May 16, 2021

Weekly Webinar Recap: An Intro to Greek Mythology

The vanity of man does a great job of keeping us entertained (at the expense of any aliens watching, of course).

Greek mythology is a prime example of this entertainment. To learn about a world of love, revenge, drama and war, keep reading about our introductory webinar on Greek myths!

It was run by Emma, a high school senior who’s gotten her fair share of fun from the historical storytelling. She’s passionate about writing, literature and cozy cottage lives in tiny European villages. Her topics included the origin of Greek myths, the rundown of the original titans and Olympians (the main gods) and some extra godly stories!

Origins

Why do myths exist? It’s because no matter our true place in the universe, humanity is vain, ignorant and curious; it needs digestible explanations it can relate to for every-day phenomena. In times when academics were shunned for believing in the solar system, and disciplines like science and philosophy were one, humanity knew nothing of how the world worked. Why the sun rose in the sky, why there was thunder or why the seasons changed. People needed an explanation. The Greek gods were born, super heroes that rode chariots of fire through the sky to create daylight and cracked bolts of lightning when they got angry. People passed on their improvised stories in a mighty game of broken telephone, tweaking details to suit their storytelling. So there is no one true lineage dating back to Greek mythology, no hard facts. Every adaptation you readers have heard to date is right in its own way, although Emma’s version is best ever to exist.

Titans and Olympians

I won’t even attempt to measure up to our hosts storytelling abilities, which is what this webinar was all about. You can head over to our webinar recording, or read a (heavily transcribed) summary of the stories she told here.

The Ascension of Cronos

In the beginning, there were two primordial gods. Uranus, the personification of the sky, and Gaia (Gaea) the Earth. Being the only two conscious entities around, they fell in love, wed, and had children. The children were birthed and uh oh, Uranus found them too ugly to raise. Despite the morbid ridiculousness behind his disappointment and Gaia’s blind motherly love towards her kids, he decreed that they be thrown into Tartarus (hell, an underground monster world).

Far from having forgiven her husband, Gaia decided to cut her losses and attempt motherhood once more. Uranus fathered more children called the Titans; they were stronger, more beautiful and looked more like their parents than their ill-fated older siblings. Uranus felt he had redeemed any inconvenience he had caused his wife but of course, she didn’t feel the same way. Even after the titans she often came at him for his child-throwing until Uranus decided he’d had enough of her back talk. A real 1950’s couple. He retreated into the skies and got rid of his human form to which Gaia had easy access. This made her furious, so she gathered all her titans and “trash-talked” her husband to them. She told them how he threw away some of her kids, how he ignored her and how she wanted to get back at him.

None of the titans volunteered to help her destroy their father except for Cronos, the youngest. She had to settle for him and hatch a plan. Rhea called down her estranged hubby from the skies under the guise of making up, rekindling the relationship and being very apologetic for HER actions. Uranus took the bait and came down to Earth in his human form for a delicious candle-light dinner. They giggled, they chewed they took part in flirtatious eye contact. Uranus thought he was killing it, and just as he leaned in to kiss his wife, Cronos JUMPED out of some bushes with a sickle and cut him up into very many pieces, like a billion. Uranus's human form was destroyed, and with it his power. He re-became the sky.

The Ascension of Zeus

In the midst of cutting him up, Cronos castrated his father, throwing his testicles into the sea. He threw all the other bits wherever he wanted, sprinkling Uranus's power all over the world. What consequences would that have? Don’t worry about it, moving on. Gaia, who was eternally grateful to her son for giving her a divorce, decried him King of the Universe.

Incest was very hip in those days so Cronos took his sister Rhea as his wife and queen. She was the beautiful Titaness of childbirth and marriage. They married and Rhea got pregnant. Cronos was happy till the three fates (3 old ladies described as messy, vague and pot-stirring) decided to shatter his mental health and tell him of a dark foreboding prophecy. They said that if he let Rhea birth his child, that child would grow up to overthrow him. Having once overthrown a father-figure himself, Cronos knew first-hand that it wasn’t a fun experience. So after hearing from the fates, this man shimmied on up to his wife in labor and asked if she’d cooked him dinner. Of course she hadn’t, explained his wife, she was giving birth. But something about Cronos’s continued adamancy toward her, certainly having made him dinner, started to make Rhea think he was referring to the child she was birthing.

With horror, disgust and an urge she couldn’t control, Rhea pushed one last time, giving life to her child who took but one breath of fresh air before she was eaten by her own father. This baby was Hestia.

