TEOGONIA. – From θεός “god” and γονεία “generation,” in the mythology of various peoples, the genealogy of the gods who presided over the organization of the world.
It may be cosmogony (v.) because, whereas the latter describes the elements from which the life of the cosmos arose (heaven, earth, water, etc.), t. gives them name and form and presents them in descending succession as the organizers and regulators of the universe which, thanks to them, emerged from the primordial chaos. This occurs not only because the birth of the gods follows the formation of the cosmos, but also because the narrative tends to impose order upon the divine world and to arrange the gods known to the group that venerates them in that hierarchical succession which corresponds to the group’s historical development and its ethical and social progress; consequently, the oldest gods, or those not originally pertaining to the group, come first in the genealogical succession, but are dethroned to the advantage of the god of the victorious group.
Already Herodotus (II, 50–53) Esiodo (v.) for having arranged the divine world genealogically—a world that in the pre-Greek (“Pelasgian”) period had been nameless, and was later freely described by Omero with the creative power of poetry. According to Omero (Iliade, XIV, 201–203; 246; 302), the father of gods and men is Ocean, while Tethys is their mother; he knows of Cronus, confined beneath the earth and father of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades (ibid., XV, 187–96), and of the division among them of the three realms of the cosmos: heaven, sea, and the underworld.
In organizing the world of the Greek gods, Esiodo intends to coordinate the various, often confused and incoherent traditions into a system of national scope, so as through this effort of condensation to offer a Hellenic pantheon expressing the fusion of the various political, commercial, and other elements already taking place in the Greek land. He therefore arranges the various divinities according to a strict plan of descent through four ages, each of which represents a conquest over the preceding one, while taking into account the bonds linking the creator gods to their creation.
Esiodo’s Teogonia opens with the cosmogony. From the primordial chaos (= emptiness) come Gaia (= Earth) and Eros (= the fecund life principle). From chaos is born a first pair, Erebus and Night, and from the latter its opposite pair, Aether and Day. From Gaia came Uranus (Heaven), the mountains, and the sea. The ordering of these elements of the world—that is, t. in the proper sense—is accomplished by the pairs that succeed one another in the ordering of the cosmos.
From Uranus is born Ocean, the river that encircles the earth, and then the mythical figures of the Titans, Cyclopes, and Giants. Uranus shuts the Titans within the bowels of the earth, but Cronus, the last of the Titans, at the instigation of his mother Gaia punishes Uranus by cutting off his genitals; from these, having fallen into the sea, are born Aphrodite, and later the Nymphs and the Erinyes. Thus the reign of Uranus ends, and Cronus takes his place; he mates with Rhea and begets Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. But he too, like his father, distrusts his children and swallows them as soon as they are born. For this reason, sorrowful Rhea conceals Zeus in Crete, causing Cronus to swallow a stone in his place. Thus what Cronus feared comes to pass: Zeus dethrones him, makes him disgorge all the swallowed children, including the stone (placed at Delphi), and takes his place. In this way the reign of Zeus begins. But his power is immediately threatened by the Titans, who rise in furious struggle against him. He nevertheless succeeds in subduing them and, having broken their strength, shuts them in subterranean Tartarus, which is as far from the earth as the earth is from the sky. Nor is this all, for Typhoeus, son of Gaia and Tartarus, stirred up by his mother in defense of her other defeated children, in turn rises to battle with Zeus; but he too is defeated, and Zeus can thus establish his rule over the definitively ordered world. With Zeus begins, through unions with immortals and mortals, the generation of heroes, and t. thus comes to be linked with the mythical traditions of the heroic age.
Orphism too had its own cosmogony and t., not simply naturalistic in character like that of Esiodo, but philosophical and moral, in accordance with Orphic thought. Its elements were transmitted to us by the Neoplatonist Damascius of the 6th century A.D. (De princ., 124 b), who derived them from the lost Penténuschos of Ferecide of Syros. There are three primordial essences: Zas (from Ζῆν = to live), which is the principle of life; Chronos, the principle of time; and Chthionis, the principle of matter. After Chronos’s victorious struggle against Ophioneus, the serpent who is the principle of chaos, the ordering of the world takes place. We also owe to Damascius (De princ., 123) another version, known as that of the (Orphic) rhapsodies, which posits Chronos, Aether, and Chaos as primordial principles. Chronos fashions from the bosom of Aether an egg from which Phanes, the “Brilliant One,” emerges. Phanes, mating with Night, produces the earth–sky pair, from which Krono is born; he begets Zeus, who in turn begets Dionysus by Persephone. With Dionysus, who in Orphism receives the name Zagreus, the divine world is reconnected with the human.
Egypt developed, in its principal political centers, various cosmogonies through the growth of the priestly schools: the t. of Memphis in Lower Egypt, whose principal creator god is Ptah, whose creative power operates through his mighty word; that of Hermopolis in Upper Egypt, whose creator god Thoth, identified with Hermes, through an ogdoad of local gods, produces the sun god by means of an egg created by this ogdoad; and finally that of Heliopolis. According to this cosmogony, there exists at the beginning a primordial chaos constituted by water and Atum (that is, Re), who begets a first pair: Shu (air) and Tphenis (rain); and a second: Geb (earth) and Nut (sky). From Geb and Nut—the former represented lying on the earth, the latter raised high above it by Shu and resting on the ground only with the tips of her hands and feet—are born two pairs of children: Seth and Nephthys, Osiris and Isis, the latter two being the ancestors of the human race. This is the Heliopolitan ennead, on which other local cosmogonies were modeled, with elements drawn from popular imagination.
The Babylonian cosmology contained in the Poem of Creation (Enlima elii) likewise describes the ordering action performed upon the cosmos by Marduk, the solar god, at the beginning of things, when there was neither heaven nor earth, but only the two primordial principles Apsû, the ocean, and Tiâmat, the sea, which mingled their fresh and salt waters in a chaos fertile with manifold life. From the first pair are born Lahmu and Lahamu, from the second Anšar and Kišar, and from the third the supreme triad Anu, Bel, and Ea. A struggle immediately arises between this triad, which represents order, and Tiâmat, at the head of the other elements representing disorder. Marduk accepts the challenge, defeats the monster Tiâmat, and divides her body into two parts, one of which he uses to form the vault of heaven; he regulates its movements, thereby establishing the zodiac and the calendar.
The Phoenicians also left a cosmogony attributed to the name of Sanchuniathon, whose most important version is due to Philo of Byblos; it reveals an Egyptian origin and a Hesiodic influence, as can be seen from the myth of the Uranids, but it appears to have been elaborated in a Semitic milieu. In the beginning there existed an airy chaos, from which Mot, the mud (analogous to Mût and to the fertilizing silt of the Nile), was born; and from the mud, through spontaneous generation, came all beings and animals: first those devoid of sensation, then the intelligent ones called Zophesamin, “contemplators of the heavens,” undoubtedly human beings, who at first were asleep but were later awakened by the thunder produced by the separation of the elements. Once separated, these seek one another, mate, and generate life on land and in the sea. The principal pair consists of Eliun and the “Lady” of Byblos. From them came Ouranos (= Anu) and Gè.
The Scandinavian mythology contained in the Edda possesses a theogony. From the original movement, the land of ice (Niflheim) was formed in the north and that of fire (Muspell-sheim) in the south. From the liquefied ice were born Ymir and the cow Adumbla, and Buri, progenitor of Odin, Vili, and Ve. After killing Ymir, they created the earth and the sea from his body. The first human beings were born from two trees that had grown on the seashore.
The universe is divided into three parts: Aigard, where the gods dwell and where the castle of Walhall is located; Midgard, where human beings dwell; and Hel, the abode of the dead; the world that will perish (the twilight of the gods) in order to make way for a new, happy generation.