There’s plenty of variation within the Ancient Greek creation myths, especially regarding which order the gods came into being. Sometimes Gaia and Ouranos are the first beings to arise out of Khaos; sometimes it’s Nyx and Erebus (Night and Darkness), sometimes it’s Khronos and Ananke (Time and Necessity), sometimes it’s Okeanos (the “river” that surrounds the earth) and Tethys (fresh water). Usually the Titans are the first generation of gods to rule on Earth, but sometimes Ophion and Eurynome precede them, and it’s not entirely clear what they are. Most of these variants are similar, though. Broadly, I’d say that there are three Greek creation myths:
The Hesiodic Creation Myth
This is the one that most people are familiar with. A quick recap: Khaos is the first thing to exist, being a primordial void out of which everything else emanates. The first thing to come out of Khaos is Gaia, the Earth, followed by Eros, Love. In this context, Eros isn’t the mischievous little winged god with his bow and arrows; rather, Eros is the primordial force of procreation, that which causes things to come into existence. It’s a not-so-subtle way of saying “without sex, nothing would exist.” And indeed, most of the rest of the universe is created by the first Protogenoi having sex with each other. The next beings to come into existence are Nyx and Erebus, Night and Darkness, who bear a whole host of daimones that represent fundamental aspects of existence like Day, Air, Sleep, Death, and so on. Ouranos (sky) and Pontus (sea) are Gaia’s first children in Hesiod’s telling, and she has sex with both of them to produce the first generations of gods.
The children of Heaven and Earth include the twelve elder Titans, the Cyclopes, and the Hekatonkheires (hundred-armed giants). Ouranos hated his children, especially the Hekatonkheires, and hid them away inside the womb of the Earth. (This is apparently because he was “jealous of their exceeding manhood and comeliness and great size” so… does that mean the Hekatonkheires are actually hot?) Gaia conspired with her youngest son, Kronos, to overthrow his father. She gave Kronos a sickle with which he castrated Ouranos, taking his place as Lord of the Universe. Ouranos’ severed genitals fell into the sea, where they turned into foam that became the goddess Aphrodite.
After a long genealogy of the other primordial gods and their children, and then of the next generations of Titans (with a special mention of Hecate), we finally return to Kronos. Rhea bears him the six elder Olympians, who are (in order) Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Kronos knows that one of them will overthrow him just as he overthrew his own father, so, he goes to extreme lengths to prevent that. Every time one of them is born, Kronos takes the baby and swallows it whole. Rhea, despairing, goes to her parents for help. They tell her to take a stone and wrap it like a baby, so that Kronos will swallow the stone instead of Zeus. Rhea spirits Zeus away to a cave on the island of Crete, where he’s raised by the Kouretes and by the she-goat Amalthea.
Zeus grows up in secret, and eventually does overthrow his father, forcing him to vomit up the stone he swallowed (which becomes the Omphalos, the navel of the world at Delphi) and then his five siblings. Zeus became Lord of the Universe, and decided to share power with his siblings.
Now, for a short interlude in which we’re introduced to Prometheus. Prometheus is a second-generation Titan, the son of Iapetos and Klymene, who fashioned the human race out of clay. Hesiod begins by describing Prometheus’ punishment at the hands of Zeus, to be chained to a rock and have his liver eaten by an eagle every single day. Prometheus is eventually liberated from this punishment by Heracles. Then he tells us why Prometheus was punished. Prometheus taught humans how to sacrifice to the gods, and cunningly divided up the humans’ portion and the gods’ portion to ensure that humans would get the best cut. He had the men wrap the meat of an ox in its skin, and to cover its bones and entrails with fat. Then he asked Zeus which portion he wanted. Zeus chose the one that looked the most appetizing, and when he realized he’d been tricked, he was furious. (This myth explains why people eat the meat of their sacrifices and burn the inedible parts as an offering to the gods — that’s right, animal sacrifice is basically a ritualistic barbecue). Zeus denied humans their access to fire as punishment, but Prometheus felt pity for the cold and hungry humans, and stole the fire using a fennel stalk. This was too much for Zeus, and he punished Prometheus.
To punish the humans, he created Pandora, the first woman. Pandora is both beautiful and a personification of sheer guile (because women are inherently manipulative, don’tchya know). What follows is a mini- sexist rant in which Hesiod complains that women are never helpful if you’re poor, only if you’re rich, and how they basically leech off of you your entire life, but that you still have to get married and deal with the shrews if you want someone to take care of you in your old age. Why? Because women are inherently evil: “even so Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil.” Yeah, it’s bad. The Pandora myth is every bit as bad as the Garden of Eden myth and I still don’t know how to interpret it.
