Greek Mythology by Sara Aishwarya

GREEK MYTHOLOGY (Major Gods & Goddesses)

K. SARA AISHWARYA June 2021

INTRODUCTION

In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the twelve Olympians are the major deities of the Greek pantheon. They were called Olympians because, according to tradition, they resided on Mount Olympus. They gained their supremacy in a ten-year-long war of gods, in which Zeus (King of the gods) led his siblings to victory over the previous generation of ruling gods, the Titans. Following the defeat of Cronus, the world was divided by lot among his three sons- Zeus was given the sky, Hades the underworld, and Poseidon the sea, with the Earth and Mount Olympus belonging to all three. They were a family of gods, the most important consisting of the first generation of Olympians, offspring of the Titans Cronus and Rhea: Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter and Hestia along with the principal offspring of Zeus Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Dionysus. Although Hades was a major ancient Greek god and was the brother of the first generation of Olympians , his realm was the underworld, far from Olympus.

MOUNT OLYMPUS Mount Olympus is the mythical home of the gods in Greek mythology. The mountain was created after the Titanomachy, the epic battle between the young gods, the Olympians and the older gods, the Titans. As a result of this battle, the Olympian victors created their new majestic home – Mount Olympus. It was shrouded from human eyes by clouds which constantly obscured its peaks. In Greece, you will also find a Mount Olympus, the tallest mountain in the country.

ZEUS Zeus rules as King of the gods of Mount Olympus, therefore he is called King of the Gods. He is also the God of Sky and Thunder. Zeus is the child of Cronus and Rhea (Titans) , the youngest of his siblings to be born, though sometimes reckoned the eldest as the others required disgorging from Cronus's stomach. He was respected as an allfather who was chief of the gods and assigned roles to the others. "Even the gods who are not his natural children address him as Father, and all the gods rise in his presence." Zeus' symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull, and oak.

Zeus is frequently depicted by Greek artists in one of two poses: standing, striding forward with a thunderbolt leveled in his raised right hand, or seated in majesty.He fathered many of the heroes and was featured in many of their local cults. He was equated with many foreign weather gods, permitting Pausanias to observe "That Zeus is king in heaven is a saying common to all men"

HERA Hera rules over Mount Olympus as Queen of the gods, being the sister and wife of Zeus. She is is the goddess of women, marriage, family and childbirth. She is the daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. The sister and wife of Zeus.A matronly figure, Hera served as both the patroness and protectress of married women, presiding over weddings and blessing marital unions. One of Hera's defining characteristics is her jealous and vengeful nature against Zeus' numerous lovers and illegitimate offspring, as well as the mortals who cross her.

Hera is commonly seen with the animals she considers sacred, including the cow, lion and the peacock. Portrayed as majestic and solemn, often enthroned, and crowned with the polos (a high cylindrical crown worn by several of the Great Goddesses), Hera may hold a pomegranate in her hand, emblem of fertile blood and death and a substitute for the narcotic capsule of the opium poppy.

POSEIDON Poseidon is god of the sea, storms, earthquakes and horses. He had also the cult title "earth shaker". He is often regarded as the tamer or father of horses, and with a strike of his trident, he created springs which are related with the word horse. Poseidon was protector of seafarers, and of many Hellenic cities and colonies. In Plato's Timaeus and Critias, the legendary island of Atlantis was Poseidon's domain.

In his benign aspect, Poseidon was seen as creating new islands and offering calm seas. When offended or ignored, he supposedly struck the ground with his trident and caused chaotic springs, earthquakes, drownings and shipwrecks. Sailors prayed to Poseidon for a safe voyage, sometimes drowning horses as a sacrifice; in this way, according to a fragmentary papyrus, Alexander the Great paused at the Syrian seashore before the climactic battle of Issus, and resorted to prayers, "invoking Poseidon the sea-god, for whom he ordered a fourhorse chariot to be cast into the waves."

HADES Hades is the god of the dead and the king of the underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was often portrayed with his threeheaded guard dog Cerberus. Hades was often portrayed as passive rather than evil; his role was often maintaining relative balance. That said, he was also depicted as cold and stern, and he held all of his subjects equally accountable to his laws. He strictly forbade his subjects to leave his domain and would become quite enraged when anyone tried to leave, or if someone tried to steal the souls from his realm. His wrath was equally terrible for anyone who tried to cheat death or otherwise crossed him.

