Part 1: The Creation Story

Adapted from Gods and Heroes by R.E. Francillon $\ccpd$ and material from the Wikipedia article “Titanomachy”, $\ccbysa$

In the beginning, there was nothing but chaos. Darkness covered everything. After many ages, the Sky married the Earth. The sky’s name was Uranus, and, the Earth’s was Terra, or Gaea. They had twelve children – six female and six male. The females were Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, Tethys, Theia, Phoebe, Rhea, and Themis. The males were Oceanus, the Titan of the sea, Hyperion, Coeus, Cronos, Crius, and Iapetus. They were huge and gray and called “Titans.”

Terra, their mother Earth, was very good and kind; but their father, Uranus, was very cruel. Gaea gave birth to three brothers called Cyclopes, who each had one eye, and then to the  Hecatonchires, another set of three brothers who had one hundred arms and fifty heads. Uranus hated how ugly they were and shut the six brothers underground so that he might never see them again.

Uranus drew the animosity of Gaea when he imprisoned her children the Hecatonchires and Cyclopes in Tartarus. Gaea created a great scythe with the iron she had in her veins — (you know that iron comes from what are called the Veins of the Earth) and adamantine, the strongest, unbreakable rock, and gathered together Cronos and his brothers to convince them to castrate Uranus so that he could never have any more children to hate. Only Cronos was willing to do the deed, so Gaea gave him the scythe and placed him in ambush.

When Uranus met with Gaea, Cronos attacked Uranus, and, with the scythe, cut off his genitals, casting them into the sea. In doing so, Cronos became the King of the Titans. But Uranus cursed him, promising Cronos’s own children would rebel against his rule, just as Cronos had rebelled against his own father, and that he would remain in the sky to watch it all happen to him. Uranus’ blood that had spilled upon the earth gave rise to the Furies. From the blood that fell into the sea, Aphrodite was born.

Cronos instantly let all his brothers out from their underground prison. They were very grateful to him until suddenly Cronos changed his mind. Paranoid and fearing the end of his rule, he now turned into the terrible king his father Uranus had been, swallowing each of his children whole as they were born from his wife Rhea and returning his disfigured brothers underground. Rhea was very unhappy and miserable: having her children eaten was worse, she thought, than if he had only shut them underground.

But she thought and thought, and at last she devised a plan. When her next child was born, she hid it away, and when Cronos asked for it to eat it, she gave him a big stone instead of the baby. Cronos must have had good teeth, for he ate it up, and only thought that the new baby’s bones were surprisingly hard. The trick seemed to work.

The other Titans did not fear Uranus’ threat and had many famous children. Iapetus had three children: Epimetheus, the god of afterthought, Prometheus, the god of forethought, and Atlas, the carrier of the universe–all of whom will be important in later stories. Oceanus married Tethys and gave birth to all the rivers in the world as well as thousands of water nymphs. Hyperion, the Titan of light, had three important children: Helios, the Sun, Selene, the moon, and Eos, the goddess of dawn. Mnemosyne became the mother of the nine Muses, and Themis, the Titan of justice, gave birth to the three Fates. However, the most famous children are those of Cronos and Rhea.

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