Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

The piercing pain of the Hecatonchires still gnawing at her, Gaia visited Othrys, a great mountain that looks down over what we now call the central Greek region of Phthiotis. From its peak you can see the plain of Magnesia reaching down to the blue waters of the western Aegean as they curl round the Malian Gulf and embrace the sporadic scattering of islands called the Sporades. But Gaia was consumed with too much pain and too much fury to enjoy one of the world’s most charming views. On the summit of Mount Othrys she set to work fashioning a most unusual and terrible artefact from its rock. For nine days and nights she laboured until she had produced an object which she then hid in the cleft of the mountain.

Next she took herself off to visit her twelve beautiful, strong children.

‘Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?’ she asked each in turn. ‘You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.’

Perhaps we imagine that Gaia – Mother Earth – is soft, warm, bountiful and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueller, harsher and more terrifying than even the wildest sea.

And talking of the marine world, the first of the children that Gaia tried to win to her side were Oceanus and his sister Tethys.fn3 But they were in the middle of negotiating a share of the oceans with Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea. All of this generation were stretching and flexing their muscles at this time, establishing their areas of expertise and control, nipping, growling and testing each other’s strength and dominance like puppies in a basket. Oceanus had conceived the idea of creating tides and currents, which were to run like a great salt river around the world. Tethys was about to have his baby – no sin in those early days of course: propagation would not have been possible without incestuous couplings. She was pregnant with NILUS, the Nile, and would go on to give birth to other rivers and to at least three thousand Oceanids or sea nymphs, attractive deities who moved as easily on dry land as in the waters of the sea. They already had two fully grown daughters: CLYMENE, who was the lover of Iapetus, and the clever and wise METIS, who is due to play a very important part in what is to come.fn4 The pair were happy and looking forward to life on the ocean wave, so neither saw any reason to help kill their father Ouranos.

Next Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable. She seemed a very shallow, silly and ignorant being, who knew nothing and appeared to understand less. This was deceptive, for each day that passed she got smarter and smarter, more and more well informed and more and more capable. Her name means ‘memory’ (giving us the word ‘mnemonic’). At the time of her mother’s visit, the world and the cosmos were very young, so Mnemosyne had had no opportunity to prime herself with knowledge or experience. As the years passed, her endless capacity for the storage of information and sensory experience would make her wiser than almost anyone. One day she would mother nine daughters, the MUSES, whom we shall meet later.

‘You want me to help you kill Ouranos? Surely the Sky Father cannot die?’

‘Dethrone or disable him, then … it is no more than he deserves.’

‘I will not help you.’

‘Why not?’

‘There is a reason and when I know it I will remember it and tell you.’

Exasperated, Gaia went next to Theia, who was also paired off in another sibling union, to her brother Hyperion. In due course she would give birth to HELIOS the sun, SELENE the moon and EOS the dawn, quite enough parenting to be getting on with, so they too showed no interest in Gaia’s plans to depose Ouranos.

Despairing at her pallid and unadventurous brood’s refusal to live up to what she imagined to be their divine destinies – not to mention repulsed by how loved up and domesticated they all appeared to be – Gaia next tried Phoebe, perhaps the most intelligent and insightful of the twelve. From the earliest age shining Phoebe had shown that she possessed the gift of prophecy.

‘Oh no, Mother Earth,’ she said, when she had heard Gaia’s plan. ‘I could take no part in such a plot. I see no good coming from it. Besides, I’m pregnant …’

‘Damn you,’ snapped Gaia. ‘Who by? Coeus, I bet.’

She was right, Phoebe’s brother Coeus was indeed her consort. Gaia stormed off with renewed fury to visit her remaining offspring. Surely one of them had the stomach for a fight?

She called on Themis, who would one day be regarded everywhere as the embodiment of justice and wise counsel,fn5 and Themis wisely counselled her mother to forget the unjust idea of usurping Ouranos. Gaia listened carefully to this wise counsel and – as we all do, whether mortal or immortal – ignored it, choosing instead to try the mettle of her son Crius, who consorted with her daughter by Pontus, EURYBIA.