Titans & primordials
The Titans
TY-tanz
Also known as the elder gods
Twelve children of Earth and Sky who ruled before the Olympians, and whose name has been borrowed by almost everything large since.
The first twelve were the children of Gaia, the earth, and Ouranos, the sky: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus and Kronos, and their sisters Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. Ouranos hated his children and pushed them back inside their mother as fast as she bore them, until Gaia made a sickle out of adamant and asked which of them would use it. Only Kronos would.
That is the founding act of the family and it sets the pattern. Kronos took his father's place, and then began swallowing his own children for the same reason his father had buried him. Greek theogony is a sequence of fathers destroyed by exactly the precaution they took.
The second generation is where the recognisable names sit. Iapetus fathered Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus and Menoetius — between them the sky-bearer, the fire-thief and the man who accepted Pandora's jar. Hyperion and Theia had Helios the sun, Selene the moon and Eos the dawn. Coeus and Phoebe had Leto, who bore Apollo and Artemis, which means two Olympians are Titans on their mother's side.
They are not monsters, and the modern habit of using 'titanic' to mean merely enormous misses what they were. The Titans were the previous administration: gods of the sun, the sea, memory, law and time itself. Themis kept her seat at Olympus after the war and Mnemosyne stayed the mother of the Muses. The war was not good against evil, it was one generation against the next, and the Greeks were clear-eyed enough not to pretend otherwise.
Gods involved
The Titans: common questions
How many Titans were there?
Twelve in the first generation — six sons and six daughters of Gaia and Ouranos. A second generation, their children, includes Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, Helios, Selene, Eos and Leto.
Who was the leader of the Titans?
Kronos, the youngest of the twelve. He took power by overthrowing Ouranos with a sickle Gaia made, and lost it the same way to his own youngest son.
Were all the Titans punished after the war?
No. Themis kept a seat at Olympus and Mnemosyne remained mother of the Muses. Those who fought against Zeus went to Tartarus; Atlas was given a sentence of his own.
Which god is your parent?
Twelve questions and the campfire decides.
Related myths
- KronosThe Titan who overthrew his father, ate his own children to keep the throne, and lost it anyway.
- AtlasThe Titan condemned to hold up the sky — not the world, whatever the statues suggest.
- PrometheusThe Titan who stole fire for humanity and paid for it daily, forever.
- The TitanomachyTen years of war between the Titans and their own children, decided not by the gods but by the prisoners they let out.
- GaiaThe earth itself, first thing to exist with a shape, and the one power in Greek myth that has never yet lost.
- Pandora's JarThe container that held every evil — and it was a jar, not a box, until a translator slipped.