Rhea was upset. She decided to have another baby, Demeter. Rhea gave birth to it and once again, Cronos gulped it down and left no crumbs. This happened THREE MORE TIMES (the babies names in continuing order are Hera, Poseidon and Hades) before Rhea wised up and hatched a plan that wouldn't give Cronos indigestion and heartburn. She secretly shimmied over to an island where she made a deal with some nymphs. If the nymphs raised her next child, who would grow up to be very strong and powerful, this child would reward them with riches. When the time rolled around, Rhea gave birth to Zeus. Quicker than Cronos chewed up her first kid, Rhea shipped off her last to the secluded island of the duty-bound nymphs. She gave her cannibal/brother/husband a rock in swaddling clothes and said, “Here’s the baby, it’s overcooked, mind your teeth when you chew”.

Her cannibal/brother/husband took the rock, didn’t think twice, and ate it, content to have gotten rid of yet another “child”.

In the coming years, as Zeus was growing up on the island, not in his father's stomach, Rhea made sure to visit and trash-talk Cronos.

With lots of hinting, winking and bias, Rhea was unsurprisingly able to instill a fiery hate in Zeus towards his father and a want to overthrow him. Once Zeus verbalized that he wanted to be the one to succeed his father, Rhea’s mutiny plan was a go. She smuggled Zeus into a classy black-tie affair hosted by Cronos, where Zeus posed as a waiter. Then, she gave him a putrid concoction whose taste and smell were amply capable of making any god or titan puke their guts out. When Cronos drank this mixture, after being taunted by his dinner guests to do so, he puked his guts out as promised and out popped 5 of his fully grown kids. What a picture.

The Olympians - Athena

So commenced the Great War between Titans and Gods. The Gods won and became the Olympians. Zeus was God of the sky; Poseidon, God of the oceans; Hades, God of the underworld; Demeter, Goddess of harvest; Hera, Goddess of marriage, and Hestia was the Goddess of the hearth. Most of them lived in the heavens, on Olympus. There were 12 Olympians in total, we’ve accounted for the first 6.

Next was Athena, the daughter of Zeus and a Titaness named Metis (Metis had sided with the gods in the Great War). As expected, Metis was gorgeous, Zeus married her, she got pregnant, and the 3 fates meddled in their lives just for fun. They told Zeus that if his wife gave birth, his child would be smarter than him. That’s something most parents would be overjoyed to hear, but remember that Zeus is the son of Cronos who’s the son of Uranus. They’re of a child throwing, child eating, cannibalistic, incestuous lineage. So did Zeus eat his baby?

Yes he did!

But to his credit, he did it more creatively than the last two. He talked his pregnant wife into a fun game of: turn into any animal I say. She turned into a cow, a goat, a mammoth and then, Zeus said FLY! His wish was her command, THAT’S when Zeus brought out his chompers and gobbled up his pregnant fly wife. He didn’t even wait for her to give birth, he was really switching up the script. Because Metis was now a fly, she went on up to Zeus’s brain and set up camp there.

All was quiet for a few years, when one day, Zeus was suddenly flooded over with a head-splitting migraine, pun intended. Zeus was in so much pain that he wanted to split his head open with an axe. Prometheus, a Titan who survived the Great War but who was bitter about the fact that his brothers and sisters didn’t, took it upon himself to do the honors. He split Zeus’s head open and out came Athena, the Goddess of wisdom.

The Olympians - Ares & Hephaestus

After turning his first wife into a fly and lodging her into his brain, one could safely assume that Zeus’s first marriage was over. He married a second time. This time it was more traditionally incestuous, he married his sister Hera, the goddess of marriage. They hated each other and Zeus cheated on her with anyone he could get his hands on; nonetheless, they had three children one of which was Ares (a mama’s boy). To Ares, Hera talked trash of Zeus just like Gaia and Rhea did, it’s all very predictable, all very repetitive.

Where Ares provided a listening ear and unlicensed therapy, Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, was the very fruit of Hera’s pure anger towards Zeus. He was the son Hera willed into existence all on her own without any reproductive help from male genitalia. This particular act of rage was the side-affect of one of Zeus’s long adulterant marathons. Unfortunately, when Hera gave birth to Hephaestus, she was horrified at the hideousness of her child and so, (here we see some Uranus-ness) she threw him off the edge of Olympus. Hephaestus was a god so he didn’t die but naturally, he was pretty offended. After being adopted, raised and educated by a good Samaritan Nymph on Earth, Hephaestus sought out a way to get back at his cruel mother.

