Zeus
King of the GodsLord Sky, bearer of thunder, tosser of lightning, King.
Grant me strength, for you are strong.
Grant me wisdom, for you are wise.
Grant me grace, for you are merciful.
Grant me guidance, for you know the paths to take.
Zeus, the King
Zeus is, by mythological accounts, the King of the Gods, the Lord of Olympus, and the father of gods and men. He is the divine patriarch of the Olympian family of Gods, for that is what they are in myth, a family. As King of Gods, his is the final word, the impetus, and the restraint. It is he that dictates what is or is not, yet we see in myth that even the king of gods must sometimes bow down to the will of the other gods. We see in myth that the Gods act on their own, of their own free will, and with whatever passions or desires move their divine spirits.
So what need do Gods have of a king?
I can only guess that Zeus is not so much a king as a coordinator in reality. Plans in hand, he knows what each god is doing and for what purpose, and they come to him to straighten out what may be conflicts between them. Religiously, however, we have the great king of Olympus and most powerful of Gods married to the great Queen of Heaven, for in myth, Zeus is as much defined by his own being as he is by his marriage to Hera, the divine wife.
Zeus is as much the King by right of birth as he is by right of marriage. He is as much the king because of his descent from and defeat of Kronos as he is for having married Hera. Of the king of Olympus, many other things can be said, but perhaps the most noteworthy, if not the most proper to our modern ears, is his prolific ability to produce children.
Zeus the Father
Zeus is perhaps best known for his role as father, but it is not a modern conception of father, the caring father caring for and supporting his family, but the biological one. Zeus produced many, many children, and above all, he produced children of such magnificence that they took their place among the Gods of Olympus. One of them, Dionysos, was born of a mortal woman and was worshipped far and wide as such in the Greek world. Another of his children, Herakles, was perhaps the greatest hero of Greek culture. So much so that the cultus given him rose to that given to gods.
This is all, of course, myth. There are truths always hidden in myth, however, and one of these truths is that of all the Gods of Olympus, Zeus is first and foremost “Father.” He is the great patriarch of the Cosmos, and by his side the great and powerful Hera.
Zeus the Husband
Zeus was by all accounts, a horrible husband. The myths surrounding him and his constant infidelity are enough to make one cringe, yet to the Greeks, this seems to have been a matter for comedy rather than moral outrage. To a patriarchal culture like that of the Greeks, the infidelities of the husband were not considered a big deal. He was, after all, the man of the house, the great father, and must therefore produce children, many of them and with all of the important women of the land (the goddesses.)
What we see here is a reflection of Greek culture and gender politics, not the true nature of the god. I hazard to guess that gods do not have a morality that we would even understand, if we could even call it a morality, and that they may not even feel the same emotions toward each other that we as human beings feel for each other. As a tool for understanding ancient Greek culture and beliefs regarding the roles of the sexes in society, these myths are indispensable, for as I have heard say many times, we give the gods an appearance that is much like ourselves, and the Greeks were no different from any other culture in this respect.
As far as modern living goes, I believe that each pairing must have its own rules. A marriage is a sacred thing, but it is also a personal thing within which none but the involved parties have right to interfere. I see nothing wrong with polygamy or polyandry. It is probably more to our nature than monogamy is, especially with our life spans so increased compared to what they were in ancient times, but a marriage must be sacred to those involved in it, and what rules they set forth in it must be respected and adhered to. This, I wager, comes more under the divine influence of Hera, however, for the Queen of the Gods is most vengeful of the hurt done to women by unfaithful mates.
Zeus Chthonios
There is an aspect of all gods that is not necessarily obvious of the high gods, the Olympians especially, and that is the aspect of chthonios, or chthonia in the case of goddesses. Simply put, the term chthonios means subterranean, or underworldly, and in this aspect we see the associations of our divine gods with death and concepts of the afterlife.
