February 27

28 min read

Before Olympus

Explore Greek creation myths and the generations before Zeus. Read the guide, follow its source readings, and try an introductory mythology lesson.

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Readings

• Section 3: The Castration of Uranus from "Theogony" by Hesiod

• Section 2: The Cosmogony from "Theogony" by Hesiod

• Book 1: 5-30 from "Metamorphoses" by Ovid

• Lecture 4: First was Chaos from "Classical Mythology" by Elizabeth Vandiver

• Section 2: The Cosmogony from "Theogony" by Hesiod

• Origin of the World—First Dynasty from "The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome" by E.M. Berens

• The Second Order: Ouranos Gelded from "Mythos" by Stephen Fry

• Aphrodite (Venus) from "The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome" by E.M. Berens

• Introduction to Classical Mythology from "Mythology" by Edith Hamilton

• Hymn to the Muses from "Theogony" by Hesiod

• Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction from "The Language of the Night" by Ursula K. Le Guin (optional)

• Out of Chaos from "Mythos" by Stephen Fry (optional)

Intro to Greek Myths

Le Guin and Hamilton recover myth as a cure for reductionist modernity.

You'll enjoy Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey ten times more if you know the myths Homer's audience already knew: gods, monsters, family curses, pride, fate. Bulfinch called mythology the handmaid of literature. For The Odyssey, that is exactly right. Give me 45 minutes. Here's Greek mythology from the original source texts.

The modern view is that "myths" (old stories) are just "myths" (false beliefs). And if myths are meant to explain the natural world, then myths are also bad science. Here's Ursula K. Le Guin to respond:

Ursula K. Le Guin

According to [this view], the god Apollo "is merely" an inadequate effort made by primitive minds to explain and systematize the nature and behavior of the Sun.

As soon as the Sun is rationally understood to be a ball of fire, the old mythological pseudoexplanation is left empty. The fiery horses and the golden chariot vanish.

But Apollo is not the Sun, and never was. The Sun, in fact, "is merely" one of the names of Apollo. Reductionism cuts both ways, after all.

The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at [a modern superhero]—really look—and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you.

The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo... and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

That is the real purpose of a myth: it calls you into a new frame. You use myths as you would a border—crossing your own ancient subconscious.

Some myths will surface again and again, long after you’ve sent them away. They’re asking you to look again, to look through their alien eyes, to make yourself whole.

Edith Hamilton

Greek and Roman mythology [shows us] the way the human race thought and felt untold ages ago...

Myths lead us back to a time when the world was young and people had a connection with the earth, with trees and seas and flowers and hills, unlike anything we ourselves can feel.

When the stories were being shaped, little distinction had as yet been made between the real and the unreal.

The imagination was vividly alive and not checked by the reason, so that anyone in the woods might see through the trees a fleeing nymph, or bending over a clear pool to drink, behold in the depths a naiad's face.

The prospect of traveling back to this delightful state of things is held out by nearly every writer who touches upon classical mythology, above all by the poets.

In that infinitely remote time primitive man could "Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

That's from Edith Hamilton’s 1942 classic, "Mythology." She ends by quoting a William Wordsworth sonnet from 1802 called "The World Is Too Much With Us." We'll read that sonnet in our Heroes course.

Now, "with hunger of the heart for beauty dead," we begin our semester of Greek & Roman mythology, starting with Hesiod's "Theogony," a genealogy of the gods...

Hymn to the Muses

Hesiod receives divine authority and creative freedom from the Muses.

In the 8th century BC, a hard-scrabble farmer-poet named Hesiod was walking the Boeotian Hills, when he was visited by the Muses.

Hesiod lived in the same century as Homer. Hesiod lived in Boeotia, the rural countryside to the northwest of Attica. Homer (whether he was one poet or a tradition of poets) was across the Aegean Sea in Ionia on the Anatolian coastline.

These goddesses of art and science demanded that Hesiod sing the "history of the gods." Hesiod’s "theogony" is the earliest and most intact source of ancient Greek mythology, but the myths have been retold many times since.

