“I shall sing of Zeus, the best and greatest of the Gods; far-seeing, mighty, fulfiller of designs…” Homeric Hymn to Zeus
Real change begins with a change in perspective. The old myths offer a valuable lens and means to make such a shift. They reveal the shared webs of meaning and images that are the source of ideologies, theologies, and other constructs.
Greek mythology continues to be a particularly strong influence in the world today, given the colonizing history of Western culture. I think it can help us understand the deeper themes in this time of social unrest and transformation.
In this episode, we examine the Greek myths surrounding Zeus, the ruler of gods and men. What do these stories suggest about power, legitimate authority, and justice?
This episode builds on ideas in the last one, “Meaning is magic: the trickster Hermes and radical change.” You might want to listen to that one first, if you haven’t already.
Thanks for listening.
Transcript of Power, justice, and the myths of Zeus, Far-seeing Ruler of the gods
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
In the last podcast, I talked to you about the Greek trickster, Hermes, and his particular form of creativity. I think it’s so powerful that I used the word “magic” to describe it in that podcast, and it has to do with the ability to change the meaning of things. As we discussed in that podcast, when you change the meaning of something, you change its significance and the context in which it appears, and therefore the truth about it. And when you make those changes, you then create the possibility for a change in the rules, and the governing order in which this thing, this idea appears.
In the myth of Hermes, Hermes makes a lot of changes. The end result being that he proposes there is actually a place for him and his mortal mother, who may have been a goddess in earlier myths, on Mount Olympus, and Zeus, who is the great authority, the ruler of the Greek gods, accepts this proposition. Hermes becomes one of the Olympians and in fact, becomes a very important helper to Zeus. He becomes Zeus’s messenger because he can move between the realms.
I want to move from this discussion of Hermes to the discussion of his partner, so to speak, Zeus. Because one of the things that this myth suggests is that, although the trickster can disrupt and subvert and create and propose all kinds of very important changes, for that to translate into a lasting possibility in the world, it has to bump up against the existing order. And that means that it has to come into conversation with the ultimate authority, with whoever or whatever is deciding about the rules. This is true for us on a personal level and it’s true for us on a collective level.
Now, it’s my contention that a very useful way to understand what’s going on in the world today, is to look for these shifts in meaning, the places where people are doing that, consciously or unconsciously, and to consider that a lot of the disagreement and confusion in our societies right now revolves around whether or not those proposed changes should be entertained. They are questions about what is the ultimate source of authority, and who should get to address that authority? As I said in the last podcast, Hermes, who is an outsider, makes his way somehow to Mount Olympus and gets to talk to Zeus, which leaves us with a question of what happens when outsiders contrive to come to Olympus.
There are many outsiders coming to Olympus right now. Zeus, in Greek mythology, is the ruler of the gods and of man. Now, he’s a very complex figure. But today I want to look at this central identity, because it relates to our questions about how to participate in the social upheaval and planetary crisis that we are living through in a useful way, how to see that and be part of the transformation in order to bring about the best possible outcomes.
I turn to Greek mythology for this type of theme because I am, like many of you listening, a product of Western culture. We are to a very large degree, still living out and within Greek mythology. The “archetypes” or the gods and goddesses in Greek mythology, are essential to our webs of signification, that is, our layers of meaning and association that comprise our world, and so, our societies.
Now when I mention Zeus, the two things that most commonly come to mind, in my experience are, first of all, that he’s the ruler, that he is the father or the king or, you know, the President, whatever you want to call it, of the gods. In Greek mythology, his primary responsibility and also privilege, source of power, is that he is the upholder of a just order.
The other thing that often comes to mind when you think of Zeus is his many infidelities. Zeus is married to his sister, the goddess Hera. In my experience, well you know, most of us generally frown upon Zeus’s behavior although Hera, who punishes his many consorts, is a difficult figure for us to entertain as well.
I want to examine these ideas, Zeus as the ruler and the ultimate authority over gods and human beings, and his infidelities, in the context of this question of authority and possibility and change, by taking a little look at his mythologies. What do the stories about Zeus tell us about power and authority and possibility and leadership and governing order, especially in conversation with Hermes, the great disrupter?
Our oldest sources in Greek mythology and stories about Zeus, are from Hesiod and Homer. Everyone who elaborated on Greek mythology, including us today, layered their versions on to Hesiod’s “Theogony” and “The Homeric Hymns,” which are called the “Homeric Hymns” because they come from that same time period, the time period in which Homer, whoever we imagine Homer to have been, composed “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” the great myths of the heroes Achilles and Odysseus, in which Zeus appears now and again, as a key component in their context.
Both Hesiod and Homer invoke the Muses at the very beginning of their long poems, or myths. The Muses are understood as the inspiration for all storytelling, which includes poetry, song, myth, and history. The Muses were among the many early daughters of Zeus. They were part of his contribution to the framing or ordering of our world. According to Hesiod, the Muses were one of the Zeus’s greatest gifts to humanity. Their mother Mnemosyne, partner to Zeus and their birth, was the Titan goddess Memory.
Hesiod provides the most complete early history in Greek mythology. He begins with the creation of the world and provides a really elaborate genealogy, the emergence of all kinds of forces and presences and conditions in our world, from Night, to Light to Heaven, to the Mountains to the Oceans, and then on to the gods, and their early feuds and wars. In the beginning Hesiod says, was Chaos, the nameless void. And it’s not so much chaos in the negative sense, as a sea, so to speak, of possibility. Everything was unformed.
The first to emerge was Gaia, that is Earth, and Eros, love, what brings things together. These two forces, the female or yin Earth, and the male or yang Love, are the foundation of everything. From that came this tremendous proliferation of things that we recognize as being characteristic and foundational components of our world. As I mentioned earlier, this includes Night and Day, Heaven, the oceans, the mountains, and then the first race of Gods which was the Titans, personifications of primal forces. There were also some other beings like Giants and Cyclops that many of the later beings like the Titans, considered to be monsters.
The leader, the mightiest of the Titans, was Cronus. He’s commonly known to us today as Saturn, or Father Time. Zeus was his youngest son. Cronus, in the tradition of those times, married his sister, Rhea. Rhea was the productive, generative aspect of her mother Gaia. So, this is another aspect of Mother Earth, one step more refined than Earth in its most primal and all-encompassing sense. And these two, Cronus and Rhea, had six children. Three daughters: Hestia, Hera, and Demeter. And three sons: Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus. Cronus had been told in a prophecy that one of his children was going to overthrow him. And because he didn’t want this to happen, he decided that every time Rhea gave birth, he would simply swallow the infant. And this is what he did. He swallowed the first five before they could even be laid in their mother’s arms.
This caused Rhea, as you might imagine, a tremendous amount of distress. So, when she was pregnant with her last child, Zeus, she went to her mother and father– Gaia, the Earth, and Ouranos, Heaven and asked them for help. Gaia told her to go to a specific place and take a particular stone from her own body, Gaia’s body, and to wrap it up in swaddling and trick Cronos into swallowing the stone rather than the baby. And this Rhea did.
As soon as Zeus was born, some emissaries of Gaia’s took the child away to the island of Crete. And when Cronos appeared to inspect the baby and swallow it, Rhea gave him this stone, and he impetuously swallowed it down and left without being any the wiser.
Zeus was raised on the island of Crete by his grandmother Gaia, and some nymphs. So, we see that Zeus was born in a cave and in secret. He grows up in isolation in the care of women, that is, in the care of female powers. In some versions, he grows up in a sacred cave of bees, who nursed him. And it’s also said that an early playmate was an eagle, either a boy who was named Eagle or an actual bird, or both, but in any event, the eagle is a central totem, if you will, associated with Zeus.
We also see that Zeus is not the first. I mean oftentimes, we think that the ultimate God, the ruler God, is also the creator of everything. But in this case, no. Zeus, the ultimate authority of the world is not the creator. He has parents and he comes into being as part of the emerging order of things, and he is dependent for his survival on Gaia, on Earth, from the outset.
Zeus grows up and liberates his siblings. When he gets old enough, he is told that he has siblings and it’s a little unclear how exactly he manages this, but he gets Cronus to drink something that induces vomiting, and out come the siblings. Once the Olympians are free, they plot to overthrow their father, Cronus. So we note again, this dynamic that the authority figure, the king, the Father, the ruler, and the order that they establish and uphold are not fixed for all time. There’s a sense that things have to change and develop in some way or another.