Back to the Titans. I have no idea why Hesiod chose to tell this story out of order, but he did, so rewind back to when Zeus first gained power. The Olympian gods (called such because they were based on Mt. Olympus) and the elder Titans (who were based on Mt. Othrys) fought a war that lasted ten years. To turn the tide of the war, Zeus freed the Hekatonkheires from Tartarus. They hurled enormous rocks at the Titans, and Zeus hurled his lightning at them. When the Titans were finally defeated, Zeus imprisoned them in Tartarus, and the Hekatonkheires became their wardens.
Hesiod then describes how the world is arranged: Tartarus isn’t part of Hades, it is as far below Hades as the earth is below the sky. It is a misty and murky chasm, and Nyx lives there during the day. She and her daughter, Hemera, greet each other as they trade off every twelve hours or so. At their tradeoff point, Atlas holds up the sky. Hypnos, Thanatos, and Nyx’s other children also live in Tartarus. “In front” of (above?) that is Hades’ palace, which is guarded by Cerberus. Styx lives in Hades. She is the goddess of the river that bears her name, which is a branch of the much greater river of Okeanos that circles the earth. The solemnest oaths of the gods are sworn on the Styx, and if a god breaks such an oath, they will fall into a deathlike trance for a year and be exiled from Olympus for another nine years.
Gaia became pretty pissed off that children of hers were still imprisoned in Tartarus, and turned against Zeus. She mated with Tartarus to produce a terrifying monster called Typhon, which she set against Zeus. Other sources describe how Typhon was so terrifying that the other gods turned into animals and fled, and some describe how Typhon was able to incapacitate Zeus by stealing his thunderbolts and his sinews. Regardless, Zeus eventually defeats Typhon after an apocalyptic battle.
That’s basically the end of the creation myth. The following sections are a further genealogy, describing Zeus’s seven wives and all his children by each of them, the births of the younger generation of Olympians, and some of their children. “Theogony” means “the genealogy of the gods,” so a good portion of it is the Greek gods’ version of Ancestry.com.
Most other versions of the Greek creation story follow this basic format. There are some variations, though. For example, these lines from Homer name Okeanos as the primordial god from which all the other gods were born/emanated, rather than Khaos or Gaia:
Since I go now to the ends of the generous earth, on a visit to Okeanos, whence the gods have risen, and Tethys our mother who brought me up kindly in their own house, and cared for me and took me from Rhea, at that time when Zeus of the wide brows drove Kronos underneath the earth and the barren water. —The Iliad, Book 14
As famous and influential as Homer is, the epics preserve some odd takes on mythology that didn’t really catch on, like Aphrodite being the daughter of Zeus and Dione rather than having arisen from the sea.
There’s another alternate version of the theogony in Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, in which Nyx and Erebus are the first beings, and Nyx lays an egg that Eros hatches from.
At the beginning there was only Khaos, Nyx, dark Erebos, and deep Tartaros . Ge (Gaia), Aer (Aither) and Ouranos had no existence. Firstly, black-winged Nyx (Night) laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebos, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Eros with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in deep Tartaros with dark Khaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race [i.e. birds], which was the first to see the light. That of the Immortals did not exist until Eros had brought together all the ingredients of the world, and from their marriage Ouranos, Okeanos , Ge, and the imperishable race of blessed gods (theoi) sprang into being. Thus our origin is very much older than that of the dwellers in Olympos. We are the offspring of Eros; there are a thousand proofs to show it. We have wings and we lend assistance to lovers. How many handsome youths, who had sworn to remain insensible, have opened their thighs because of our power and have yielded themselves to their lovers when almost at the end of their youth, being led away by the gift of a quail, a waterfowl, a goose, or a cock. —Aristophanes, Birds
This version of the story is almost a missing link between the standard one and the Orphic one.
The Orphic Creation Myth
Speaking of odd takes on mythology, the other major Greek creation myth is the Orphic Theogony. Orphism is a mystery cult, meaning that we have only a handful of surviving texts that describe it and its mythology in any kind of detail. It’s very old, with references to it appearing throughout Ancient Greece. Most of the texts related to it are relatively late, but one source for its creation myth is the Derveni Papyrus, a commentary on a theogony attributed to Orpheus that it provides an allegorical interpretation of. It is the oldest European book ever found. HellenicGods.org has a page on which it attempts to reconstruct the Orphic Theogony from multiple sources, and it helpfully cites each source for each line. My guess is that all these different sources from different contexts and time periods can’t be strung together so neatly; someday I’m going to write a more in-depth essay that addresses all these sources and the context around them, but that’s a much bigger project that requires a lot more research, so for now I’m just going to retell the Orphic creation myth as I understand it.