Interestingly enough, this aspect of Zeus is linked with his elder brother, who is called Hades or Plouton or Aidoneos. If this is the case, then the word Zeus is here used as a title rather than a name. The term which later came to be used as the word Dios or Dieus, which means simply “god.” Thus, we see that the term Zeus, a title and name for the Heavenly Father god can be said to simply mean God.
But does this mean that Hades is Zeus in an underworld aspect, or does it simply mean that the name of Zeus was used as an honorific for other very powerful gods such as the mighty lord of the underworld?
As true polytheists, we must see Hades/Aidoneus as a separate entity from Zeus. That his personality traits and “feeling” are quite different from Zeus implies this, and that the god was seen as separate in ancient times sets the precedent.
What, however, is a chthonic aspect?
Since all gods have them, to some extent, this is a very valid question. A chthonic aspect of a god is simply the actions of a god as they pertain to the underworld, to death, and to the afterlife. It does not mean that the god is split into many different aspects, rather that the god is seen doing different things at different times, and is how that god is therefore interpreted at that point.
It is rather like seeing a person at work all the time, at a restaurant, for example, and then noting how different that person seems outside that environment. Still the same person, but in different “aspects” of his/her life…
Thus, Zeus in his chthonic aspect, is Zeus as he works within the realm of death. Why, however, would a god need to do such a thing if there are deities that work in those areas already. The idea in my mind regarding this is actually rather simple, and that is that while the realm of the dead does belong to Hades and his bride Persephone, and they are the ones who rule it, each god does for his followers, and that includes working in the lower realms when necessary. Thus a worshipper may call upon Zeus Chthonios to intercede with Hades and Persephone on his behalf. Clearly all gods have the power to travel the lower and upper realms at will, even if paying proper respects to the rulers of the individual realms, so it is not so odd that a god or goddess would seek to give to this/her followers fulfillment in whatever way they need without having to involve other gods. Thus Aphrodite, hearing the prayers of a man whose lover has died, will seek to comfort that man and provide what he needs at that moment, even if it might involve feelings surrounding death, which we do not necessarily equate with the goddess of love.
Zeus, the loud-thundering
Zeus was, and continues to be seen as a weather god. His power manifests upon the earth as the force of the great storm, the thunderstorm, the tornado, and even the hurricane, for though it may be a sea storm, it is truly a storm of the churning sky.
The power of Zeus has enthralled and frightened humanity since its very beginning, and no doubt it will continue to do so as we learn more about the universe and discover “space storms.”
It is unfortunate, in my opinion, that we human beings see gods in all too human forms, and that we sometimes forget that the gods are not human and never have been. That the gods are cosmic beings that we recognize and worship in forms as varied as there are people who worship them. That the gods are in all things both immanent and transcendent, and that Zeus above all others, has made his presence so strongly felt that he will always be remembered, even if not as Zeus of the Greeks.
Zeus the Conqueror
(Zeus The Conqueror was added on January 13th, 2002)
Zeus is another type of god, he is the conquering hero, the victorious son who supplants the father, and in the case of the Greeks, it is in a violent fashion.
The story, as it is told, is that upon her pregnancies, Rhea was forced to give up her children to Kronos, who promptly swallowed them. By her sixth pregnancy, however, she was heartbroken and asked her own parents for advice.
Gaea, the earth mother and prophetess, advised her to hide a stone in swaddling cloth and present it to Kronos instead of the baby.
As her delivery began, the holy mother of gods sought a cave in which to hide herself and the babe. She began her delivery, and in her pain dug her fingers into the ground to bring forth the daktiloi (fingers) and the korybantes who danced around her as she gave birth and rang loudly with a banging upon their shields to hide the sounds of the birth and the child from Kronos.
Rhea did as she was advised by her mother, giving the child over to the nymph Amalthea to guard and care for and hiding a stone in the swaddling clothes before presenting it to Kronos, who promptly swallowed it.
The child, Zeus, grew quickly, and soon was a robust youth who, like his father before him, sought to rid the world of the tyranny of his own father. Zeus went about his secret plan and sought aid from those of power and brute strength, who like his own father, called the great earth their mother.
