In the beginning, there was only Chaos.

It gave birth.

First was Gaia, the Earth.

Next was Tartaros, the Underworld.

(it's under the world, so you can't see anything).

Then came Eros, the foundation of love and desire.

Also produced were Erebos, darkness personified...

...and Nyx, the dark night.

They mated.

From them came Aither, brightness.

Also Hemera, day.

Meanwhile, Gaia took Dick Cheney's advice to "go fuck yourself" to heart and began to reproduce asexually. From her came Pontos, the sea, and Ourea, the mountains.

She next conceived of the heavens, Uranus.

He proved quite fecund, and together they produced a multitude of spawn.

They made twelve Titans, total: Oceanus, Coius, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and the ill-tempered Cronus.

The Greek deities were anthropomorphic, subject to the same weaknesses as the rest of humanity, and procreation was no different. Inbreeding tends to embellish the more extreme, homozygous characteristics, and Gaia got lucky for the twelve good kids she had. Then the bad traits started piling up: the Cyclopes Brontes, Steropes, and Arges; one-eyed brutes, makers of lightning for the yet-unborn Zeus.

And it gets worse. You know how parents shouldn't have kids after a certain age because the DNA starts degenerating and causes problems? Well, Gaia was past her prime by this point, and after the Cyclopes came the Hecatonchires, creatures with a hundred arms on a hundred shoulders, with fifty heads between them. Gaia farted out three of these ugly ducklings: Cottus, Briareos, and Gyes. Scroll down to see just how awful they were.

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Almost there...

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....Nevermind. These things were so ridiculous in concept that nobody ever ventured an attempt to capture their likeness in painting or sculpture. But rest assured, they were wretched, with faces only a mother could love.

Regardless of it all, Uranus was jealous of them for "their exceeding manhood and comeliness and great size," and had them imprisoned in the depths of the Earth, which was either Tartaros or the cervical depths whence they came.

Regardless, Gaia was was not pleased, and fashioned a scythe of flint that she gave to her most unstable offspring, Cronus, who was only too eager to put it to use. When Uranus attempted to get some lovin' one night, Cronus revealed himself and castrated the (literal) motherfucker forthwith.

The blood that spouted from Uranus' wound fell to Earth (he had been trying to mount her, after all) and produced all manner of creatures. The Erinyes (Furies): avenging women spririts.

Gigantes.

And Nymphs. Lots of Nymphs.

Cronus cast the severed member into the sea, where it foamed and formed Aphrodite, goddess of love.

Then things got frisky. A whole lot of interbreeding amongst and of the deities went on, but that's mostly secondary to the story.

Having emasculated his father, Cronus took Rhea as his wife. She bore him many kids, but not wanting any of them to tread the same path he had, he swallowed each child, Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon, as it was born. When it came time for the next child Rhea despaired, but was guided by her parents to go to Lyctus to bear it. She did so, and the boy was whisked to safety by Gaia to a cave on Crete, where he was brought up as Zeus.

In Zeus' place, Rhea gave Cronus a stone wrapped in blankets, which he swallowed without question.

When the time was ripe Gaia and Zeus conspired and were able to get Cronus to vomit up all that he had swallowed.

About this time Iapetus got a little randy and made a little whoopie with a daughter of Oceanus, and got a whole litter of trouble-makers. Menoetius was banished by Zeus to Erebus for excessive pride and is of negligble importance. But Prometheus (foresight), Epimetheus (hindsight), and Atlas (whatever) would play important roles to come.

Having put the pwnage on his father, Zeus and the Olympian gods then went to war with the rest of the Titans, for ten years. At Gaia's insistence they released the Hecatonchires from what was actually Erebus, to make war on the Titans, which they did with gratitude. They took up boulders with their three hundred hands, and the Titans closed ranks, and the two sides fought with a din that shook Tartaros, and suddenly

ZEUS WENT UTTERLY APESHIT AND LAID THE SMACK DOWN ON ALL OF THEM,

with a fury that even Chaos took notice of.

In the aftermath the Hecatonchires bound the defeated Titans and sealed them behind a bronze gate in Tartaros, as far from Earth as Earth is from Heaven, being 9 days distance as the anvil falls. This falls under Hades and Persephone's jurisdiction and is guarded by Cerberus and demarcated by Styx, the feared daughter of Ocean.

Then there was Atlas.

For siding with the Titans, Atlas was condemned to hold up the sky (Uranus), to keep its grubby hands off the Earth (Gaia).

By then things looked to be settling down, and there was even a wedding, that of Briareos to Poseidon's daughter Cympolea. Zeus only knows which head of fifty she kissed.

But that was not the end.

Gaia got lucky with Tartaros and with the help of Aphrodite (!) birthed a veritable monster, Typhoeus. It had a hundred heads of snakes and a dragon's visage, all of which burned with fire and uttered words intelligible and bull cries and lion roars and wonderful baby sounds and hisses, enough to make Hades tremble.

Zeus would have none of this, however.

He battled the creature; he smote its myriad heads with thunder and lightning and cast it off Mt. Olympus, where it burned its impression into the ground, and then into the depths of Tartaros, where it released all manner of winds, most of them confounding, hence our word 'Typhoon.'

At this point Zeus was crowned head honcho of the Greek pantheon, and he celebrated by wooing and wedding many, many women. The first and most important was Metis, who conceived of two children who would surpass and, in the case of the boy, overthrow their father. Zeus was not about to start the whole wretched cycle over again and swallowed Metis to prevent it. This only half-worked, for Athena was eventually born fully formed from Zeus' forehead anyway. Armed.

From Zeus' union with Mnemosyne came the Nine Muses.

...these folks.

His next consort, Leto, daughter of Coeus and Phoebe, bore the twins Artemis and Apollo.

They would respectively become the goddess of the hunt and chastity and patron god of archery, medicine, music and the arts, and maybe even the sun.

Finally Zeus "settled down" with Hera, but not really. She was steamed over the daughter he'd conceived without her and bore from his head, so she parthenogenically conceived a child of her own, Hephaestos, lame god of smithying and crafts.

She did couple with Zeus to produce Hebe and Eileithyia, and, more significantly, Ares, the god of war.

Somewhere in the midst of all this Zeus fornicated with Maia, daughter of Atlas, to get Hermes, messenger of the gods.

And with Themis he begot many, three of which were the Moirai, the three Fates Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos (even though Nyx had already birthed them previously); three women with way too much time on their hands.

There was a whole lot of deiophilia happening, too much to recount here.

In the meantime, while Prometheus had sided with the gods, he was much more enamored of mankind, giving them sacrificial meat and dressing up the bones for Zeus. When in response Zeus decreed man could not have fire, guess what Prometheus did?

For his transgression, Prometheus was chained to a mountain to have his liver picked out by an eagle every day until he was freed by Hercules (one of Zeus' sons, by the by).

As a punishment for humanity for receiving fire, Zeus (with the help of the other gods) forged a creation of contradiction that, with it our without, would vex straight men's souls forevermore....

Woman.

He named it Pandora and gave her to Epithemeus. For their wedding Zeus gave a jar that Pandora opened, releasing all kinds of nastiness into the world, with hope shut up inside.

And that's why women are inferior. So there.

THE END (of the beginning)