#or conflating the Titanomachy with the Gigantomachy

[deathlessathanasia]

I just finished the chapter on Greek mythology in "A Feminist Companion to Mythology" and I think I got a stroke in the process.

#it's not just about stuff like calling Leto a mortal #or saying that Daphne was a priestess of Demeter and was saved by her by being taken to Crete and transformed into Pasiphae #or conflating the Titanomachy with the Gigantomachy #or calling Erichthonios a 'gorgo' and claiming that Gaia didn't want to raise him because he was too ugly #or suggesting that Persephone's connection with the pomegranate represents her menarche #and that her kidnapping represents the seclusion of women during menstruation #or claiming that the Judgement of Paris was in actuality about which of the goddesses he should marry #or all the ridiculously forced connections between myths and rituals #it's all of that together + many other things #including recommending Robert Graves' Greek Myths at the end of the chapter #jeezus! If all the other chapters on mythologies I'm far less familiar with are equally reliable #then there is no point in finishing this book #ramblings

[barid-bel-medar]

Failure to Explode: Titanomachy, please!

Titanomachy, aka FtE's version of Kamino Ward! Fun fact; in mythology the Titanomachy preceded (well depending on source, sometimes they're conflated) the Gigantomachy (and isn't that a familiar sounding term for BNHA fans...).

For those that don't know, the Titanomachy was the fight between the Titans (who were the Olympians predecessors) and the Olympian gods, which the Olympians won. The later fight was between the Olympians and the Giants, which again the Olympians won.

So we can all guess why I'd call a version of Kamino this.

#failure to explode

[feyariel]

Three and a half episodes in and I’m not terribly impressed with Blood of Zeus, but I’m at least entertained. I recognize it for what it is: a vain attempt at cashing in on Castlevania’s popularity without being another season of Castlevania. The Witcher’s similar, save it’s live action instead of anime. The big difference between BoZ and the rest is that the first two are trying to hew closer to canon because they have to, while BoZ has recognizable departures and is telling its own story.

...except...

So, things I’m noting (bold = show’s premises):

Olympians are gods of light, Titans are gods of darkness. Wat. Why do people keep jacking with a very simple family squabble in the hopes of making it dualism?

Gods can die. I get that this has been a big thing in pop culture renderings of Greek gods, but please stop. Greek gods cannot die; it’s a central premise of the mythology. Norse gods can die. They aren’t niftier because of that. Please quit killing the Greek gods/trying to Norsify them. It’s dumb.

Gods are at war with/trying to preemptively stop a war with an apocalyptic force of doom. Again, that’s the Norse gods. There were two divine wars in Greek mythology: the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy. Both wars ended with the named sets of beings improsoned — the former in Tartarus (Hell), the latter in various places (generally beneath mountains, offering one of the explanations for vulcanism and earthquakes that Greek mythology provides [Hephaistos and Poseidon being responsible, respectively, is the usual one I encounter]). There are no prophecies for an end of the world scenario. Why not use the Norse gods if you want to rewrite Ragnarok?

Humans consume the flesh of giants to become demons (spiky drow). This one’s like Castlevania on steroids. “Demons” (kakodaimones) are part of Greek mythology, but not in this sense. It’d be an intriguing premise given the blasphemy angle if they were going with it, which they might (Hera’s just done some spoilerific nonsense, so we’ll see, maybe.)

The gods have a non-interference law (punishable by death). I mean, the gods paying lip service to this notion and then not abiding by it is kinda all over Greek mythology but especially The Iliad, so it always gets me headtilting when modern works try to play with the idea and then fail horribly.

Zeus is subject to the other gods of the pantheon. Ha! This is a very modern/American spin. Zeus is an autocrat. He’s stopped rebellions a time or two and punished various gods (Hera, Poseidon, and Apollo all come to mind) for their insubordination. Big thing in Greek mythology: divine command theory, with Zeus’s rule being the absolute pinnacle.

Hera’s the villain. I mean, this one’s an easy tack to go down, given Zeus, but the hints at Hera being much more of a villain than usual are a bit strained. I can’t help but think that she’s a Carmilla sort.

Hera was queen before Zeus was king. This is a variation I have heard of before, but it’s uncommon. Generally, she’s the queen consort and not Zeus’s first wife. (Either second or third, IIRC.)

Artemis and Apollo are Selene and Helios, basically. I don’t usually care for this conflation, but I’ll admit it makes things easier in the telling.

A goddess (likely Athena, Demeter, or Hestia) has frown lines and Zeus has salt-and-pepper hair. Because ambrosia doesn’t exist? o.0

[deathlessathanasia]

I'm curious about your thoughts on the titanomachy timeline, it seems like Hyginus -in The Fabulae i think- states that Zeus' children helped with casting the titans into Tartarus. but is it more widley believed that it was Zeus + his siblings alone who fought against them? Which version do you prefer?

