God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

In the Greek imagination, Mount Olympus was not just the abode of the gods who ruled over humanity; it was the home of a highly dysfunctional divine family engaged with one another in the same cosmic drama, like characters in a long-running soap opera who are constantly interacting in each other’s storylines. There was Zeus, the patriarch, father of gods and men; Hera, whom the Greeks transformed into Zeus’s sister and wife; and their firstborn son, Ares, the god of war. There were also Zeus’s two brothers: Poseidon, demoted from his perch at the height of the Mycenaean pantheon, and Hades, god of the underworld, as well as his second sister, Demeter, goddess of agriculture. Add to these Zeus’s other son, Hermes, whom he bore with the goddess Maia; his twin children Apollo and Artemis, both born from his tryst with the goddess Leto; Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy, whom he sired with a mortal woman; Athena, who in her evolution from Mycenaean to Greek goddess became Zeus’s daughter, born directly out of his head after he had swallowed his pregnant wife, Metis; and Zeus’s favorite child, Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex.