Olympus Read online

  The Danaids were forty-nine sisters who were made to fill water in a vast tub using a perforated pot. Their crime: on their wedding night they killed their sleeping husbands, the sons of Aegyptus, on their father’s instruction.

  In Hindu mythology, the Garuda Purana describes various types of hell or naraka depending on the nature of the crime. But Tartarus is not just about common crimes, it is about hubris that affects the cosmos and so earns the displeasure of Zeus. It shows those suffering to be wilful agents of chaos who threaten harmony.

  Being forced to perform a thankless, meaningless, monotonous task was the greatest punishment for the Greeks, and often the result of angering the gods.

  In Hindu mythology, the material world goes through repetitive, senseless, purposeless cycles: all humans are thus Sisyphus. Wisdom is finding meaning through it.

  Deucalion

  Zeus noticed that humans, created and nurtured by Prometheus, were foul and cruel and more interested in fighting each other for wealth and power than in offering oblations to the Olympians. Worse, they had begun to doubt the power of the Olympians.

  Once, when Zeus was visiting him, Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, decided to check if the Olympian was indeed a god and so, along with the flesh of animals, served him the flesh of a human, his own son, thus breaking the rules of hospitality and the rules against cannibalism.

  Enraged, Zeus decided to destroy all humanity with a great flood. He caused the oceans to overflow and the rivers to swell and the rains to fall until the entire earth was covered with water. All living creatures, plants and animals and humans, were destroyed in this flood.

  But then Zeus found floating on these waters a chest, within which were a man and a woman, the only survivors of the flood. The man was Deucalion, son of Prometheus, and the woman was his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Pandora. Like his father, Deucalion had foresight and had known that one day Zeus would lose his patience with humanity and devastate the earth. And so the couple had hidden in a wooden chest, and stayed safe and dry while the waters deluged and destroyed everything else.

  When the waters subsided, Deucalion and Pyrrha came out of the chest and begged for mercy at the shrine of Zeus that stood nearby. Taking pity on them, Zeus said, in a rather cryptic way, ‘Throw the bones of your grandmother behind you and you shall establish a new line of humanity who will be as wise as you.’

  The bones of their grandmother? Where would the couple find them? Then Deucalion realized what Zeus meant, and along with his wife began gathering rocks from the ground and throwing them over their shoulder, for the earth was their grandmother and the rocks were her bones.

  The rocks thrown by Deucalion became men and those thrown by Pyrrha became women. These men and women, born after the flood, were the new line of humanity, fire controllers, who respected the Olympians and offered them oblations.

  From this race of men would be born heroes, who would defy the limitations imposed on them by the Olympians. Some would become gods themselves, grudgingly admired by the Olympians. Others would earn a place in the heaven of heroes, Elysium, located in the underworld across the River Styx, reserved for those who live extraordinary lives. Those who upset the gods would be cast into the dark void that was Tartarus. The rest, the ordinary, the mediocre, would spend the afterlife in the shade of the Asphodel fields.

  In Hindu mythology, Brahma is the grandfather of humanity—there is a biological connection. But there is no such connection in Greek mythology. The gods create humans from clay. In later myths, they are created from the earth by sowing the seeds of dragons and other monsters.

  Some of the crimes that Zeus abhorred were the ill treatment of guests and human sacrifice.

  Deucalion’s survival in the box reminds us of the tale of Noah’s Ark found in the Old Testament of the Bible, and of Utnapishtim who survives the flood of the Mesopotamian gods.

  Augustine of Hippo who lived in the fourth century CE took the tale of Deucalion as historical fact, and considered him a contemporary of Moses. In medieval times, Deucalion’s flood was dated to around 1500 BCE , a regional flood that followed the more global flood witnessed by Noah.

  Deucalion and Pyrrha had a son called Hellen from whom all the Hellenic tribes of Classical Greece arose: the Achaeans, Ionians (from whom come the Persian word ‘yunan’ and the Sanskrit ‘yavana’ that describes the Greeks), Dorians and Aeolians.

  Book Two

  Minos

  ‘Zeus reminds me of a king struggling to maintain order, contending with the violence of those who came before him, the quarrels of those around him, and his suspicion of those who stand below him,’ said the gymnosophist. ‘I can feel his struggle to harmonize the intellectual Athena with the passionate Aphrodite, the lucid Apollo with the intoxicated Dionysus.’

  ‘How interesting! You see the Olympians inside you,’ said Alexander. ‘I see them outside. In Crete, ruled by Minos, I find Dionysian mysteries, and in Athens, ruled by Theseus, I find Apollonian clarity.’

  Io

  Zeus demanded that the king of Argos give his daughter Io to him. The king dared not refuse a god, even though he knew his actions would upset Hera, for Io was her priestess and was expected to be faithful to the goddess.

  As Zeus was enjoying Io’s company, he saw Hera approaching and, fearing for Io’s safety, immediately turned her into a cow.

  But Hera was not fooled. She knew that the cow was not really bovine but a woman who had caught Zeus’s fancy. She told her faithful minion, the giant Argus, to watch over this cow, for sooner or later she would revert to her human form for the pleasure of Zeus.

  Argus had a hundred eyes. And at any time, at least one pair was always open, so he could watch Io night and day. Nothing she did escaped his sight. Finally, Zeus sent Hermes to play his lyre until Argus shut all his eyes and fell asleep. Hermes then beheaded the sleeping giant and let Io escape.

  Hera was furious. She placed the eyes of Argus, who had served her so well, on the tail of a peacock.

  Then she sent a gadfly to sting Io and chase her around the world, giving her not a moment to rest. Io fled from Europe into Asia through a sea route that came to be known as the Bosphorus, or the path of the cow. She ran through lands that would later be known as Phrygia, Phoenicia and Egypt. Everywhere she went, she gave birth to Zeus’s children, who would rule these lands.

  The peacock is linked with a tale of infidelity in Hindu mythology too. Rishi Gautama discovers his wife, Ahalya, in the arms of Indra, the king of the devas. He curses that Indra will sprout a hundred eyes on his body so that he can ‘see’ where his senses lead him. Eventually these eyes are placed on a peacock’s tail. A peacock’s feathers are used to ward off the ‘evil eye’ in many Hindu rituals.

  Io is identified with the Egyptian goddesses Hathor and Isis.

  From Io descend many Greek heroes like Perseus, Cadmus and Heracles.

  Io is the name given to one of planet Jupiter’s moons.

  Europa

  One of Io’s many sons, the king of Phoenicia, had a daughter called Europa, who often took care of her father’s cows and bulls. Zeus saw Europa and, enamoured of her, he decided to seduce her.

  He took the form of a white bull and walked towards her while she was gathering flowers. When she touched him, he lowered himself, inviting her to sit on him. As soon as she climbed on to his back, he ran into the sea, carrying her with him, jumping over the waves until he reached the island of Crete.

  There he ravished her, and in time she gave birth to three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon.

  Ancient cattle-herding civilizations revered the bull for its virility, which could not be tamed unless it was castrated and thereby stripped of virility. In the Indus Valley civilization, we find seals with the image of the bull. In Hindu mythology, Shiva rides Nandi, a bull. In Jain mythology, the first Tirthankara is known as Rishabha, which means bull, and his symbol is the bull as well. Even Buddha was addressed as a bull amongst men.

  The story of Euro