The Orphic Theogony begins with “water and matter,” and the first beings to exist were Khronos (Time — not to be confused with the Titan Kronos) and Ananke (Necessity or Inevitability). Khronos appears as a winged dragon with the heads of a bull, a lion, and a man. (These sorts of descriptions of supernatural beings are pretty typical of mysticism. Examples include the Mithraic lion-headed figure, cherubim in the Abrahamic religions, and Phanes himself.) Khronos and Ananke produce Aither (air) and Khaos (the chasm), out of which they create a cosmic egg. From the egg hatches Phanes, the first Lord of the Universe.
Phanes is an androgynous, winged god with the heads of a man, a lion, a bull, and a dragon, whose skin glitters. He(/she/it) is functionally identical to the primordial Eros, in that he is the god of progenation, that which causes things to come into being. “Phanes” means “shining” or “to emit light,” which in this context may mean “to make appear,” i.e. bring into existence. If there’s a Prime Mover in Greek mythology, Phanes would be it. I consider Phanes and primordial-Eros to be the same entity, but in Orphic sources, Phanes is more often identified with Zeus and Dionysus. He’s even called Pan, since Pan means “All,” i.e. The Absolute, and Priapus (the name of another god of procreation). Phanes brings everything else into existence.
After creating the world, Phanes passes his regal scepter onto Nyx, and she becomes the second Lord of the Universe. Nyx gives birth to Gaia and Ouranos, and passed on rulership of the universe to Ouranos. The story precedes as in the Hesiodic Theogony from there — Gaia’s children are imprisoned in Tartarus by their father, and Kronos overthrows him by castrating him with a sickle. In one Orphic source, Okeanos is not on board with the plot and does not aid in it. The story again proceeds as normal — Kronos has five children and swallows them all, Rhea spirits away the sixth by replacing him with a stone, Zeus grows up in secret. Porphyry ascribes to Orpheus a version of the story in which Nyx, not Gaia, gives Zeus advice on how to defeat Kronos, and he does so by getting him drunk on mead. This is very interesting, because it’s unique, and it highlights the Dionysian character of Orphism. Mead is older than wine, and Zeus’s associations with mead and honey are something of a prelude to Dionysus’ divine intoxication. Zeus castrates Kronos just as Kronos had castrated his own father, and goes to Nyx for advice on how to order the universe. She advises him to surround the gods’ heavenly abode with Aither, the bright upper air.
Zeus swallows Phanes, acquiring all of Phanes’ power and becoming the Demiurge, the source and center of all existence. As the Derveni Papyrus puts it, “Zeus the head, Zeus the middle, and from Zeus all things have their being…” So, Zeus isn’t just the next god in the line of succession — he becomes something more akin to the Abrahamic God, a manifestation of the Absolute.
The sixth and last Lord of the Universe is Zagreus-Dionysus, who is himself an incarnation/aspect/evolution of Phanes. But in the interest of brevity, and because I’ve covered it many times in other answers, that’s another story.
The Orphic Theogony tells mostly the same story, but focuses on different details and applies a much more mystical flare to the whole thing. It’s less about climatic war, and more about the line of succession from Phanes all the way to Dionysus, which is less entertaining but more significant from a mystical perspective. I’m not going to analyze this story here, but the specific differences are very interesting to me.
The Platonic Creation Myth
A lot of the surviving information on Orphic mythology comes from commentaries on Platonic dialogues, like Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. This is because mysticism and Neoplatonism tend to go hand in hand. While Plato’s theogony is probably the least relevant to Ancient Greek religion as a whole, Platonic ideas had a lasting impact, and even influenced early Christianity.
