Myth·eumAncient Myth, Retold
HomePantheonsThemesAbout
GreekNorseEgyptianJapaneseMesop.RomanChineseHindu

#Creation

Cosmogony, origin of the world, gods, and humankind.

A young woman with loose auburn hair, in a blue gown under a rose-red mantle with a jewelled clasp, rests her right hand on the ornamented lid of a great lidded ceramic jar at the left — a satyr-mask moulded on its swelling belly — as if about to lift it; ivy climbs a broken pillar behind her against a stormy blue sky.
Greek

Pandora, the First Woman

The gods pooled their gifts to build one flawless girl, then handed her to mankind as a punishment; when she lifted the lid of a jar, only Hope stayed behind.

5 minHesiod
An Attic red-figure pelike, the whole black-glazed vessel standing against a plain grey ground, its belly panel bordered by a band of tongues above and running dot-chains at the sides. In the scene the Titaness Rhea, at left in a long pleated chiton and mantle with her hair bound in a fillet, steps forward and holds out in both hands the stone wrapped in swaddling clothes; facing her at right the bearded Kronos, in a himation that leaves one shoulder bare and a soft cap, grips a long sceptre in his trailing hand and raises his other hand to receive the bundle he believes is his newborn son — the swaddled-stone deception that founds the ruling family.
Greek

The Twelve Olympians: The Ruling Family

There is no ancient list of the Twelve. What the oldest poets give us instead is a household with a throne room, a swallowed generation, and a family quarrel that never quite ends.

7 minHesiod
A dark, teeming Mannerist canvas of the defeated Titans hurled from the sky. From a luminous break in the storm-clouds at the top, a mass of muscular nude figures tumbles headlong and foreshortened into the depths, limbs flailing and faces contorted in terror. They pile into a heap of straining bodies across the foreground, ruddy and pale flesh tangled together; one massive figure sprawls face-up at the centre, mouth open in a scream, his hair standing on end. At the lower left a standing youth grips a burning torch while a black hound's fanged head snarls beside him, and a few small butterflies and insects — the painter's emblems of the fleeting — rest on the fallen limbs.
Greek

The Titanomachy

For ten years the sky itself hung in the balance, until Zeus loosed the hundred-armed prisoners of the deep and the world caught fire.

8 minHesiod
A nude Aphrodite risen waist-deep from a grey-blue sea, wringing the water from the long rope of her hair as she looks aside, a scallop shell adrift on the swell beside her.
Greek

Aphrodite, Goddess of Love

Born from sea-foam and the severed flesh of Heaven, the goddess whose power bent gods and beasts alike, and whom only three could resist.

5 minHesiod
A luminous creator-figure sits enthroned at the centre of the newborn cosmos, arms outspread to draw the concentric spheres of the world out of formless Chaos, while personified winds and elements billow in the four corners — an engraved frontispiece to Ovid's Metamorphoses Book I
Greek

The Birth of the Cosmos

Before there was a world there was only a gap, and out of that yawning dark the first gods came to be.

8 minHesiod