Ancient history has always fascinated me.
When I was around the age of 8/9 I used to research all kinds of things about ancient Egypt. I read a lot of books, including “Egyptology”. Even though it’s fiction, you learn a lot.
There even was this day when I visited the library with my grandmother and picked a 1000-page book about the ancient Egyptian world. I can’t remember I finished that one.
Greek Mythology always remained a little in the background for me. But because of my interest in this branch of ancient “history” by my girlfriend, I started diving into it.
About a week ago I wrote a story about “Daphne & Apollo” and found out about God Peneus, but I also found out that there were “Titans” like Prometheus and Thanatos.
I didn’t understand the difference between them.
So what are the differences between Gods, Titans, and the Primordial Deities?
In The Beginning…
With all religions, there is a story that starts with nothing, zero, the void.
Chaos is what they call the first God of the void. He was the first “thing” to ever exist in this mythology. Like with Christianity, after nothing came life and those were all implemented in a specific order.
These first gods are called the primordial genealogy and these are the most known ones: Chaos (as mentioned above), Gaia, Uranus, Pontus, Nyx, and Eros.
Gaia made the earth, Uranus the sky, Pontus the sea, Nyx the night, and Eros the God of love.
Having the first generation of Gods clarified now gives us time to take a look at the second generation: Titans.
The 2nd Generation of Gods: The Titans
Often referred to as the pre-olympian Gods.
They were the children of the primordial deities. For example, we have the Titan Prometheus. He was the grandson of Uranus and Gaia and the son of one of the many Oceanid nymphs called Clymene.
Another well-known Titan is Cronus, the Titan God of time.
He was the direct son of Uranus & Gaia and therefore the brother of other Titans such as Rhea.
But what happened after the second generation of Gods?
The Olympian Era
There are Gods before and after the Olympian era.
One of them is Zeus. The leader of all the Olympian Gods. Some kind of King as you could call it.
Apolo, Aphrodite, Artemis, Ares, Athena, Demeter, Dionysus, Hera, Hephaestus, Hermes, Hestia, and Poseidon were the 12 major and important “Olympian” Gods that were sitting on top of Mount Olympus.
But there’s one important “God” missing: Hades. He was the God of the underworld and therefore not included on this list.
Not an Olympian.
Besides Hades missing from this list you might think there were a couple more Gods in Greek Mythology.
That’s right, but these twelve were “the main characters” of the “story” on Olympus.
But the other ones could have been demigods or less important for the family tree.
Final Thoughts on Greek Mythology
If I may compare Greek Mythology with Egyptian one I think the Ancient Egyptians documented their gods better than the Greeks did as I find much more detailed descriptions of their “God World”.
But, there are a lot of interesting myths, stories, and gods of the ancient Greeks I want to dive into.
