Before I began Hesiod’s long poem Theogony, I wondered what it could possibly be about. I mean, what a strange title. If I had even remotely been paying attention to word roots I could have figured it out, but it took me until about halfway through the poem before the light bulb came one. Turns out Theogony is a genealogy of the Greek gods. And boy howdy, are there a lot of gods! If you’re like me you’ve learned the standard stories about Kronos and Zeus and Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, Athena, etc, etc. But that’s not all.
In the Greek pantheon every river is a god or goddess. Styx? Goddess. The rivers were born of the god Okeanos and the goddess Tethys. These two gods are brother and sister whose parents are Gaia and Ouranos. Ouranos is Gaia’s son who she had without consort. Gaia, along with Chaos, Tartaros, and Eros is one of the original gods who got this crazy world going. Other gods born at various times from various parents include the Fates, the muses, the graces, Panic, Terror, Harmonia, Discord. Whenever, it seems, the Greeks needed to be able to talk about something big, it became a god, not an archetype, but an actual being who caused panic and terror and discord, or inspired music or poetry. Think about what that means for a minute. Think about what it means to say that Aphrodite caused Paris to fall in love with Helen and take her to Troy. Paris suddenly isn’t as responsible for his actions. No one is. People become pawns and playthings with little or no agency of their own. It’s a bit trippy to think about.
One of the more astonishing things for me is that there were loads of gods before Zeus and company even came on the scene. Zeus, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon are all siblings, their parents, Kronos and Rheia were also brother and sister. Their parents were Gaia and Ouranos, mother and son. The harpies, the giants, the cyclopses (cyclopi?), the gorgons, were all born from god/goddess pairings which goes to show even inbreeding among the godly doesn’t always work out so well. All of these matings and offspring are enough to make the head spin and I was thinking that I would need to make a chart so I could keep track of them all. Thankfully Lattimore, the translator, thought of it first and provides five pages-worth of charts which I am going to definitely photocopy because they are so useful.
Humans get a blurb in Theogony too. Zeus created man. Men ran around doing their thing for quite some time, free of women to tell them to put the toilet seat down or pestering them about drinking from the milk carton and then leaving it empty in the fridge. Prometheus (who is Atlas’s brother and son of the gods Iapetos and Klymene) had to go and mess things up by stealing fire from Zeus. Prometheus gets his by getting his liver eaten everyday, and men got theirs too, because Zeus, with the help of Athena, decided to make women:
But when, to replace good,
he had made this beautiful evil
thing, he led her out
where the rest of the gods and mortals
were, in the pride and glory
that the gray-eyed daughter of a great
father had given; wonder
seized both immortals and mortals
as they gazed on this sheer deception,
more than mortals can deal with.
For from her originates the breed
of female women,
and they live with mortal men,
and are a great sorrow to them
and hateful poverty they will not share,
but only luxury.
It goes on like this for another forty or fifty lines. Curiously there appears to be a disconnect between mortal women and goddesses. Goddesses are not thought ill of, far from it, they are courted and appeased. But mortal women, evil incarnate.
In spite of the misogyny, Theogony is an interesting poem and I am glad I read it. Not only did I get a bit of an education in the Greek gods, but I also got a glimpse into pre-Socratic Greek thought and begin to understand what a huge change it was when the gods became abstractions instead of reality.
Weeds 
Cyclopes. And men are still complaining that women will only date men with jobs! đ
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Panic, of course, comes from Pan, the goat-legged god of the woods. Pan is a subform of Dionysos, god of madness and drunkenness. whenever I think about the Greek Panthon, this passage from Philip K Dick’s “VALIS” comes to mind:
” The gentle sounds of the choir singing “Amen, amen” are not to calm the congregation but to pacify the god.
When you know this you have penetrated to the innermost core of religion. And the worst part is that the god can thrust himself outward and into the congregation until he becomes them. You worship a god and then he pays you back by taking you over. This is called “enthousiasmos” in Greek, literally “to be possessed by the god.” Of all the Greek gods the one most likely to do this was Dionysos. And, unfortunately, Dionysos was insane.
Put another way – stated backward – if your god takes you over, it is likely that no matter what name he goes by he is actually a form of the mad god Dionysos. He was also the god of intoxication, which may mean, literally, to take in toxins; that is to say, to take a poison. The danger is there.
