth century BCE, complained that Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods everything that is shameful among humans — theft, adultery and deception. He also made the sharpest observation about anthropomorphism anybody has: if oxen and horses had hands and could draw, they would draw gods that looked like oxen and horses.
So what do you do with gods who are not moral?
Two things, and both are informative.
Morality is located elsewhere. In dike, justice, and in nemesis, the retribution that follows excess — impersonal principles that even the gods are subject to. And in the Delphic maxims: know yourself, nothing in excess.
And the tragedians turn it into the subject. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides spend the fifth century BCE asking how a person should live in a world run by beings like this, and Euripides in particular is close to open criticism of the gods he is dramatising.
Demeter and Persephone
The one story in this chapter that is genuinely moving, and it is the best-attested religious practice in the Greek world.
Persephone, Demeter's daughter, is gathering flowers. The earth opens and Hades takes her to the underworld to be his wife, with Zeus's consent and without her mother's knowledge.
Demeter searches the earth for nine days without eating or sleeping.
And when she learns what happened, she stops.
She withdraws from her function. Nothing grows. The seed stays in the ground. The whole earth becomes barren, and humanity begins to die, and the gods begin to lose their offerings.
Zeus is forced to negotiate.
Persephone is returned — but she has eaten pomegranate seeds in the underworld, and anybody who eats there is bound to it. So the settlement is a division: she spends part of the year below and part above.
And when she is below, her mother grieves and nothing grows.
That is winter.
What it does
A seasonal myth, obviously. And more than that.
It is a story about a mother's grief having consequences for everybody, and about grief as a withdrawal rather than as an emotion — she does not rage, she stops functioning, and the world stops with her (7.5 is the same shape).
And it was the basis of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most important religious ritual in the Greek world, practised for around two thousand years, open to anybody including women and slaves, and requiring absolute secrecy about what happened inside.
The secret was kept. We do not know what happened at Eleusis. What is recorded is the effect: participants said afterwards that they no longer feared death.
What to carry from this page
A myth in which power changes hands by violence, twice, is a memory of something. The gods on the losing side are usually the older religion.
Love is born out of a mutilation, at the beginning, deliberately.
The Greek gods are not good, and the Greeks knew it and put morality somewhere else — in impersonal justice, in the two Delphic maxims, and in the tragedies.
And if oxen could draw, their gods would look like oxen. Xenophanes, twenty-six centuries ago, and it is still the best one-line critique of religious imagery ever made.
Next: 11.3 — the heroes, who are not admirable and are not supposed to be.