Being a wonderful blacksmith, he decided to give all the Olympians thrones. When Hera sat on hers, magical tethers shot out around her and strapped her bum securely to her seat. Hera screamed and screamed and screamed and Hephaestus ran away from the scene; Hera was screaming so loudly and annoyingly that Zeus soon sent his violent son Ares after the godly blacksmith to unbind her. Ares failed but later on, Hephaestus agreed to free his cruel mother if he was inaugurated, sworn into Olympus and officially labelled an Olympian. Both Zeus and Hera agreed to his terms without hesitation. It was Dionysus, shown second from the left in the picture below, who did the convincing.

The Return of Hephaestus to Olympus (Hephaestus far left, Hera far right)

The Olympians - Artemis & Apollo

If it weren’t for Zeus’s raging adultery, the Olympian crew would be stuck at around 8, with Athena and Ares being legitimate children, fruits of matrimony. But of course Zeus couldn’t keep it in his pants. In this section we speak of only 2 additional Olympians he fathered. Their mother was the beautiful Titaness Leto, symbolic of motherhood. When Hera found out that Zeus cheated she was furious. Hera cursed the pregnant woman so that she may not be able to give birth on any land in the entire world. Leto searched for a place to do the deed and ended up doing so on a deserted island. It was deemed an acceptable location, for the island didn't reach the ocean floor. It technically wasn't land. Her daughter Artemis became the goddess of the hunt and Apollo, her son, was the god of poetry and the sun.

The Olympians - Aphrodite

Remember when not too long ago, Cronos cut up his child-throwing dad into a billion pieces and threw his testicles into the ocean? Now we found out what became of those godly givers of life. The mix of sea foam and Uranus's blood and body bits gave birth to Aphrodite, a beauty to end all beauties. She was drop-dead gorgeous, it was unbelievable. The three Greek seasons (because Greece only had 3 seasons) found her splashing around by the shore and were so taken aback by her beauty, they knew she was fit for Olympus. They took her up there and gave her to the gods and demanded that she become a goddess. The gods knew that she must become one of them, but they conceded so grudgingly and jealousy. To even the score a bit, they forced her to marry Hephaestus. Aphrodite became the goddess of beauty.

The Olympians - Hermes

As bad as it sounds, it would be trite to go over the conception of Hermes, his mother was Maia and he was yet another one of Zeus’s illegitimate children. He was a trickster, even as a newborn. His first prank, act of terror, felony, whatever you call it, was to steal the most beautiful cows he came across.

Unfortunately, those cows happened to belong to Apollo, the god of poetry and our biggest hottest star. He used a magic rope, herded them all and began to walk them. Apollo caught him red-handed and almost decimated the naked infant, when Hermes de-escalated the situation by gifting him a beautiful instrument he (the literal newborn) had made himself: the lyre. Supremely impressed, Apollo took Hermes to Zeus for closer inspection of the talented thief baby he’d just come across.

Once at Olympus, Hermes did a stand up comedy routine, truly fit for the gods because upon the conclusion of his final punchline, he was offered a spot up on Olympus. Hermes took it.

The Olympians - Dionysus

For our intents and purposes, this will be the last case of adultery ending in pregnancy we review. How bittersweet.

Zeus fell in love with his mistress at the time, Semele, and Hera found out. To get revenge, she appeared before the woman and talked her into a very consequential ruse. Hera told Semele that if Zeus really loved her, he’d show himself to her in his purest godly form.

Semele found this to be a very reasonable statement, not knowing that when a mortal witnesses a god in it’s true form they are immediately incinerated.

One day Semele walked right up to her boyfriend Zeus and made him swear on the river Styx (a river that separates the Earth and Underworld) that if he truly loved her he’d do anything she asked. He agreed, he swore on the river Styx; such a swear is unbreakable, they’re stronger than pinky swears. Semele then revealed what Zeus had to do to prove his love. His heart broke. He knew that witnessing his godly form would kill her and that he was bound by oath to do it anyways. Zeus showed himself and Semele combusted but her godly fetus survived.

In a moment of emotion, Zeus sewed the fetus into his thigh so that it could finish baking, and upon it's birth gave it away to a human family to raise. His name was Dionysus grew up to be an ancient frat boy of sorts. When a close friend of his died after tripping on a vine and falling out of a tree, he created a commemorative fruit, grapes, to honor the clumsy little man. He crushed the grapes, made wine, started a raging cult and became the god of wine, grapes and the like.

If you’ve reached the end, you’re an honorary Olympian! Greek mythology is mind-bogglingly expansive, it’s a great drama/comedy/tragedy/horror show to get into. I hope you’re a little alarmed at what the Greeks thought was making their world go round and see you next week!