Hades, as the god of the dead, was a fearsome figure to those still living; in no hurry to meet him, they were reluctant to swear oaths in his name, and averted their faces when sacrificing to him. He spent most of the time in his dark realm. His chariot, drawn by four black horses, made for a fearsome and impressive sight. His attributes in art include a scepter, cornucopia, rooster, and a key, which both represented his control over the underworld and acted as a reminder that the gates of the Underworld were always locked so that souls could not leave.

DEMETER Demeter is the Olympian goddess of the harvest and agriculture, presiding over grains and the fertility of the earth. She was also called Deo. Demeter was frequently associated with images of the harvest, including flowers, fruit, and grain. She was also sometimes pictured with her daughter Persephone. Demeter is not generally portrayed with any of her consorts; the exception is Iasion, the youth of Crete who lay with her in a thrice-ploughed field, and was sacrificed afterwards by a jealous Zeus with a thunderbolt.

According to the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates, Demeter's greatest gifts to humankind were agriculture, particularly of cereals, and the Mysteries which give the initiate higher hopes in this life and the afterlife. Demeter's emblem is the poppy, a bright red flower that grows among the barley. Demeter's most wellknown relationship is with her daughter, Persephone, queen of the underworld. Both Hesiod and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, describe Persephone as the daughter of Zeus and his older sister, Demeter, though no myths exist describing her conception or birth.

ATHENA Athena is the goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and warfare. Athena was regarded as the patron and protectress of various cities across Greece, particularly the city of Athens, from which she most likely received her name. The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens is dedicated to her. Her major symbols include owls, olive trees, snakes, and the Gorgoneion. In art, she is generally depicted wearing a helmet and holding a spear.She was also a warrior goddess, and was believed to lead soldiers into battle. In the classical Olympian pantheon, Athena was regarded as the favorite daughter of Zeus, born fully armed from his forehead.

Since the Renaissance, Athena has become an international symbol of wisdom, the arts, and classical learning. Western artists and allegorists have often used Athena as a symbol of freedom and democracy. In Homer's Iliad, Athena, as a war goddess, inspired and fought alongside the Greek heroes; her aid was synonymous with military prowess. Athena's moral and military superiority derived in part from the fact that she represented the intellectual and civilized side of war and the virtues of justice and skill.

APOLLO The national divinity of the Greeks, Apollo has been recognized as a god of archery, music and dance, truth and prophecy, healing and diseases, the Sun and light, poetry, and more. One of the most important and complex of the Greek gods, he is the son of Zeus and Leto, and the twin brother of Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Seen as the most beautiful god and the ideal of the kouros (ephebe, or a beardless, athletic youth), Apollo is considered to be the most Greek of all the gods.

Medicine and healing are associated with Apollo, whether through the god himself or mediated through his son Asclepius. Apollo delivered people from epidemics, yet he is also a god who could bring illhealth and deadly plague with his arrows. The invention of archery itself is credited to Apollo and his sister Artemis. Apollo is usually described as carrying a golden bow and a quiver of silver arrows. Apollo's capacity to make youths grow is one of the best attested facets of his panhellenic cult persona. As the protector of young (kourotrophos), Apollo is concerned with the health and education of children. He presided over their passage into adulthood. Long hair, which was the prerogative of boys, was cut at the coming of age (ephebeia) and dedicated to Apollo.

ARTEMIS Artemis is the is the Goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, wild animals, the Moon, and chastity. Artemis is the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and the twin sister of Apollo. She was the patron and protector of young girls, and was believed to bring disease upon women and relieve them of it. Artemis was worshipped as one of the primary goddesses of childbirth and midwifery. Much like Athena and Hestia, Artemis preferred to remain a maiden and is sworn never to marry. Artemis' symbols included a bow and arrow, a quiver, and hunting knives, and the deer and the cypress were sacred to her.

The childhood of Artemis is not fully related to any surviving myth. A poem by Callimachus to the goddess "who amuses herself on mountains with archery". Callimachus then tells how Artemis spent her girlhood seeking out the things she would need to be a huntress, and how she obtained her bow and arrows from the isle of Lipara, where Hephaestus and the Cyclopes worked. While Oceanus' daughters were initially fearful, the young Artemis bravely approached and asked for bow and arrows. Artemis practiced archery first by shooting at trees and then at wild game.