Gaia gives Zeus thunder and the lightning bolt as his particular powers and weapons against Cronus. This war that ensues between the Titans and Cronus, and Zeus and the Olympians, is called in Greek mythology, the Titanamachia. It’s a huge battle between the primal forces that emerged first, and the second order that’s a bit more nuanced. Now Zeus, Zeus goes around to pretty much everybody, including the female Titans, that is the Titanesses, and most everybody agrees to fight on his side. And yet, the war rages on for 10 years. He has all of these powers and forces, but he can’t win. That’s how strong the Titans were.
Eventually, he went to his grandmother Gaia, for advice. And she tells him to go to three sons of Cronos that were locked into the dark, isolated depths of Tartarus, which is not exactly a hell, it’s like even further away than that. It’s like so far away that you can never get there. And they’ve been locked away there by their father Cronos because Cronos found them hideous. He thought they were terrible and he locked them away and they never got to have any kind of life. These brothers were named Kottos, Obriareos, and Gyges.
Earth said, “Go to them and liberate them and make your case, and see if they will fight with you.” Zeus goes down there. He finds them. He frees them from Tartarus and he feeds them ambrosia, which is the food of the gods. It’s an important form of sustenance and it’s also an important symbol of honoring them. He tells them what he wants to do, that he needs to overthrow Cronus and of course, there is no love lost there. So, the three hideous brothers agree to fight on the side of the Olympians.
Each of these brothers had 50 heads, and 100 arms springing from their shoulders. Their weapon was boulders. With all of these arms, they picked up these gigantic boulders and pelted the Titans. And this turned out to be that additional bit of strength necessary to win. For nine days and nights Hesiod tells us, there was the most awful din and destruction, fire and upheaval. On the 10th day, the Titans lose. Zeus locks them all up in Tartarus and the Olympians begin to rule the world, a world that they further elaborate according to their sense of order, by giving birth to various forms and conditions and children.
It’s through this creation, ongoing creation, that they create and establish the order that presumably governs us today. Most of Greek mythology from this point on, is stories of the Olympians, of their interactions with each other and with human beings. Around the same time men appear, and it is only men who appear first.
They were commonly understood to be the children of Gaia. It was said that human beings sprung from the earth, like plants and animals sprung from the earth, the difference being that man possessed a form of reason that was necessary to be devout to the gods.
So, you see that Zeus and men had the same parentage. Some say that Prometheus, who was a Titan, who’s very famous for stealing fire for human beings, also had a hand in our creation.
In any event, now that the Olympians have won the right to reign, and to work on this project of world creation, they need to divide up power. The brothers, and it is only the three brothers, draw lots. They draw a lots. It’s chance, so to speak. Hades gets stuck with the underworld. Poseidon gets the oceans and Zeus wins heaven and earth. So even though Zeus is very charismatic you might say, and has been the leader all along, he still can’t just assume power and authority over the others. There has to be some sharing. There has to be some collaboration and there also has to be some limits.
For example, this establishment of the different realms largely dictates where these gods can go and where they can act. Zeus can’t go to Hades’s realm because the immortals cannot go to the place of death. There are no stories that I know of, of Zeus making any journeys to visit Poseidon either. And this is why he needs Hermes, that trickster, as his messenger, because Hermes can travel anywhere.
There’s another limiting factor that’s introduced at the beginning, and that is Fate. The Greeks imagined Fate as three sisters, who were given the powerful task of weaving individual destinies. There was Clotho, the Spinner of the thread of your life, and Lachesis, who was called the Allotter. She determined how long your thread was, and Aropos, the Inflexible, who cut it off at the time that they had determined.
These three Fates were among the daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Themis, who was the goddess of justice. No one can change fate, not even Zeus. So, he gives birth, through his union with the goddess of Justice, to Fate, which then acts as a limiting factor on his authority.
At this point, what I notice is that Gaia is the source and the foundation and the mother of all of the mortals and the gods, and that she provides not only life, but advice to the gods. I notice the necessity of exchange and negotiation, and the idea that things have to evolve and change, that holding power is a dynamic process. It’s not something that is garnered one time and held absolutely. We can see the need for this ongoing dynamic exchange or negotiation, as one of the reasons that Zeus is not faithful to his wife Hera.
