The Gods of The Greeks

Károly Kerényi

• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781787201088
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

Drawing on a wealth of sources, from Hesiod to Pausanias and from the Orphic Hymns to Proclus, Professor Kerényi provides a clear and scholarly exposition of all the most important Greek myths. After a brief introduction, the complex genealogies of the gods lead him from the begettings of the Titans, from Aphrodite under all her titles and aspects, to the reign of Zeus, to Apollo and Hermes, touching the affairs of Pan, nymphs, satyrs, cosmogonies and the birth of mankind, until he reaches the ineffable mysteries of Dionysos. The lively and highly readable narrative is complemented by an appendix of detailed references to all the original texts and a fine selection of illustrations taken from vase paintings.'...learned, admirably documented, exhaustive...'—TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT'...it most emphatically must be the book that many have long been waiting for...'—STEPHEN SPENDER'Kerényi's effort to reinterpret mythology...arises out of the conviction that an appreciation of the mythical world will help Western man to regain his lost sense of religious values....(His) theory of myth and his actual interpretations of mythical themes...help to point the way to...a new kind of humanism.'—A. Altman, Philosophy

 

CHAPTER I—The Beginning of Things

1. OKEANOS AND TETHYS

OUR mythology contains many tales of the beginning of things. Perhaps the oldest was that to which our most ancient poet, Homer, refers when he calls Okeanos the “origin of the gods”{1} and “the origin of everything”.{2} Okeanos was a river-god; a river or stream and a god in the same person, like the other river-gods. He possessed inexhaustible powers of begetting, just like our rivers, in whose waters the girls of Greece used to bathe before marriage, and which were therefore supposed to be the first ancestors of ancient races. But Okeanos was no ordinary river-god, for his river was no ordinary river. Ever since the time when everything originated from him he has continued to flow to the outermost edge of the earth, flowing back upon himself in a circle. The rivers, springs and fountains—indeed, the whole sea—issue continually from his broad, mighty stream. When the world came under the rule of Zeus, he alone was permitted to remain in his former place—which is really not a place, but only a flux, a boundary and barrier between the world and the Beyond.

It is, however, not strictly correct to say that “he alone was permitted”. Associated with Okeanos was the goddess Tethys, who is rightly invoked as Mother.{3} How could Okeanos have been the “origin of everything”, if there had been in his person only a male original stream, unaccompanied by a conceiving original water-goddess? We understand, too, why it is told in Homer that the original couple have for a long time refrained from breeding.{4} It is said that they have quarrelled; an explanation that one might well expect to find in such ancient tales. The fact is that, had the original breeding not ceased, our world would have no stability, no rounded frontier, no circular course turning back upon itself. Begetting and bearing would have continued into infinity. So Okeanos was left only with his circular flux and his task of supplying the springs, the rivers and the sea—in subordination to the power of Zeus.

Of Tethys our mythology tells us little except that she was the mother of the daughters and sons of Okeanos.{5} The latter are the rivers, three thousand in number.{6} The daughters, the Okeaninai, were equally numerous.{7} Later on I shall mention only the eldest of them. Amongst the granddaughters was one whose name, Thetis, sounds rather like Tethys. In our language we make a clear distinction between the two names; but it may be that, for people who lived in Greece before us, they were closer together in sound and meaning, and meant one and the same great Mistress of the Sea. I shall shortly speak of Thetis again. The prevalence of this tale, and the dominance of these deities all over our sea probably go back to a time before peoples of Greek stock lived in these regions.

2. NIGHT, THE EGG AND EROS

Another story of the beginning of things was passed down in the sacred writings preserved by the disciples and devotees of the singer Orpheus. But latterly it is to be found only in the works of a writer of comedy, and in certain references to it by philosophers. At first it was more commonly told amongst hunters and forest-dwellers than amongst our sea-coast people. In the beginning was Night—so this story runs{8}—or, in our language, Nyx. Homer, too, regarded her as one of the greatest goddesses, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in sacred awe.{9} According to this story, she was a bird with black wings.{10} Ancient Night conceived of the Wind and laid her silver Egg{11} in the gigantic lap of Darkness. From the Egg sprang the son of the rushing Wind, a god with golden wings. He is called Eros, the god of love; but this is only one name, the loveliest of all the names this god bore.

The god’s other names, such of them as we still know, sound very scholastic, but even they refer only to particular details of the old story. His name of Protogonos means only that he was the “firstborn” of all gods. His name of Phanes exactly explains what he did when he was hatched from the Egg: he revealed and brought into the light everything that had previously lain hidden in the silver Egg—in other words, the whole world. Up above was a void, the Sky. Down below was the Rest. Our ancient language has a word for the void, “Chaos”, which simply means that it “yawns”. Originally there was no word meaning turmoil or confusion: “Chaos” acquired this second meaning only later, after the introduction of the doctrine of the Four Elements. Thus the Rest, down below in the Egg, was not in turmoil. According to another form of this story, the earth lay down below in the Egg, and the sky and the earth married.{12} This was the work of the god Eros, who brought them into the light and then compelled them to mingle. They produced a brother and sister, Okeanos and Tethys.

The old tale, as told in our seagirt lands, probably went on to relate that originally Okeanos was down below in the Egg, and that he was not alone there but was accompanied by Tethys, and that these two were the first to act under the compulsion of Eros. As is stated in a poem by Orpheus:{13} “Okeanos, the beautifully flowing, was the first to enter into marriage: he took to wife Tethys, his sister by the same Mother.” This Mother of them both was she who had laid the silver Egg: she was Night.