ARES Ares is the god of courage and war. In Greek literature, he often represents the physical or violent and untamed aspect of war and is the personification of sheer brutality and bloodlust.The Greeks were ambivalent toward Ares: although he embodied the physical valor necessary for success in war, he was a dangerous force, "overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering."His sons Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Terror) and his lover, or sister, Eris (Discord) accompanied him on his war chariot. In the Iliad, his father Zeus tells him that he is the god most hateful to him.

An association with Ares endows places and objects with a savage, dangerous, or militarized quality. Ares plays a relatively limited role in Greek mythology as represented in literary narratives, though his numerous love affairs and abundant offspring are often alluded to.He is well known as the lover of Aphrodite. Walter Burkert notes that "Ares is apparently an ancient abstract noun meaning throng of battle, war." In Sparta, Ares was viewed as a model soldier: his resilience, physical strength, and military intelligence were unrivaled. An ancient statue, representing the god in chains, suggests that the martial spirit and victory were to be kept in the city of Sparta.

HEPHAESTUS Hephaestus is the god of blacksmiths, metalworking, carpenters, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metallurgy, fire, and volcanoes. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus was either the son of Zeus and Hera or he was Hera's parthenogenous child. He was cast off Mount Olympus by his mother because of his deformity or, in another account, by Zeus for protecting Hera from his advances. As a smithing god, Hephaestus made all the weapons of the gods in Olympus. He served as the blacksmith of the gods, and was worshipped in the manufacturing and industrial centres of Greece, particularly Athens. Hephaestus's symbols are a smith's hammer, anvil, and a pair of tongs.

Hephaestus had his own palace on Olympus, containing his workshop with anvil and twenty bellows that worked at his bidding. Hephaestus crafted much of the magnificent equipment of the gods, and almost any finely wrought metalwork imbued with powers that appears in Greek myth is said to have been forged by Hephaestus. He designed Hermes' winged helmet and sandals, the Aegis breastplate, Aphrodite's famed girdle, Agamemnon's staff of office, Achilles' armour, Diomedes' cuirass, Heracles' bronze clappers, Helios' chariot, the shoulder of Pelops, and Eros's bow and arrows. Hephaestus built automatons of metal to work for him.

APHRODITE Aphrodite is the goddess associated with love, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation. Aphrodite's major symbols include myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans. Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus. Aphrodite was frequently unfaithful to him and had many lovers; in the Odyssey, she is caught in the act of adultery with Ares, the god of war. Aphrodite was also the surrogate mother and lover of the mortal shepherd Adonis, who was killed by a wild boar. Aphrodite has been featured in Western art as a symbol of female beauty and has appeared in numerous works of Western literature.

Aphrodite was known for her erotic beauty and aggressive sexuality and she had relationships with mortal lovers. The goddesses was associated with the colors red, white, and gold. Aphrodite is consistently portrayed as a nubile, infinitely desirable adult, having had no childhood. She is often depicted nude. Hephaestus forged her beautiful jewelry, including a strophion known as the keston himanta, a saltire-shaped undergarment (girdle), which accentuated her breasts and made her even more irresistible to men.

HERMES Hermes is considered the herald of the gods. He is also considered the protector of human heralds, travellers, thieves, merchants, and orators. He is able to move quickly and freely between the worlds of the mortal and the divine, aided by his winged sandals. Hermes plays the role of the psychopomp or "soul guide" — a conductor of souls into the afterlife. In myth, Hermes functioned as the emissary and messenger of the gods, and was often presented as the son of Zeus and Maia, the Pleiad. He is regarded as "the divine trickster," for which Homer offers the most popular account in his Hymn to Hermes.

His attributes and symbols include the herma, the rooster, the tortoise, satchel or pouch, talaria (winged sandals), and winged helmet or simple petasos, as well as the palm tree, goat, the number four, several kinds of fish, and incense. However, his main symbol is the caduceus, a winged staff intertwined with two snakes copulating and carvings of the other gods. In Greece, other gods have been depicted holding a caduceus, but it was mainly associated with Hermes. It was said to have the power to make people fall asleep or wake up, and also made peace between litigants, and is a visible sign of his authority, being used as a sceptre.

