186637-Sample.Pdf

Sample file Pantheons IV his is the Olympian Pantheon, ruled by the war-chief Zeus and founded on the shattered The Gods remains of the paleolithic matriarchal faiths The syncretism between the warrior and agrarian deities did that predated his arrival by several millennia. little to overcomplicate the resulting cosmology or mythology. According to the Olympian cosmos, everything emerged from that most ancient of entities, Chaos. From this unfathomable beast sprang forth Erebus and Nyx, from whose union and TZeus and his war-gods swept down from the northern emerged Aether and Hemera, then Uranus and Gaia. forests into the fertile valleys and plains where the gentle Gaia, the great goddess of the earth, gave forth many great denizens of an agrarian culture were unaccustomed to the and terrible creatures. The three Hecatonkheires are among brutal nature of his rough and dirty worshippers. One by one, her brood, and Zeus is her grandson, whom she raised in the stone temples dedicated to the grain-goddesses of old fell secret to save him from his father’s jaws. With her sage to the iron and bronze of the invasive hunter people and their counsel, Zeus overthrew his father and took strides to the warrior gods. Zeus did battle with the primordial Typhus, the chieftainship of the gods, which in turn led to his conquest of last hope of the native gods, and claimed final victory over the the grain-goddess’ people. Once Zeus slew Gaia’s last child land when it too fell before his power. Typhon, he became the uncontested king of the gods. Customs shifted and changed, and the mythology followed. A full listing of the deities in the Olympian cosmology Hera, the former matriarch of the ancient grain-goddesses, would be exhaustive. The list below details the central deities was made the wife of Zeus, though she forever strove against in ab otherwise expansive pantheon; only bolded deities are his plans and progeny. Zeus was elevated from a mere god of presented as creatures in this text: storms among his ancient warrior people to the king of a vast pantheon of gods within these newly claimed lands. Those Aether (CR 35). God of light and breath. gods who came with him along his journey from the lands of Aphrodite (CR 33). Goddess of love and beauty. the paleolithic hunt were given high station, while the Apollo (CR 34). God of light and consciousness. syncretic deities of the grain-goddess pantheon were not. Ares (CR 32). God of war and and violence. The Olympian cosmology was the near-opposite of its Artemis (CR 34). Goddess of women and hunting. Kemetic cousin and predecessor. Rather than model their Athena (CR 34). Goddess of intelligence and skill. state after their perceived order of the cosmos, the Demeter (CR 34). Goddess of life and grain. Olympians modeled their cosmos after the structure of their Dionysus (CR 33). God of wine and bliss. secular state. Zeus is the king, Ares is his war-chief, Hera his Hades (CR 35). God of death and the dead. queen. In addition to this, these deities were all far more Hephaestus (CR 32). God of fire and metalworking. human than those of the Kemetic or Sumero-Akkadian Hera (CR 34). Goddess of life and marriage. cultures. Hades was a flawed character with a very human Hermes (CR 32). God travel and communication. ego, while Osiris was transcendent and aloof. Isis was Hestia (CR 34). Goddess of home and hearth. revered while Hera was the victim of Zeus’ male brutality. Persephone (CR 31). Goddess of the underworld. These flawed personalities were double-edged: one the one Poseidon (CR 35). God of the sea and the abyss. hand, the Olympian gods were more accessible and their Typhon (CR 31). God of destruction and chaos. influence had more reach. On the other hand, however, they Zeus (CR 35). God of mountains and storms. were more prone to the kind of drama that can bring down a mortal dynasty with ease, greatly reducing their potential The Clergy longevity as a pantheon. The Olympian pantheon may have The clergy of the Olympian pantheon are an erudite class of been more accessible to the people, but it lasted only half as educated scholarly elders. Literacy was public, so the power long as their Kemetic predecessor. of the priests to dictate the structure of social life is greatly In the Olympian pantheon's waning era, the pantheon’s reduced. Instead, the priests tried to mirror the heavens after proclivity toward human-like drama brought the dramatic the secular world, greatly increasing accessibility to their tension between Apollo and Dionysus to the foreground of orthodoxy. The gods of lived on nearby Mount Olympus, not theosophical thought. These two gods came to represent the in an inaccessible heavenly plane, and they were stricken struggle between an ordered social existence (Apollo) and a with human flaws and foibles. return to the chthonic power of untamed nature (Dionysus). Because of the dramatic nature of the gods, theatrical This struggle is later attributed by Olympian philosophers as drama became an increasingly important part of the culture the root cause of all human civilization and progress, the of the Olympian people. Priests engaged in deeply symbolic, conscious Apollonian drives warding off thwe unconscious ritualistic communions, rites, and sacrifices. Masks, dance, Dionysian impulses to abandon life in society and return to wine, and other trappings of the dramatic all become the chaos of indiscriminate, unindividuated existence. cornerstones of the rites of the Olympian clergy until the study of the dramatic tension between the forces associated Samplewith Apollo and Dionysus began fileto threaten to destabilize the pantheon itself.

PANTHEONS IV: OLYMPIC 2