In the Timaeus, Plato attributes the creation of the world to a singular, nameless deity, a true creator god in the modern sense. Plato defines God, the Absolute, as being purely good, and it wants everything to be good like itself. This nameless God brings order out of chaos and endowed the world with a soul. It made the universe out of fire and earth, and created water and air to act as mediators between them. It made the world a sphere because the sphere is a perfect figure. (No one tell Plato that the Earth is an oblate spheroid.) After making this perfect spherical body, the Creator made a soul to go with it. Then he made a third, mediating principle between the body and soul, and merged all three principles (“same,” “other,” and “essence”) into one. Through a complex procedure that sounds a lot like alchemy, he divided this single substance and made the five planets, the Sun, and the Moon. He shaped the races of beings out of the four elements — the gods out of fire, the birds out of air, the marine life out of water, and land animals out of earth. Plato describes the gods as being literally shaped like spheres, because spheres are perfect. Despite this, he believes that the people who claim to be descendents of gods are telling the truth, because why wouldn’t they know about what happens in their own family?
His genealogy of the gods is as follows: Gaia and Ouranos come first, followed by Okeanos and Tethys, then Phorkys, Kronos, Rhea, and the other Titans, and then Zeus and the Olympians. The Demiurge tells the gods to create mortal beings, because if the Demiurge created them himself, their nature would be like unto that of gods and they wouldn’t be mortals. Why do they need to be mortals? Because that’s what would make the universe perfect, I guess. But the Demiurge does sew a seed of immortal divinity in each mortal, and that is the part of us that is rational.
The Timaeus is extremely dense for how short it is, and Proclus’ commentary on it (one of our main sources for Orphism) is extremely long and even more dense, so I hope I’ve got that summary right. It’s not really a myth so much as philosophical pontification on the nature of the universe and how it came to be, as well as on the nature of perfection, divinity, the elements, morality, and so on. It’s Plato.
However, Plato’s idea of creation was extremely influential going forward. Ovid mostly sticks to “conventional” Greek mythology in the Metamorphoses, but his creation myth bears a lot of similarities to the Platonic one. It attributes the creation of the world to an unknown, nameless god:
Before the ocean and the earth appeared—before the skies had overspread them all—the face of Nature in a vast expanse was naught but Chaos uniformly waste. It was a rude and undeveloped mass, that nothing made except a ponderous weight; and all discordant elements confused, were there congested in a shapeless heap. As yet the sun afforded earth no light, nor did the moon renew her crescent horns; the earth was not suspended in the air exactly balanced by her heavy weight. Not far along the margin of the shores had Amphitrite stretched her lengthened arms,—for all the land was mixed with sea and air. The land was soft, the sea unfit to sail, the atmosphere opaque, to naught was given a proper form, in everything was strife, and all was mingled in a seething mass—with hot the cold parts strove, and wet with dry and soft with hard, and weight with empty void. But God, or kindly Nature, ended strife—he cut the land from skies, the sea from land, the heavens ethereal from material air; and when were all evolved from that dark mass he bound the fractious parts in tranquil peace. The fiery element of convex heaven leaped from the mass devoid of dragging weight, and chose the summit arch to which the air as next in quality was next in place. The earth more dense attracted grosser parts and moved by gravity sank underneath; and last of all the wide surrounding waves in deeper channels rolled around the globe. And when this God—which one is yet unknown—had carved asunder that discordant mass, had thus reduced it to its elements, that every part should equally combine, when time began He rounded out the earth and moulded it to form a mighty globe. Then poured He forth the deeps and gave command that they should billow in the rapid winds, that they should compass every shore of earth. he also added fountains, pools and lakes, and bound with shelving banks the slanting streams, which partly are absorbed and partly join the boundless ocean. Thus received amid the wide expanse of uncontrolled waves, they beat the shores instead of crooked banks. At His command the boundless plains extend, the valleys are depressed, the woods are clothed in green, the stony mountains rise. And as the heavens are intersected on the right by two broad zones, by two that cut the left, and by a fifth consumed with ardent heat, with such a number did the careful God mark off the compassed weight, and thus the earth received as many climes.—Such heat consumes the middle zone that none may dwell therein; and two extremes are covered with deep snow; and two are placed betwixt the hot and cold, which mixed together give a temperate clime; and over all the atmosphere suspends with weight proportioned to the fiery sky, exactly as the weight of earth compares with weight of water. And He ordered mist to gather in the air and spread the clouds. He fixed the thunders that disturb our souls, and brought the lightning on destructive winds that also waft the cold. Nor did the great Artificer permit these mighty winds to blow unbounded in the pathless skies, but each discordant brother fixed in space, although His power can scarce restrain their rage to rend the universe. At His command to far Aurora, Eurus took his way, to Nabath, Persia, and that mountain range first gilded by the dawn; and Zephyr's flight was towards the evening star and peaceful shores, warm with the setting sun; and Boreas invaded Scythia and the northern snows; and Auster wafted to the distant south where clouds and rain encompass his abode.—and over these He fixed the liquid sky, devoid of weight and free from earthly dross. And scarcely had He separated these and fixed their certain bounds, when all the stars, which long were pressed and hidden in the mass, began to gleam out from the plains of heaven, and traversed, with the Gods, bright ether fields: and lest some part might be bereft of life the gleaming waves were filled with twinkling fish; the earth was covered with wild animals; the agitated air was filled with birds. But one more perfect and more sanctified, a being capable of lofty thought, intelligent to rule, was wanting still man was created! Did the Unknown God designing then a better world make man of seed divine? or did Prometheus take the new soil of earth (that still contained some godly element of Heaven's Life) and use it to create the race of man; first mingling it with water of new streams; so that his new creation, upright man, was made in image of commanding Gods? On earth the brute creation bends its gaze, but man was given a lofty countenance and was commanded to behold the skies; and with an upright face may view the stars:—and so it was that shapeless clay put on the form of man till then unknown to earth. —Ovid, Metamorphoses.