HESTIA Hestia is goddess of the hearth, the right ordering of domesticity, the family, the home, and the state. She is the firstborn child of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. In Greek culture, Hestia received the first offering at every sacrifice in the household. Zeus assigned Hestia a duty to feed and maintain the fires of the Olympian hearth with the fatty, combustible portions of animal sacrifices to the gods.[28] Wherever food was cooked, or an offering was burnt, she thus had her share of honor; also, in all the temples of the gods, she has a share of honor. "Among all mortals she was chief of the goddesses".

Hestia is identified with the hearth as a physical object, and the abstractions of community and domesticity. In classical Greek art, she is occasionally depicted as a woman, simply and modestly cloaked in a head veil. At times, it shows her with a staff in hand or by a large fire. She sits on a plain wooden throne with a white woolen cushion and did not trouble to choose an emblem for herself. Her associated sacrificial animal was a domestic pig. Hestia rejected the marriage suits of Poseidon and Apollo, and swore herself to perpetual virginity.

DIONYSUS Dionysus is the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking and wine, of fertility, orchards and fruit, vegetation, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity and theatre. His thyrsus, sometimes wound with ivy and dripping with honey, is both a beneficent wand and a weapon used to destroy those who oppose his cult and the freedoms he represents. As Eleutherios ("the liberator"), his wine, music and ecstatic dance free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. Those who partake of his mysteries are believed to become possessed and empowered by the god himself.

Wine played an important role in Greek culture, and the cult of Dionysus was the main religious focus surrounding its consumption. Wine, as well as the vines and grapes that produce it, were seen as not only a gift of the god, but a symbolic incarnation of him on earth. Dionysus is an agriculture and vegetation deity. His connection to wine, grape-harvest, orchards, and vegetation displays his role as a nature god. As the god of viticulture and grapes, he is connected to the growth and harvest of the fruit. In myth, he teaches the art of growing and cultivating the plant.

GOD OF WAR God of War is an action-adventure game franchise created by David Jaffe at Sony's Santa Monica Studio. It began in 2005 on the PlayStation 2 video game console, and has become a flagship title for the PlayStation brand, consisting of eight games across multiple platforms with a ninth currently in development.

Based on Greek mythology, the story follows Kratos, a Spartan warrior who was tricked into killing his family by his former master, the Greek god of war Ares. This sets off a series of events that leads to wars with the mythological pantheons. The Greek mythology era of the series sees Kratos follow a path of vengeance due to the machinations of the Olympian gods.

RICK RIORDAN Richard Russell Riordan Jr. is an American author. He is known for writing many books surrounding Greek Mythology. PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: About a teenager named Percy Jackson who discovers he is a son of the Greek god Poseidon. (THE HEROES OF OLYMPUS was the sequel to the Percy Jackson series). TRIALS OF APOLLO: A five-book quest adventure centered on Apollo, in which the god is sentenced by Zeus to life on Earth as a mortal.

THE OLYMPIANS The Olympians is a series of graphic novels about Greek mythology. Each volume of the Olympians tells the story of one of the gods in the Olympic pantheon – accompanied by extensive back matter that tells the history behind each myth. Extensively researched and written and illustrated in a bold, dynamic style, these are action-packed, fast-paced, high-drama adventures, with monsters, romance, and huge explosions. O’Connor’s vibrant, kinetic art brings ancient tales to life in a fusion of super-hero aesthetics and ancient Greek mythology.

OLYMPUS GUARDIAN Olympus Guardian is a South Korean animated television series. It tells the story of Ji-woo and Ji-yeon listening to Greek and Roman mythology from their father, who works as painters. There are a total of 70 volumes. The twelve greek gods are the main protagonists of the series and their stories are narrated faithfully with chronological order.

BLOOD OF ZEUS Blood of Zeus, formerly known as Gods & Heroes, is an American adult animated television series created by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides for Netflix. Chronicles the illegitimate son of Zeus, a young man tasked with saving heaven and earth despite the interference of a vengeful goddess and her monstrous forces.

STORY BOARD

INSPIRATION BOARD Olympus

Poseidon Hera

Zeus Hades Apollo

Artemis

Ares Demeter Hephaestus

Athena Aphrodite

Hestia

Hermes

Dionysus

MOOD BOARD

ILLUSTRATION BOARD

Accessories and Make up

HADES

Accessories and Make up

HADES

Accessories and Make up

HESTIA

Accessories and Make up

HESTIA

Accessories and Make up

THE END