Zeus has lots of children. First of all, with some of the female Titans or Titanesses. As I already mentioned, he has the Muses and many others daughters with Mnemosyne or Memory. He fathers the gods Artemis and Apollo with the titaness Leto. Another example is Metis, who is the goddess of wisdom or more specifically “prudence.” Their child is the goddess Athena. Metis is the one who gave Zeus the drug to make Cronus vomit, and she is his first mistress. But when she gets pregnant, Gaia and Heaven tell Zeus that after the daughter that she’s carrying is born, Meti will have another child by him, that will overthrow him. And Zeus does not want this to happen. And of course, he knows all too well that it can, because he just did it himself.
So, Zeus swallows Metis and he gives birth to Athena himself. Athena springs fully formed from his forehead. So, there’s a need to preserve power, because it’s always in question. There has to be a balance maintained. And the two sides of this, of this need for strategizing and balancing are embedded actually, in the Greek’s notion of “prudence.” Prudence of course, is acting with proper discretion and care. On the flip side, in a pejorative way, the Greeks also understood prudence as treachery. Treachery, tricks and betrayals that are necessary to maintain your power.
Zeus also has liaisons with two of his sisters. He fathers the goddess Persephone with his sister Demeter, who is the cultivated Earth, and then he marries Hera, the beautiful golden goddess, and they have a few children, including the god Aries, the God of War. Which tells us something about their marriage! I’m going to come back to that later.
Zeus also has many, many, many affairs with mortals, this is a big part of his mythology. Sometimes these births result in the birth of gods. For example, his affair with Semele results in the birth of the god Dionysus. And as we discussed in the last podcast, his affair with Maia results in the god Hermes. Both of these sons had to create and win a place for themselves on Mount Olympus, given their mixed parentage. Now sometimes, the affairs with mortals resulted in heroes, like Perseus or Hercules, or sometimes they resulted in famous women like Helen of Troy, or kings of Greek cities. You can easily imagine the authority that could be claimed by a city whose origin story begins with a first and founding King, who was a son of Zeus.
King Minos of Crete, for example. Crete was a very powerful kingdom for a very long time. Now, Minos turned out to be power hungry and tried to trick the gods. So, being a son or daughter of Zeus did not necessarily mean that you had a lasting and perfect character by any means. Crete ends up being plagued by the monster the Minotaur.
There are many, many myths about Zeus and his exploits, and then about the activities of his offspring. But our point here today is, you know, what all this sleeping around might signify about the rules of the gods who are charged with maintaining and upholding a just order for heaven and earth. Well, I mentioned alliances a few minutes ago and some of these unions were in a sense, alliances, relationships that Zeus built with Gaia’s daughters and granddaughters, and with the gods who came before him. They were part of the exchange or the networking necessary to maintain power and also order. We recognize this in the behavior of our historical kings, and even arranged marriages in lives that are a little bit more humble.
Zeus was also investing himself in the ongoing creation of the world and contributing to its ongoing vitality. He was literally planting seeds. In other words, so great a god, with so many gifts, needed to spread that around. And the results, as I’ve indicated, were mixed, a wide range of characters. But that’s the way that it is with creative activities, isn’t it? It’s not inherently a moral activity. It’s about seeing what you can make happen. Now, you see the objections to Zeus’s infidelities, because he is married to the goddess Hera and she is very unhappy, don’t really belong to close examination of Zeus and his role in upholding a just order.
It’s kind of hard to accept because Hera is very unhappy, she’s affronted actually, her pride is injured, and she’s the most beautiful, and how could he possibly need anyone else? And then she tortures the mortal women and all of Zeus’s progeny by them if she can, because she can’t exact revenge against Zeus directly, or control him. He’s Zeus after all.
This predicament belongs to the archetypal experience of marriage and Hera, personifies it, she carries it. That suffering is her story, not his. That it is the wife who must suffer the loss of intimacy and prestige may rankle. I expect it does rankle you and it reflects the misogyny inherent to patriarchy, which was the ancient Greek paradigm, and is unfortunately, part of our cultural heritage. And yet, Zeus is creative possibilities. And this is the point for Zeus. He’s not fully realized in a partnership with one other. You have to note that he only had one wife, one Queen, he didn’t threaten that, within that paradigm. But he needed to do more, he needed to bring more into the world.
I want to conclude this brief, oh too brief perhaps, survey of some of Zeus’s foundational mythologies, by reading the Homeric Hymn to Zeus. It’s only four lines.