The war between the Titans and the Olympians was truly joined when Zeus attacked Kronos after giving him a potion to cause him to throw up his children, for Zeus had engraciated himself to Kronos by becoming his cup bearer, the implications of which we will not go into here.
Once reborn into the light of day, the Olympians, Kyklopes, Hekatoncheires, and all their allies staged their war, their coup d'etat, against the Titans.
But the Titans were not a unified camp, and some of their own number, most notably the wise Prometheus, joined the Olympians in their war against the brute power that was the rule of the Titans.
The war was won. Zeus, the conquering hero, took the divine realm as his, and Olympus would be its name.
The three brothers, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, drew lots, and to each a realm fell. To Hades the dark underworld, to Poseidon the raging sea, and to Zeus the sky that trembles at his movements.
What, however, does all this mean on a theological level?
Well, for one thing, it raises a great many questions. Cosmologically, it meant that the wild and chaotic epoch of creation was over. The epoch of subtler powers, of calmer forces, had come. But it does not by any means imply that the Gods of Olympus came to shower the universe in love and kindness. The Greeks left that kind of naive theology to others.
The cosmos and nature itself are violent. Chaos and order must by their very nature be at odds, and in a cosmos, that is a violent thing indeed, and the gods too, a neutral force between the two, must act to balance out those chaotic and orderly forces and so act in ways that often confuse man, at once for order and for chaos. It is in this act of balancing the two that the Gods often seem to man as capricious, or cruel. It is in this that we find the great floods and the violent tornado and the earthquake that destroys civilizations in its aftermath.
What are the forces of order and chaos, however? Can they be equated with the human concepts of good and evil?
Chaos is the lack of order, but that would attach to chaos a certain level of order that it does not posses. Chaos has no rhyme, no reason, no top no bottom, no light or dark, it simply has no cohesion of any type. To bring light to darkness is not to bring order to chaos, then, for darkness and light are both ordered aspects of nature.
Order is the absolute placing of every thing in a proper place and context, and order is stagnant. When all things have become ordered, nothing may move or progress, all has become as it should be and must thus remain. There can be no growth or evolution, and time itself must stop.
Chaos is not evil and order is not good. They are simply two extremes of possibility, extremes that cannot ever be in our universe because neither chaos nor order is alone conducive to a dynamically evolving universe, and certainly not to life. Neither mortal life nor divine life, and in a very real way the gods themselves were responsible for bringing order to chaos. Chaos was all there was, and into it were born the night, the earth, and attraction, three forces of order, three gods. The darkness of space that is night, the firm earth, and the power that holds it together are orderly powers by their very nature, and they form the very foundation of the Hellenic divine hierarchy, for Nyx, Gaea, and Eros are the oldest of the gods.
That said, it is sometimes unclear to me if indeed a power such as Eros is a god rather than just a human anthropomorphism of a natural force, that force being gravity.
This mode of thinking brings me back to a very basic question, how do I know that Zeus is truly a god, and not just a human conception, an anthropomorphic form attached to a natural phenomenon?
That is actually a topic for another discussion altogether, but one that can be touched on here for the sake of this topic, Zeus as conquering hero or even savior. Zeus was not born the sky god, according to our mythology, he rested that power from the Titans, and even then he could easily have ended up the sea god or lord of the underworld when he and his brothers drew lots to decide how to divide the universe.
Zeus was the conquering hero by choice. He sought revenge against his father and in so doing rested the very universe from him and his brethren, making the cosmos a far more refined place, a place where life, mortal life, could take hold and thrive.
As a god, Zeus' power is, as all the gods are, omnipotent. In his role as sky god, his power is restrained by his own choosing. As King of Gods, his is the power to restrain and direct other gods by their grace, but as conqueror of Titans, he is our hero and benefactor, though perhaps it is better to say he is life's benefactor, for Zeus had, at our beginnings, no true love of humanity.
