From Logos to Mythos: The Greek Creation

The Creation of the Universe

All mythologies dedicate a tale to relating the creation of the universe and the origin of the human existence. Greeks gave the following explanation:

At the beginning, only the Chaos dominated a deep vacuum… then Gaia emerged, the eternal goddess of the Earth, and Eros, prince of love, followed her.

Born from the Chaos, the goddess of the Night enveloped the earth with her obscurity, and her brother Erebus (primordial god of the underground region) stretched below her. Both of them engendered the Light and the Day.

Fate, Destiny, Thanatos, Lethargy and Hypnos rose of the darkness.

Gaia gave birth to Uranus, the starry sky: he fertilized his mother and Titans, Cyclopes and Giants were born. However, Uranus became afraid of their power and threw them onto the Tartarus (the shadowy bosom of the earth).

Gaia, furious and tired of bearing and losing her children, hatched a plan to end the tyrannical reign of her husband. Cronus, the youngest son, castrated his father with a sickle and tossed the genitals into the sea.

After the Titans and the other brothers were freed, they made Cronus their king and he gathered with his sister Rhea. But he ruled the immortals even in a more despotic way than Uranus: he threw the Cyclopes and Giants back to dungeons in Tartarus, and swallowed all his own babies as soon as they were born. His objective was to prevent the prophecy which said that he would be overthrown by his own son one day.

Grieved for his behavior, Rhea gave her sixth child, Zeus, to Gaia… who hid and nourished him in a cave. Meanwhile, Rhea handed Cronus a large stone wrapped in cloth, which Cronus swallowed thinking that the newborn was inside.

When Zeus grew up, he plotted with Rhea their revenge: She convinced her husband to accept the young man as waiter; thus, he could supply his father drugs that make him vomit his five sons, who had remained in his stomach all the time.

Then the fight for the throne of the Gods began; at first, the fierceness of Cronus and some Titans seemed to beat the younger ones… but Zeus got some new allies: Cyclopes and Giants. Finally they were victorious: Zeus condemned the survivors to the prison in Tartarus.

Zeus joined his sister Hera and established their residence in Mount Olympus. When his power had been consolidated among the gods, order subjugated chaos and Rhea embellished her body… creating a paradise.

Each god of the Olympic court defined his realm:

Zeus, king of thunder and sky