I kind of interpreted the event mentioned in Hyginus as a second Titanomachy, given that Zeus was already king at the time, the Titans were supposed to bring Kronos back to power, and their leader was Atlas rather than any of the elder Titans. Maybe this was a rebellion started by some of the Titans who had not been imprisoned into Tartaros previously, or maybe, and I think this is most plausible, we have here a case of conflating the Titanomachy and Gigantomachy. This happens quite frequently in Greek texts as well.

But in both Hesiod's Theogony and Apollodoros' Library all of the younger Olympians are clearly conceived and born after the Titan war, and this makes far more sense to me; getting random goddesses pregnant just before or during a great war doesn't sound like a very good idea and was definitely not among Zeus' priorities at the time. The Titanomachy was a war fought by the children of Kronos and Rhea (with the help of various allies), the Gigantomachy was a battle where all (or most of) the gods, elder and younger alike, participated.

#ask #titanomachy #titanomachia #greek mythology

[deathlessathanasia]

“The accounts of the Orphic theogonies preserve fewer details of the ongoing conflicts that lead to the shifts of authority in the cosmos, but the same basic story of Kronos overthrowing Ouranos, to be overthrown in turn by Zeus who then establishes his rule against further uprisings, seems to occur in them all. Characteristically, however, the most shocking elements of the story in Hesiod are multiplied or elaborated in the Orphic sources; Zeus’s binding of Kronos is told in more detail, and Kronos’s castration of his father may be doubled in some accounts by Zeus castrating Kronos. Both the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy appear in Orphic accounts, with the familiar slippage between the two that appears in the evidence for these battles outside the Orphica, but the Typhonomachy, the ultimate battle in the Hesiodic account, seems absent. Athenagoras recounts (pro Christianis 18) that Ouranos learned (probably from the oracle of Night) that his children would overthrow him, so he imprisoned them in Tartarus; the Orphic account thus provides a motive for Ouranos’s repression of his offspring, which seems in Hesiod almost an unintended consequence of Ouranos’s unceasing desire to mate with Gaia. The Titans are conceived to avenge the imprisonment of their siblings, and Kronos not only castrates Ouranos but hurls him out of his seat in the sky; as in Hesiod, his bleeding genitalia generate Giants and Aphrodite in earth and sea. Kronos then proceeds to swallow his children, as in Hesiod, to prevent his own overthrow.

Whereas in Hesiod Zeus receives advice from Gaia about a drug that will make Kronos vomit back up the gods he has swallowed, in the Orphic accounts Zeus seems to receive oracular advice from Night. Night advises him to ambush and bind Kronos, “when you see him beneath the high-topped oaks drunk with the works of loud-buzzing bees.” Taking vengeance one shocking step further than in Hesiod, Zeus castrates Kronos in his turn, so that the cutter is himself cut, and then imprisons him in Tartaros. The absence of coherent and continuous narratives in the Orphic accounts makes it difficult to determine how the story proceeded from this point, but there are sufficient allusions to Orphic accounts of a Titanomachy and Gigantomachy to conclude that at least some Orphic poems narrated these events, even if there were not continuous narratives that went from the first principles through to the end in the manner of Hesiod. Of the Typhonomachy, however, there is no real trace in the Orphica, even if various combats involving serpentine figures appear at earlier points in the narrative; the final conflict that is so important in Hesiod as the last attempt of the Earth to topple the ruler of the cosmos has no place in cosmogonies in which Earth’s fundamental role is replaced by Night or some other power. Athenagoras (pro Christianis 20)  mentions in passing that Zeus fought with the Titans for hegemony, but he has abandoned the continuous narrative by this point and is merely recounting a string of horrible things attributed to the Greek gods by Orpheus. The battles of Zeus and the Olympians as related in Hesiod seem hard to reconcile to the culminating event that appears in several of the Orphic accounts (Zeus’s swallowing of Protogonos and giving birth again to the entire cosmos), yet references to Orpheus’s tales of battles against the Titans and the Giants suggest that such inconsistent accounts appeared as separate tales that were probably later assembled as different parts of the Rhapsodies (cf. Edmonds 2013:  144–59). The similar tales of the Titanomachy and Gigantomachy were conflated and confused in many sources, and it is often difficult to tell which rebellion a particular fragment of Orphic poetry may be describing, but the proem to the Orphic Argonautica refers to the destructive deeds of the Earthborn as one of the previous tales of Orpheus, and the Etymologicum Magnum’s entry for Giant locates the tale in the eighth book of the Rhapsodies (Etymologicum Magnum s.v. γίγας = Orphicorum Fragmenta 188B = 63K). References to the generation of humans from the remains of the Giants or Titans suggest that both tales appeared in various Orphic texts and were often conflated, especially by Neoplatonists, who saw their allegorical meaning as indistinguishable.”

 - Radcliffe G. Edmonds, Deviant Origins: Theogony and the Orphica (The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod)

#orphism #quotes #excerpts