Zeus had no love of man, and it is said that man has had various incarnations on earth, but we live in the last of these, in an age past the crime of Prometheus, who stole from Olympus the gift of fire, or was it the wisdom to tame and use fire? And gave that gift to man.
As the story goes, men lived like beasts, and Prometheus, the wise, sought to give unto man the use of fire that he might not fear the darkness of night or the cold of winter, but Zeus opposed this, for man was but a beast not worthy of such a gift. Prometheus then did the unthinkable and in defiance of the King of Gods himself, stole fire from the blessed hearth of Olympus and brought it forth to man, who quickly learned to use it.
This simply could not go unnoticed, certainly not from Zeus, and Prometheus was bound to a mountain for thousands of years, bearing torturous punishment for his defiance of Zeus, and every day an eagle ate his liver, and every night it grew back only to be devoured once more.
But Prometheus was unrepentant, for he knew he had done the right thing. This wisest of Titans would eventually be freed from his bondage, and man would forever be changed by his knowledge of fire and how to use it.
Man does not go unscathed by all this, however, for in his anger Zeus punishes mankind, and this punishment takes on the shape of woman, Pandora to be exact.
Pandora was fashioned, the first of women, to vex men. She was given a jar and told it was a gift from Zeus to her new husband. This husband, Epimetheus, was the brother of Prometheus, and from Prometheus he had received ample warning not to accept gifts of Zeus, for Zeus was crafty and deceitful, but when Pandora was delivered to him, her beauty beguiled him, and he accepted her into his home as well as the jar she brought with her.
What the jar, or in most artistic representations a box, contained was great ill to man, and of course, one boon. Hope.
Pandora did, of course, open the jar, and let loose all the evils man is plagued with, but closed the jar just in time to keep hope trapped within it. This is a myth of some allegorical complexity, especially in our modern look at it, but there are two very different ways to look at it that lead to two very different conclusions about Pandora, and about Zeus.
On the one hand, Zeus is the conqueror king, and Prometheus did defy his will. On this level, as god king, he is within his power and right to mete out whatever punishment he sees fit. Pandora is then an evil sent to men, and by extension, all women are the Bain of men.
On the other hand, the conqueror king saw something in man, once his eyes had been opened by Prometheus, whose name means forethought, and decided to send man those things that would make him stronger, the challenges of those evils let loose upon the world by Pandora, who in holding hope close by to man allows man another source of strength and power, the hope that no matter how bad things are today, they may be better tomorrow. Pandora and Zeus are not, in this case, villains, but bringers of good, if difficult hurdles for man to conquer, and conquest is the way of Zeus, after all.
But what of Zeus' punishment of Prometheus, who brings to man the gift of fire so he may prosper? This is something that eludes me, except that one may see forethought as a kind of punishment. Acquiring fire, becoming self aware, sapient, cursed man with one more thing, the ability to look forward to the time of his own death, something non-sapient animals are blessedly left in ignorance of.
But there too we see this aspect of Zeus, the conquering hero, who shows us a hope most unobtainable, that of living forever. But Zeus is a god, himself eternal, so what might he know of death?
For divine experience of death, the great conquering Zeus gives us his son, Dionysos, who in one myth of his birth, that of Dionysos Zagreus, the god-child is killed, boiled, roasted and then consumed by the Titans who are said to act at the request of Hera, wife of Zeus and Queen of Heaven. Dionysos dies.
Zeus, then, strikes down the Titans, finally conquering them forever, and conquers death to bring Dionysos back to life. The whole thing is complicated further by looking at the name Dionysos, which many take to mean the twice born (appropriate enough) but which apparently means 'the Zeus of Nysos.'
Taking the term Zeus as a noun, one assumes this makes the god Dionysos an aspect of Zeus, but taken in a broader sense, zeus (actually Dio or Dias) means simply 'God' so that he is not as such an aspect but a fully individual entity, which is the case.
We have then seen the conquering Zeus conquer the circumstances of his birth, his father, the Titans, and death itself, he conquers in other ways too, for probably the most famous of Zeus' characteristics in mythology, is that of conqueror in sex.
