Drama Amongst the Gods

Drama Amongst The Gods

CHAOS - in one ancient Greek myth of creation, the dark, silent abyss from which all things came into existence. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, Chaos generated the solid mass of Earth, from which arose the starry, cloud-filled Heaven. Mother Earth and Father Heaven, personified respectively as Gaea [Gaia] and her offspring Uranus [Uranos], were the parents of the Titans. In a later theory, Chaos is the formless matter from which the cosmos, or harmonious order, was created.

Sky (Uranos) was the first who ruled over the whole world. And having wedded Earth (Gaia), he begat first the Hundred-handed.... After these, Earth bore him the Cyclopes.... But them Sky bound and cast into Tartarus.... And he begat children by Earth, to wit, the Titans ... and youngest of all, Cronus....But Earth, grieved at the destruction of her children, who had been cast into Tartarus....

Apollodorus

Earth produced the Sky (Uranus [Uranos]) to cover herself. Then, by coupling they produced an enormous brood, including Oceanus (Ocean), Themis (Law), Mnemosyne (Memory), Phoebe, Cronus, the Cyclopes (producers of Zeus' thunderbolt) and the fifty-headed monsters, Cottus, Briareus, and Gyes (the Hecatoncheires).

Not a very natural parent, Uranos took pleasure in preventing any of his children from seeing the light of day. He insisted that Gaia keep them locked up. Growing within the bowels of their Mother Earth (Gaia), the children of Uranos and Gaia caused great physical and emotional pain for their Mother Earth. Eventually she could take it no longer and so she created a new metal. From the metal, Gaia fashioned a sickle, which she gave to her boldest offspring, the Titan Cronus.

The next time Uranos came to make love to Gaia, which he did by stretching out all over the Earth, Cronus sprang up from his hiding place, brandished his sickle, and attacked and castrated father Uranos. Additional offspring sprang from the spilled blood and organ of Uranos : Giants, Erinyes (Furies), Meliae -- and most spectacularly, Aphrodite, who was born from the foam.

Great Father Sky called his children the Titans because of his feud with them; he said that they blindly had tightened the noose and had done a savage thing for which they would have to pay in time to come.

And they did have to pay. Just as Uranos (Sky) suffered at his son's