He was a ghostly primordial deity who personified the meaning of time (sometimes he is confused with god Chronos). Etymologically, Aether means the highest and purest layer of air. According to Hesiod, she is the demon of death. The first creature that some say existed even before Chaos himself. Achlys: the goddess of the eternal night.
#Hades greek god drawing full#
The full list of the Primordial Greek Gods: From Gaia came Ourea, the god of the mountains, Pontus, the god of the sea, and Uranus, the god of the heavens.
Erebus, the god of darkness, and Nyx, the goddess of the night, were also born from Chaos. Goddess Gaia then followed, t he personification of Earth. Then Tartarus was born, a dark place like the abyss and the original god of the Underworld. We can see that ancient Greeks considered love as one of the most fundamental powers in the world. Out of Chaos came Eros, the god of love and procreation. Chaos was the personification of the absolute nothingness - an immerse, dark void from which all of the existence sprang. Natural forces are personified and the most basic components of the cosmos are Gods.Īccording to Hesiod, in the beginning there was Chaos.
The famous work of Hesiod, called Theogony (meaning “birth of the Gods” in Greek), presents a complete cosmogony. After a while, because his proper name would not be spoken, Hades was referred to as Plouton, closely related to the Greek for “giver of wealth,” because he was thought to be responsible for the precious minerals found in the ground-he was thus venerated for a time as a god of wealth as well as a god of the Underworld.Greek mythology starts at the beginning of the world! The Greek Gods that existed then were the Primordial Gods. Those who prayed to Hades would bang their hands or even their heads against the ground in order to get his attention, worshippers would avert their eyes or turn their whole heads away from statues and altars while making sacrifices of beautiful black animals, and special pits were dug in which the sacrificial blood was poured so that it would reach Hades more easily. Historical records indicate that though it did not happen as often as it did for other gods, Hades was, on occasion, ritually worshipped, and with a great deal of servile deference. Everyone else ended up in the Fields of Asphodel-a grey and uninteresting limbo where the shades of the average Joes and Janes wandered aimlessly for all eternity-or in Tartarus, where the evil were punished for their behavior in life by some truly creative methods of torture.Īrcheologists have found the ruins, located in the Greek town of Eleusis, of at least one temple that may have been dedicated to Hades and his queen, Persephone. The Underworld was a notoriously harsh place full of terrifying creatures like Cerberus, Hades’ three-headed guard dog, the grotesque Furies, and the Hekatonkheirs (giants which had one hundred hands and fifty heads), just to name a few and while the Underworld did include a paradise called the Elysian fields, that balmy and beautiful place was reserved for only the most heroic of figures. The Ancient Greeks in particular had a lot to fear from death. As ruler of the Underworld, he was heavily associated with death (though he is not Death incarnate-there was another god for that, named Thanatos), and your average mortal human isn’t usually comfortable thinking about death too seriously. On some level it’s easy to understand why Hades wasn’t very well liked as a god, or at least why the Ancient Greeks would have wanted to keep him at a distance. Top that off with the fact that most people were too afraid of him to worship him, and it seems like the eldest of the Olympians got a pretty rough deal. He drew the shortest stick, and therefore had to accept the twisted, dark, Underworld as his realm while his youngest brother became king of the gods and erected his kingdom in the sky. Normally, according to Greek law, the eldest brother (which in this case was Hades) would have been granted the biggest and best kingdom but Hades was cheated out of his rightful place and title as king of the gods by the drawing of lots (though it seems like an arbitrary system, it was a customary solution to difficult decision-making issues). After Zeus forced his father, Cronos, to disgorge Zeus’ brothers and sisters (whom he had swallowed in order to circumvent any threats to his power), and after Cronos’ children overthrew his rule as supreme god, Zeus and his two brothers-Poseidon and Hades-drew lots to decide which realms they would rule. All told, this may seem like just another example of Hades drawing the short stick-and in this case that’s not an idiom.
0 kommentar(er)