Zeus is like a walking erection in many of his myths. From his affairs with such divine entities as Metis and Themis, to his affair with the doomed Semele and his treachery into the bed of Alkmene, Zeus was lead astray by his own penis more often than any other god in Greek myth.
The legendary conquests of women are akin to the conquests or migrations of the Hellenes into non-Hellenic Greece. The Hellenes, a highly patriarchal people who appropriately enough worshipped the gods more vigorously than the goddesses, entered a land which to all appearance, and there is no real way to know this to a certainty, worshipped goddesses far more vigorously than gods. It was the perfect setting for myths that put the gods of the newcomers into the beds of the goddesses of the natives. A perfect setting for the developing reputation of Zeus as husband and rapist, a term that had very different connotations in ancient times than it does today. Zeus conquers, and in turn produces children, all splendid, some divine, some mortal, and these children take their rightful places in history, both Olympian and terrestrial. Apollon, Artemis, Ares, Hermes, Dionysos and Athena are all his children in myth, and great Gods in their own right, while Hephaestos is said to be either a son of Zeus and Hera or a child of Hera alone as vengeance for Zeus’ insult in producing Athena without her. These children and daliances, except for the birth and life of Dionysos, happen before man comes into being.
This was not the dawn of Zeus, of course. Zeus is a god, after all, and his life is one of millions not hundreds of years. But the life of a god can only be measured by the use of his name, but what about the god itself, and do note the use of a neuter pronoun, for to seek to understand how I see the gods you must also understand my concepts of godhead.
To begin, a godhead is a god. A god in its pure divine form has no gender, no physical form save that which it wishes to have, and exists as both part of and separate from the cosmos in many ways like ourselves. A god, once born, is eternal. Unlike the Judaeo-Christian concept of god existing always, I do believe the gods were born into this cosmos, the first of these born into an energetic universe which was dramatically altered by their sudden presence, for while gods do not have physical forms in the solid sense, they are none the less organized beings which caused a chain reaction in the chaos that was to bring balance between the chaos that was and the potential order that could be. A god as worshipped by us is a set of embellishments of our own creation set upon the deity we perceive in our limited way, thus Zeus does not have to appear to man as male, he may appear as female elsewhere, but for me, he is male, and the God as worshipped by the ancient Greeks.
Zeus is but one god, eternal and omnipotent to our limited understanding of such a term, and by our standards, omniscient, but these terms only apply to gods when they are compared to us. Compared to each other we suddenly find ourselves faced with gods that are more powerful than others, more 'omnipresent' then others, and so the terms omnipotent and omniscient become relative.
Of the mighty Olympian Gods, Zeus is always said to be the most powerful, a power and guile that allowed him to rest the cosmos itself from his own father, a divine entity far older than he was, and of course, to free his fellow gods from assimilation into Kronos, for that, I believe, is what Kronos was doing. Assimilating into himself the powers that were his children.
There is another conquest taken up by Zeus that would have been his ultimate conquest, attempted by both his father and grandfather.
The assimilation of the cosmos in its entirety into himself so that all that is became a part of him. Did this happen?
The answer boils down to what you believe, of course, but in my opinion, no, it did not. There are powers older and more powerful than Zeus in our universe, Gaea and Nyx, who are hardly to be assimilated into the divine form of a conqueror. But what if it had happened? How would that have changed us, the world, and the Gods?
The answer to that seems to be that it would not. We know that Kronos' assimilation of his children did not kill them, rather it held them within him, just as the Titans had at once been held, living and vital, within the body of Gaea. So, the assimilation of the universe by Zeus would have been akin to his returning it to a shell, as in one myth it is said to have sprung from, but this would, in my opinion, put Zeus outside the universe, and though it may have satisfied his need and desire to conquer all things, it would have put him outside the very thing he wants to conquer. Thus the conqueror comes to the end of his conquests. To conquer or not to conquer, that for Zeus is the eternal question, and as the father of all wisdom, I wager he knows when to do which.