3. CHAOS, GAIA AND EROS

The third tale of the beginning of things comes from Hesiod, who was at once a farmer and a poet, and in his youth had pastured his sheep on the divine mountain of Helicon.{14} Eros and the Muses had sanctuaries there. The disciples of the singer Orpheus paid especial reverence to these divinities, and perhaps brought their cult to this place from more northerly regions. Hesiod’s tale sounds as if he had simply omitted the eggshell from the story of Night, the Egg and Eros, and had sought, as a farmer would, to attribute the rank of senior goddess to Gaia, the Earth. For Chaos, whom he mentions first, was for him not a deity but merely an empty “yawning”—that which remains of an empty egg when the shell is taken away.

As Hesiod tells it:{15} First arose Chaos. Then arose broad-breasted Gaia, the firm and everlasting abode of all divinities, those that dwell high above, on Mount Olympus, and those that dwell within her, in the earth; likewise Eros, the loveliest of the immortal gods, who loosens the limbs and rules the spirit of all gods and men. From Chaos are descended Erebos, the lightless darkness of the depths; and Nyx, Night. Nyx, in love with Erebos, bore Aither, the light of heaven, and Hemera, the day. Gaia, for her part, bore, first of all and as her equal, the starry Sky, Ouranos, so that he should completely cover her and be a firm and everlasting abode for the blessed gods. She bore the great Mountains, whose valleys are favourite dwellings of goddesses—the Nymphs. She bore also that desolate, foaming Sea, the Pontos. And all those she bore without Eros, without mating.

To Ouranos she bore, besides the Titans and Titanesses (amongst whom, in Hesiod, are numbered Okeanos and Tethys), also three Kyklopes: Steropes, Brontes, Arges. These have a round eye in the middle of the forehead, and names that mean thunder and lightning. To Ouranos she also bore three Hekatoncheires—giants each with a hundred arms and fifty heads: Kottos, “the striker”; Briareos, “the strong”; and Gyes, “the bemembered”. But the whole story of the mating of Ouranos and Gaia—although it must originally have been one of the tales concerning the beginning of things—already takes us into the stories of the Titans. It is the earliest tale of this particular sort in our mythology. I shall proceed to relate the other tales in their due order.

CHAPTER II—Stories of the Titans

THE stories of the Titans are about gods who belong to such a distant past that we know them only from tales of a particular kind, and only as exercising a particular function. The name of Titan has, since the most ancient times, been deeply associated with the divinity of the Sun, and seems originally to have been the supreme title of beings who were, indeed, celestial gods, but gods of very long ago, still savage and subject to no laws. We did not regard them as being in any way worthy of worship; with the single exception, perhaps, of Kronos; and with the exception also of Helios, if we identify the latter with the wilder, primordial Sun-God. These two did, it is true, have places of worship here and there. The Titans were gods of a sort that have no function except in mythology. Their function is that of the defeated: even when they win seeming victories—before the stories come to their inexorable conclusion. These defeated ones bear the characteristic of an older male generation: the characteristics of ancestors whose dangerous qualities reappear in their posterity. What sort of beings they were will be shown in the tales immediately following.

1. OURANOS, GAIA AND KRONOS

Ouranos, the god of the sky, came in the night to his wife, to the Earth, to the goddess Gaia.{16} The two bright children of Night and Darkness, the children Aither and Hemera, who appeared in daytime, have already been mentioned. Ouranos came every night to his mating. But from the very beginning he hated the children whom Gaia bore him.{17} As soon as they were born he regularly hid them and would not let them come out into the light. He hid them in the inward hollows of the earth. In this wicked work—so Hesiod expressly states—he took his pleasure. The gigantic goddess Gaia groaned under this affliction, and felt herself oppressed by her inner burden. Therefore she, too, invented a wicked stratagem. She quickly brought forth grey iron. She made a mighty sickle with sharp teeth, and took counsel with her sons.

The number of these was then already great. Hesiod names, besides Okeanos, also Koios, Krios, Hyperion, Iapetos, and, as the youngest, Kronos. These six brothers had six sisters: Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, golden-wreathed Phoebe and sweet Tethys. Gaia, in her woe, said to all her children, but especially to her sons: “Ah, my children—and children, too, of a nefarious father—will you not hear me and punish your father for this wicked ill-doing? He was the first who ever devised a shameful deed!” They were all afraid, and none opened his mouth. Only great Kronos, the tortuous thinker, took courage. “Mother,” he said, “I give my promise, and I shall act thereon. I care nothing for our father, of hated name. He was the first who ever devised a shameful deed!” At this Gaia rejoiced. She hid her son in the place appointed for the ambush, gave the sickle into his hand and told him all her plot. When Ouranos came at nightfall and, being inflamed with love, covered the earth and lay all across it, the son thrust out his left hand from the place of ambush and seized his father. With his right hand he took the huge sickle, quickly cut off his father’s manhood, and cast it behind his back.

Gaia received in her womb the blood shed by her spouse, and gave birth to the Erinyes—the “strong ones”, as Hesiod calls them—also to the Giants and the Ash Nymphs, or Nymphai Meliai, from whom arose a hardy race of men. The father’s manhood fell into the sea, and thus—according to stories that I shall tell later—Aphrodite was born. What Hesiod did not tell us (although it is a thing that all hearers of this story of the Titans will at once perceive), should now be added: namely, that since the bloody deed of Kronos the sky has no longer approached the earth for nightly mating. The original begetting came to an end, and was followed by the rule of Kro...