Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1)

by Stephen Fry

So the Chaos that began everything is also the Chaos that will end everything.

Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.

As he roared these furious words, he pushed them and the Cyclopes back into Gaia’s womb.

What is certain is that in reacting like this to the three Hecatonchires and the three Cyclopes, his own children, and in treating his wife with such abominable cruelty, Ouranos was committing the first crime. An elemental crime that would not go unpunished.

I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse.

This dialogue from Monty Python’s immortal “Cheese Shop Sketch” introduced many, myself included, to TERPSICHORE, the Muse of dance.

Under Hades’ personal command came Erebus and Nyx and their son Than-atos (Death himself).

In common with his brothers and some of his sisters, he was also to exhibit urgent bodily lust, deep spiritual love, and every feeling in between. Like

he was greedy for admiration, sacrifice, obedience, and adoration. Once your friend, always your friend. Once your enemy, always your enemy. And he was ambitious for more than burnt offerings, libations, and prayers.

Apollo was lord of mathematics, reason, and logic. Poetry and medicine, knowledge, rhetoric, and enlightenment were his realm. In essence he was the god of harmony.

Deucalion got to his feet and scrabbled around, collecting rocks and stones. They made their way across the fields below Delphi, casting them over their shoulders as instructed, but not daring to look back until they had covered many stadia. When they turned the sight that greeted them filled their hearts with joy. From out of the ground where Pyrrha’s stones had landed sprang girls and women, hundreds of them, smiling and healthy and fully formed. From the earth where Deucalion’s stones had fallen boys and men grew up. So it was that the old Pelasgians drowned in the Great Deluge, and the Mediterranean world was repopulated by a new race descended through Deucalion and Pyrrha from Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora, and—most importantly of course—from Gaia.84 And that is who we are, a compound of foresight and impulse, of all gifts and of the earth.

It was a joy that was to last for half the length of the year, for six months later, in accordance with ineluctable divine law, Persephone was forced to return to the underworld. Demeter’s distress at this parting caused the trees to shed their leaves and a dead time to creep over the world. Another six months passed, Persephone emerged from Hades’s domain, and the cycle of birth, renewal, and growth began again. In this way the seasons came about, the autumn and winter of Demeter’s grieving for the absence of her daughter and the spring and summer of her jubilation at Persephone’s return.