If you sense this, you try to run. But if you run he has you anyhow, for the demigod Pan was the basis of panic which is an uncontrollable urge to flee, and pan is a subform of Dionysos. So in trying to flee from Dionysos you are taken over anyhow.
I write this literally with a heavy hand. I am so weary I am dropping as I sit here. What happened at Jonestown was the mass running of panic, inspired by the mad god – panic leading to death, the logical outcome of the mad god’s thrust.
For them no way out existed. You must be taken over by the mad god to understand this, that once it happens there is no way out, because the mad god is everywhere.
it is not reasonable for nine hundred people to collude in their own deaths and the deaths of little children, but the mad god is not logical, not as we understand the term.” – Philip K Dick, “VALIS”
which is why weapons should be a part of every religious service.
as for goddesses being courted and appeased… consider that it may have been because they were every bit as petty, vindictive, and moody as their male counterparts and just as likely to do something horrific for no good reason to whatever human happened to be nearby. Consider that it was Eris, Discord, who REALLY started the trojan war by getting all the other goddesses to argue over which amongst them was the prettiest. I assert that the Greeks had temples all over the place not out of love for their gods, but out of fear – they knew they were on the bottom of a very large, elaborate food chain and were just trying to not get eaten.
wow, that’s a long comment. sorry.
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Great post, Stefanie. I get very confused trying to work out all the relations between gods and goddesses, particularly when there seem to be so many variations on each tale. And I’m very intrigued by the thought of the personification of panic, love, fear and so on. That’s quite a thought.
And finally, don’t tell me your husband leaves empty milk cartons in the fridge too! Just as well women came on the scene to impose a little order around the place!
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Now those charts sound like they would be very useful — I should get me some of them, because I can’t keep the gods straight!
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Funny you should say that Sylvia, because the next part of the poem compares men to the drones of the hive who have to do all the work while the women just sit around a reap the benefits of men’s labor. And thanks for the plural!
Interesting quote Doktoholocaust. The god Panic and Dionysus are related, of course, but in the Greek pantheon Panic does not appear to be derivative. Panic was born of Aphrodite and Ares. Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Semele and Semele is the daughter of Harmonia and the mortal Kadmos. Harmonia is Panic’s sister. Perhaps Dionysus is so insane because he is offspring of god and mortal? You make a good point that there are so many temples because the Greeks both revered and feared the gods.
Thanks Litlove! My husband doesn’t leave empty milk cartons in the fridge anymore he’s had 15 years of training so we’ve been able to move on to other things đ
If your library has the Lattimore translation Dorothy, the charts are all there in the back of the book.
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Reminds me of the Bible. I “tried” to read the Bible, as a piece of literature and some ultra religious text but the constant connections of each person did my head in…at least now I have an understanding of where all that came from though.
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PKD and I were not referring to the GReek personification of panic so much as the word itself, which is derived from the name of Pan. Dionysus is insane for a lot of reasons. I recall reading one myth mentioning that he was raised by the Hyades, the rainy ones, sort of the evil reflection of the pleiades. They weep constantly, because their little boy is ceremonially ripped apart evyer so often as the myth plays itself out over and over, regrown from his own heart by Zeus, only to be torn apart all over again, as dionysus was the basis for the sacrificial Year-king.
Historically speaking, the hyrbid sons of gods and man do have hard lives, which can certainly be maddening. Heros, there were once called, and usually burdened with the task of saving a lot of people and otherwise being in the middle of what would become a big dramatic myth, but elsewhere they got called Saviors and were expected not only to save people from other people, but to get between wrathful gods of smiting and mass destruction and the already-suffering people such gods like to pick on. So, yeah, from time to time they snap, giving rise to such legends as the Vampire Jesus (He gave his blood for your sins, and now he wants it back!).
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Yes, Silverneurotic, there are many Biblical type comparisons that can be made. I’m not up on my Biblical scholarship enough to actually make any kind of coherent comparisons, but I can see that they are there.
Ah, Dokorholocaust, thank you for the clarification. And you are right, the god/human offspring often don’t have an easy time of it. Vampire Jesus made me laugh đ
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