(Let me tell you, this is a lot easier to read than the Timaeus.)
The Demiurge as a concept resurfaces in Hermeticism and Gnosticism, and therefore it has a significant presence in Western occult philosophy. The description of creation in the Corpus Hermeticum describes almost the same thing as the Timaeus:
From the will of God, which, holding the Word and seeing the beautiful cosmos made one exactly like it, fashioned from her own constituent elements and the offspring of souls. Nous, God, being male and female, beginning as life and light, gave birth, by the Word, to another Nous, the Creator of the world; he, being the god of fire and air, formed seven powers who encompass in their circles the sensory world, and the governance of these powers is called destiny. Immediately, the Word of God leapt forth from the downward moving elements to the pure work of the Creator, and was united with the Creator Nous (for he was the same substance) and the downward moving elements of the creation were left behind, without the Word, to be matter alone. Nous, the Creator, together with the Word, encompassing the spheres and spinning them round with a rushing motion, caused those things he had made to revolve and he allowed them to revolve from no fixed beginning to an end without limit, for it begins where it ends. The rotation of these spheres, as Nous willed, brought forth from the downward moving elements living beings without speech (for they did not contain the Word) and the air produced winged creatures and the water swimming creatures. The earth and the water were separated from each other, as Nous willed, and the earth brought forth from herself what she possesses, four-footed animals, reptiles, beasts; wild and tame. Nous, the Father of all, who is life and light, brought forth Man, the same as himself, whom he loved as his own child, for Man was very beautiful, bearing the image of his Father. It was really his own form that God loved, and he handed over to him all his creation. —The Corpus Hermeticum, “Poimandres.”
Would you believe that this is a pagan text?
It’s important to note here that the Platonic Demiurge is not the same thing, conceptually, as the Abrahamic God. Even if it looks the same (and by Zeus, Christian philosophers did their damndest to make it sound like it was the same thing), the Platonic Demiurge still exists within a polytheistic framework. Like Phanes (or perhaps it is Phanes) it is a primordial entity that personifies the act of creation and the ultimate state of perfection. The gods and goddesses as we know them still exist in this model, and still deserve worship. To put it in my own terms, “God” in the singular is the Absolute, and gods and goddesses — while they are all divine, and none inferior — are too limited in their scope to be the Absolute.
But I’m not going to make this about philosophy. I’ll save that for another post.
These creation myths get progressively more abstract. I don’t think they contradict each other at all, but rather that they express similar ideas in different terms. The Hesiodic version is the entertaining campfire story, and the Platonic version is the brain-breaking philosophical treatise about what creation really is and how it works, while the Orphic version is somewhere in between. That’s not to say that the more “mythic” variant is all metaphor while the Platonic version comes closer to the “truth.” I think that they all tell more or less the same story but choose to focus on different things.
I don’t literally believe that the Titanomachy ever happened, but I do believe that the universe began in formless Khaos, because as far as we know, that is literally true. Now I’m curious… which gods would represent the actual creative forces of the universe? I’d say that Khronos is the fabric of Space-Time, Ananke is Force (all/any force), Phanes is Heat and Light (or all/any energy), and Nyx and Erebus are the corresponding lack thereof (the cold and dark vacuum of space). That might not be the most accurate equation, because as much as I love science, it’s not my strong suit. However, I think I can safely say that they all predate Ouranos and Gaia by quite a bit.
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