Hesiod and Homer are oral poets. Greece had lost the ability to write for 400 years. We assume humanity always progresses. But if you lived in Greece between 1200 BCE and 800 BCE (the Greek Dark Ages), you’d be surrounded by palatial architecture you couldn’t rebuild and a script you couldn’t read. And yet poets have kept these myths alive by memorizing and reciting.

Hesiod and Homer are the earliest extant poets of Ancient Greece. "Extant" meaning their poems still exist today. Hesiod has two poems. One is called "Works and Days" which is a self-help book on how to live and farm. The other is called "Theogony" which we'll read now. Literally the origin story ("gonia") of the gods ("theoi").

“Theogony” begins like many poems of antiquity: with an invocation to the Muses. The Muses agree to gift Hesiod with divine knowledge despite their low opinion of shepherds as mere bellies.

Hesiod

Let us begin our song with the Muses of Helicon. They dance on soft feet around the deep-blue spring and the altar of the almighty Zeus, son of Cronos.

These muses wash their tender bodies in Permessus and the Horse's Spring, and lead lovely dances upon the highest Helicon. By night, they arise, veiled in thick mist, praising Zeus.

One day they taught Hesiod a glorious song while I was shepherding my lambs. These were the first words the goddesses of Olympus, the daughters of Zeus, said to me.

Calliope

Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies you are.

We know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we wish, how to utter the truth.

Hesiod

So spoke the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they gave me a rod—a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvelous thing. They breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate both the future and the past.

They bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods who exist eternally, and always to sing of the Muses themselves, both first and last.

The Muses warn Hesiod: “we know how to speak many false things (pseudea) as though they were genuine (etumoisin homoia); but we know, when we will, to utter true things (alēthea).”

First, we must remember that these Muses are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the Titanesse of memory. Memory itself is fallible and selective. To make matters worse, the gods can deceive.

Muses can choose to give you the truth (alēthea), but they can also choose to mislead. And they do not give you any mechanism for telling truth and deception apart.

A Rest from Every Sorrow

The nine Muses turn memory, song, and invocation into relief and creative power.

Hesiod

Mnemosyne (Memory), who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bore the Muses in Pieria from her union with Zeus. They were born as a forgetting of all human ills and a rest from every sorrow.

For nine nights wise Zeus lay with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. When a year had passed and the seasons came round, she bore nine daughters, all of one mind.

Their hearts are set upon song and their spirits are free from care, dwelling in their beautiful homes and bright dancing halls, a little way from the peak of snowy Olympus.

Beside them, the Graces and Himerus (Desire) live in delight. Uttering a lovely voice through their lips, the Muses sing the laws of all things and the goodly ways of the immortals.

These things, then, the Muses who dwell on Olympus sang—nine daughters begotten by great Zeus, Cleio and Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene and Terpsichore, and Erato and Polyhymnia and Urania and Calliope.

Calliope is the chiefest of them all, because she attends to princes. Whichever heaven-nourished prince the Muses choose to honour—and look upon from the moment of his birth—they pour sweet dew upon his tongue, and his words come out pleasing and strong.

A man may live in dread because his heart is distressed, yet when a singer, the servant of the Muses, sings about the glorious deeds of men and about the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus; at once the man forgets his heaviness.

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song, and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever—those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night, and those reared by briny Sea.

Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above.

Tell of the gods who were born of them, givers of good things; and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honours amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus.

These things declare to me from the beginning, you Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, and tell me which of them first came to be.

The poets of antiquity invoked the Muses because they believed clear speech, memory, and beauty came from beyond the self. By starting their work with an invocation, they shift from anxiety and ego to rapture and flow.

The nine Muses are named Calliope (muse of epic poetry), Cleio (history), Euterpe (music), Thaleia (comedy), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance), Erato (love poetry), Polyhymnia (hymns), and Urania (astronomy).

You don’t need to remember all of these names—they’ll surface again in this course—but you may want to keep one or two in your back pocket. You never know when you might need an invocation to unlock your own creative genius.

In the next lesson, we’ll hear from the freshly inspired Hesiod about what "first came to be." We'll also start Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the same breath.

From Chaos

Hesiod names Chaos; Ovid shows its elements ordered into cosmos.

Greek mythology doesn’t have the concept of a “creator.” There is no monotheistic, omnipotent god, like the God of the Old Testament.

