Greek Mythology is effectively a big collection of narratives featuring characters and deities and was the basis of a religion in ancient Greece
It is told through stories and poems and art forms like mosaics and painted pottery.
It is assumed that the ancient Greek culture had these narratives for pretty much everything to make sure that there were no loose ends.
In Greek mythology, linear history can be split into 4 separate times or eras:
- The Age of Gods
- The Age of Gods and Mortals
- The Age of Heroes
- The Trojan War
The Age of Gods:
Before there were any gods or anything at all there was this big void state of nothingness known as Chaos.
Out of the Chaos at some time emerged Gaia (The personification of the Earth) and some other important deities: Eros (or Love), The Abyss (Otherwise known as Tartarus; A deity and a place even lower than the Underworld which is really bad) and Erebus (The personification of darkness and shadow) with no real explanation of how they came into existence.
Somehow Gaia had an immaculate kind of conception and gave birth to Ouranos (Uranus; The sky) and they became lovers. Incest appears to be a recurring theme in Mythology but they are gods so they can probably do whatever they want.
When Ouranos fertilized Gala, she gave birth to the Titans.
The Titans consisted of 6 boys and 6 girls accordingly:
Coeus, Crius, Cronus, Hyperion, Lapetus and Oceanas were the boys and Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Rhea, Theia, Themis and Tethys were the girls.
After these births, Gaia and Ouranos decided that no more Titans would be conceived.
After the Titans came the Cyclopes (One eyed giant guys) and the Hekatonkheires (“Hundred-Handed Ones” which are literally giants with 100 hands and 50 heads and almost as powerful as the Titans) were born.
Cronus was the youngest and apparently most terrible of the Titans and decided to overthrow his father Ouranos by castrating him and throwing his genitals into the sea which we know was how Aphrodite was born.
Cronus then became the ruler of all the gods with his sister Rhea as his wife.
Cronus had a weird thing about his children as he assumed that they might try to overthrow as he did to his own dad, so each time Rhea gave birth, Cronus would snatch up the child and eat them. They had six children altogether; Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera and Zeus.
Rhea started to get annoyed about Cronus eating her children (I don’t blame her) so when Zeus was born she hid him and placed a stone in a baby’s blanket which Cronus mistook for the new born baby and ate, leaving Zeus alive and well.
When Zeus was fully grown and powerful, he fed Cronus a poisoned potion of something which made him vomit up the children that he ate and the stone which had all just been sitting in his stomach apparently undamaged.
Cronus sent the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires to Tartarus for some reason (I think he just didn’t like them) and Zeus freed them. To repay the favour they gave Zeus his Lightning bolts, Hades his Mask of Invisibility and Poseidon his Trident and altogether they challenged Cronus for the throne and overthrew his power, condemning the Titans to imprisonment in Tartarus.
Interestingly after all this strife, Zeus had the exact same paranoia and decided to eat his first wife Metis before she could give birth. Unfortunately for Zeus, Metis was already pregnant with Athena and together they apparently made Zeus miserable from inside his own body until one day Athena burst from his head fully grown and dressed.
After defeating the Titans there were more gods and goddesses born and raised and a pantheon was created to reside atop Mount Olympus
Zeus was a bit of promiscuous and fathered a lot of Gods and heroes.
He also fathered the 9 Muses through Mnemosyne (The Goddess and personification of Memory):
Calliope (Epic Poetry)
Clio (History)
Erato (Love Poetry)
Euterpe (Music)
Melpomene (Tragedy)
Polyhymnia (Hymns)
Terpsichore (Dance)
Thalia (Comedy)
Urania (Astronomy)
His other children are the Gods Athena, twins Apollo and Artemis, Hermes, Persephone and Dionysus and he fathered the heroes Perseus and Heracles. He was also the father of Helen (Helen of Troy) and the great king Minos of Crete. He also had Ares (God of war), Hebe and Hephaestus with his Sister-Goddess Hera.
There are a bunch of other stories that would take far too long to write out completely as each god has a background and features in loads of other narratives.
The basic pantheon consists of 12 gods on Mount Olympus
There are about 450 individual gods and deities in the ancient Greek mythology not including deified mortals.
You can see a list of probably every God or Deity from Ancient Greek Mythology on this Wikipedia page with most of the references properly cited:
I also found this quite confusing family tree but it seems accurate enough:
No comments:
Post a Comment