“I shall sing of Zeus, the best and greatest of the gods,
far-seeing, mighty fulfiller of designs, who confides
his tight knit schemes to Themis as she sits leaning upon him.
Have mercy far-seeing Kronidea, most glorious, and great.”
Parenthetically, I think it’s very interesting that Zeus only gets four lines. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes that was the basis of the last podcast was 580, lines, and some of the gods, Aphrodite, for example, get more than one hymn. And yet in this hymn, we find the primary themes that we’re discussing today, and the central identity of Zeus.
Now, at the outset of this podcast, I said that I see this as a time of changing meanings, and that changing meanings means changing truths, and so then perhaps, a change in the rules. But that change in the rules can only happen when Zeus, that is the upholder of the existing order, is brought into the conversation. It’s his acceptance or her acceptance of the possibilities in that change, that is essential. What I see in this mythology of Zeus, is that it’s a very dynamic process. Authority is not vested in one being, or form or institution, for all time, and that maintaining it is a matter of exchange, collaboration, boundaries, and also prudence, or treachery.
In Greek mythology, power is the central value. Power is the central value. And one question is whether or not it needs to be. I mean, we can’t live without power without order, authority, responsibility. In our personal lives and our collective social lives, decisions have to be made, and we need justice, which is necessary to our communal life, necessary to any real notion and experience of equality. But if justice is the real goal in community, just as autonomy may be at this point in history, for individuals formed by Western culture anyway, the goal, the objective, that still leaves the question about how this is best achieved, through what exercise of power, and by whom.
There are a few other things that I observe in the mythology of Zeus that I think are useful, in reflecting on these questions about who or what has power in your life, about how you see your own power in this life, and how these things support justice, a just order. I mentioned earlier, one thing that strikes me is that Gaia, the Earth is the source and foundation. She is the source of life, succor, and advice, even to the gods, even to Zeus.
Another, this notion of limiting factors. In addition to the need for alliances, Zeus fathers the Fates. I think this is very interesting that he is their father, and that this happens fairly early on, in the establishment of the Olympian world order. The Titans, the earlier versions of the gods, are characterized by their rejection of limits. They are raw power. They are force. And so, you have the sense that this is the only way to operate, that whatever it is that you want to do, you achieve it through coercion, bullying, compelling, you know, you just overpower the opposition.
But it’s different in the world that Zeus and the Olympians create. First of all, they have to respect each other’s realms and powers, and sort of balance their different interests. And then we have the Fates who are the ultimate authority, when it comes, especially, to the lives of mortals. The gods can interfere and direct mortal lives but only up to a point, only up to a point. This gives rise to a more nuanced approach, to the need for strategy and collaboration. And I suspect that it’s better actually, to live in a world where some things are impossible. And that is the world created by Zeus and his Olympian siblings.
There’s a common epithet or attribute that is often given to Zeus. Homer does it a lot. If you read him, he’s always referring to Zeus as the “far-seeing.” We heard that in the in the Homeric Hymn that I read a moment ago. Far-seeing Zeus is wise enough to deserve his role, to deserve his authority, because he can look beyond immediate circumstances. He plays a long game. He’s willing to lose a battle to win the war. He is strategic. And far-seeing also in the sense that he can see into the character of a thing or person. In the interactions with Hermes, we’re told that he understood Hermes’ nature and he saw the potential in that, and so made space for it.
I think this is a very important form of creativity. Zeus is creative in the direct sense, as we discussed, that sowing of seeds. And yet there’s something very creative in the ability to allow events to unfold, to sense that there’s nothing to do but to watch, and to wait, and maybe, to nurture.
“Zeus” is an archetypal idea. He’s a web of associated notions that include justice and power and authority. No one of us will be Zeus, and yet I think it’s worth contemplating who he was and how he had to operate, entering into this web or the fabric of his mythology, to consider the capacities that we might want to cultivate in ourselves, and to look for in those to whom we give the authority, the privilege and responsibility of upholding justice in our time.
There’s a lot more to be said about Hermes and Zeus and tricksters and changing meaning. I’ve gotten some interesting comments from a couple of listeners so I may do a little bit more with this theme in upcoming podcasts. But we’ll stop there for today. I want to give a big welcome to new subscribers, Dave and Teresa. Thank you for subscribing for email announcements about the podcast and my other programs.
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And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself. And until next time, happy mythmaking and keep the mystery in your life.