Later, the Roman poet Ovid speculates that either creator or nature separated the cosmos. But Hesiod’s universe starts with only kháos, a yawning gap.

The chief god of Greek mythology, Zeus, arrives much later. Yes he’s immortal, but he’s within the universe, not without.

According to Hesiod, the cosmos emerged from Chaos. "Verily at the first Khaos came to be." Other poets and philosophers expanded on this idea later.

Here, the poet Ovid describes the early cosmos to his Roman countrymen 700 years after Hesiod's song:

Ovid

Before land and sea and the all-covering sky were made, in the whole world the countenance of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos.

[Chaos was] a raw and undivided mass, nothing naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds of ill-joined elements compressed together.

No Titan had yet poured light upon the world, no waxing Phoebe yet filled her crescent anew, nor had the earth yet hung in the ambient air, self-balanced and equipoised.

What came before Form? Well... Formlessness. Which isn't the same as "nothing," rather it's a pre-Nothing. In Norse mythology, you have a similar concept: the Ginnungagap, the gap between realms. The same idea is in the Rigveda and in Genesis. "The earth was without form, and void (in Hebrew, tohu va-bohu); and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

Ovid

Though land and sea and air were there, no foot could tread the land, no creature swim the sea. The air was lightless; nothing kept its form.

All objects were at odds, since in one mass cold essence fought with hot, and moist with dry, and hard with soft, and light with things of weight. A god, with nature's blessing, solved this strife.

He severed land from sky and sea from land, and from the denser vapours set apart the ethereal sky; and each, resolved and freed from the blind heap, he fastened in its place, appropriate in peace and harmony.

The fiery weightless force of heaven's vault flashed up and claimed the topmost citadel; next came the air in lightness and in place;

The thicker earth with grosser elements sank, burdened by its weight; lowest and last, the girdling waters pent the solid globe.

That reading is from Ovid's Metamorphoses—one of Shakespeare’s favorite works of literature. Ovid describes the early cosmos as a lifeless, shapeless mass (chaos) where the elements clashed, and neither sun, moon, nor earth yet took their place.

The Cosmic Yawn

Stephen Fry retells creation as a cosmic yawn stretching from Chaos to Gaia.

Let's now fast forward two millennia, and read from "Mythos" as the inimitable Sir Stephen Fry describes the early Greek cosmos.

Stephen Fry

These days the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a Big Bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made.

The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with CHAOS.

Was Chaos a god – a divine being – or simply a state of nothingness? Or was Chaos, just as we would use the word today, a kind of terrible mess, like a teenager’s bedroom only worse?

Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn. As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void…

It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

Next we will gain a firm footing on Mother Earth—Gaia, the subject of our next lesson.

Gaia

Primordial gods emerge as Earth shapes Greek cosmos.

In the previous lesson, we kicked off our Greek mythology studies from the top. The ancient Greeks believed the universe began not with a bang, but with Chaos—a yawning gap.

From Chaos came Gaia (the Earth), Tartaros (the Underworld), and Eros (Desire). The gods did not create the world as outsiders; they were the world, made of the same stuff as mountains, sea, and sky.

As soon as Eros existed, life could multiply. Generations of gods emerged through desire, sex, and birth; creation unfurled like a family tree.

Hesiod

From Chaos came Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night). And Nyx, pregnant through sweet union with Erebus, gave birth to Aether and Day.

Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side and serve as a steadfast home for the blessed gods.

Then she bore the long hills, graceful homes of the goddess-Nymphs who live in the glens. She also bore the barren sea—Pontus—with its raging swell. All of this, without the sweetness of intercourse.

Gaia shapes herself by giving birth to Ouranos (the sky), Pontos (the sea), and Ourea (mountains). Let’s hear how classics scholar, Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver explains the emergence and self-sculpting of Mother Earth.

Elizabeth Vandiver

The earth is taking on the recognizable shape that would have been familiar to the people of Hesiod’s day.

Then she shapes herself into the familiar earth of the Greeks by making the Mediterranean Sea (Pontos) in the center of the lands, and producing the mountain ranges that would have been familiar to Hesiod and his audience.

Pontos, here the sea, means THE sea. The Mediterranean Sea. The sea in the middle of the known world. So Gaia first exists apparently as simply a flat disk–the earth is conceived of as being disk-shaped.

So we’re picturing a flat, disk-shaped earth, and Ouranos, the sky, will come to be a dome over her. Think of a cake dish, a flat round disk with a dome over it and you’ll have the picture of Gaia and Ouranos. Tartarus is, Hesiod tells us, as far below Gaia as Ouranos is above her.

As we read Hesiod’s Theogony, we’ll see gods and goddesses begin to appear through sexual desire (Eros). At first, Gaia has no mate—or at least, not until she gives birth to her husband, Ouranos. In the next lesson, Earth and sky will come together to create life. We’ll see how well that goes for them…

Gaia and Ouranos

Earth and Sky produce Oceanus, the Titans, and the one-eyed Cyclopes.

The Greek myths are delightfully clever. Ouranos lay atop Gaia as the sky lies atop Earth. Their union filled the world with life, just as the sky fertilizes Earth.

E.m. Berens

A moment’s reflection will show what a truly poetical, and also what a logical idea this was; for, taken in a figurative sense, this union actually does exist.

The smiles of heaven produce the flowers of earth, whereas his long-continued frowns [in winter] exercise so depressing an influence upon his loving partner, that she no longer decks herself in bright and festive robes, but responds with ready sympathy to his melancholy mood.

The first-born child of Ouranos and Gæa was Oceanus, the ocean stream, that vast expanse of ever-flowing water which encircled the earth.

Here we meet with another logical though fanciful conclusion—the ocean is formed from the rains which descend from heaven and the streams which flow from earth.

Gaia and Ouranos produced eighteen children: three Cyclops, three Hecatoncheires, and twelve Titans. What Ouranos did with their children would irrevocably sever his relationship with Gaia.

Hesiod

Gaia slept with Ouranos and bore the Ocean with its deep currents. And other titans too: Koios, Krios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Rheia, Themis, Mnemosyne, Gold-crowned Phoebe, lovely Tethys, and her most terrible child, Kronos, the youngest, an arch-deceiver, who hated his lecherous father.

She bore the Cyclopes too, with hearts of stone—Brontes, Steropes and ponderous Arges, who later gave Zeus thunder and made the thunderbolt. In every other respect the Cyclopes were just like gods, But a lone eye lay in their foreheads’ middle. They were strong and knew their craft.

[Besides the Titans and Cyclopes], three other sons were born to Gaia and Ouranos, strong, hulking creatures that beggar description—Kottos, Briareos, and Gyges, outrageous children. A hundred hands stuck out of their shoulders, grotesque, and fifty heads grew on each stumpy neck.

Ouranos saw his children as threats. What he did next would turn Gaia against him.

Gaia Plots Revenge

Ouranos imprisons his children, and Gaia arms Kronos for revenge.

The union between Gaia (earth) and Ouranos (sky) bore first a brood of titan gods such as Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, and Kronos, as well as the terrifying Cyclopes and the hundred-headed Hecatonchires. These in particular, Ouranos considered fearful and terrible monsters.

Hesiod

These monsters exuded irresistible strength. They were Gaia’s most dreaded offspring, and from the start their father feared and loathed them.

Ouranos used to stuff all his children back into a hollow of Earth as soon as they were born, keeping them from the light, an awful thing to do, but Heaven did it, and was very pleased with himself.

Vast Earth groaned under the pressure inside, and then she came up with a plan, a really wicked trick.

She created a new mineral, grey flint, and formed a huge sickle from it and showed it to her dear boys. And she rallied them with a bitter speech:

Gaia (terra)

Listen to me, children, and we might yet get even with your criminal father for what he has done to us…

Hesiod

They were tongue-tied with fear when they heard this. But Kronos, whose mind worked in strange ways, got his pluck up and found the words to answer her:

Kronos (saturn)

I can pull it off, Mother. I can’t stand Father; he doesn’t even deserve the name.

Hesiod

This response warmed the heart of vast Earth. She hid young Kronos in an ambush and placed in his hands the jagged sickle...

The Fall of Ouranos

Kronos ambushes Ouranos to avenge enraged Gaia.

In the previous lesson, we learned that Ouranos has been forcing his monstrous offspring back into Gaia. Gaia’s now enraged and wants vengeance. She gives her son, Kronos, a sickle and tells him to lie in wait for Ouranos’s return…

Stephen Fry

At last, Gaia and Kronos heard from the west the sound of a great stamping and shaking. The leaves on the trees shivered. Kronos, standing silently in his hiding place, did not tremble. He was ready.

Ouranos (caelus)

Gaia! Prepare yourself. Tonight we shall breed something better than hundred-handed mutants and one-eyed freaks …

Stephen Fry

The horrible sounds of a lustful deity slobbering, slapping and grunting suggested to him that his father was attempting some kind of foreplay.

In his alcove Kronos breathed in and out five times. Never for a second did he weigh the moral good of what he was about to do, his thoughts were only for tactics and timing. With a deep inhalation he raised the great sickle and stepped swiftly sideways from his hiding place.

Ouranos, who had been preparing to lie on top of Gaia, sprang to his feet with an angry snarl of surprise.

Walking calmly forward, Kronos swung the scythe back and swept it down in a great arc. The blade, hissing through the air, sliced Ouranos’s genitals clean from his body.

All Cosmos could hear Ouranos’s maddened scream of pain, anguish and rage. Never in creation’s short history had there been a sound so loud or so dreadful. All living things heard it and were afraid.

Kronos leapt forward with an obscene cry of triumph, catching the dripping trophy in his hands before it could reach the ground. Ouranos fell writhing in immortal agony and howled out these words:

Ouranos (caelus)

Kronos, vilest of my brood and vilest in all creation. Worst of all beings, fouler than the ugly Cyclopes and the loathsome Hecatonchires, with these words I curse you. May your children destroy you as you destroyed me.

Stephen Fry

Kronos looked down at Ouranos. His black eyes showed nothing, but his mouth curved into a dark smile… He juggled before his father’s eyes his grisly spoils of victory, burst and slimy with blood, oozing and slippery with seed.

Laughing, [Kronos] pulled back his arm and hurled the package of genitals far, far from sight. Across the plains of Greece they flew out over the darkening sea…

Soon we will follow what happened to Ourano’s genitals as they were thrown across the sea.

The Foam-Born

Aphrodite rises from violence and transforms Cyprus.

Aphrodite is born from male genitalia. Her story starts when Kronos cuts off the genitals of Ouranos and tosses them into the sea.

Hesiod

[His father’s genitals] did not fall in vain. Earth received all the bloody drops that gushed forth.

As the seasons turned, she bore the strong Erinyes and the great Giants with gleaming armor, holding long spears in their hands, and the ash-tree Nymphs called the Meliae, born across the boundless earth.

[The genitals themselves were flung far over the mainland into the restless sea.] Around them, white foam gathered from the immortal flesh, and from it a maiden grew.

Gods and mortals would call her Aphrodite, “the foam-born.” Eros (Desire) followed her from her first breath.

Aphrodite isn’t just a beautiful goddess—she is Beauty itself. She is the goddess of love and passion, who governs “the whisperings of maidens, smiles, beguilements, sweet longing, love, and grace.”

E.m. Berens

Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty! Shaking her long, fair tresses, the water-drops rolled down into the beautiful sea-shell in which she stood, and became transformed into pure glistening pearls.

Wafted by the soft and balmy breezes, she floated on to Cythera, and was then transported to the island of Cyprus.

Lightly she stepped on shore, and under the gentle pressure of her delicate foot the dry and rigid sand became transformed into a verdant meadow, where every varied shade of colour and every sweet odour charmed the senses.

The whole island of Cyprus became clothed with verdure, and greeted this fairest of all created beings with a glad smile of friendly welcome.

Here she was received by the Seasons, who decked her with garments of immortal fabric, encircling her fair brow with a wreath of purest gold, whilst from her ears depended costly rings, and a glittering chain embraced her swan-like throat.

With Aphrodite’s arrival, the mythic world gains beauty and pleasure—but also betrayal, madness, and ruin…

Daily history and lit

Nerd out on the subjects you love

Try a free lesson from Before Olympus