Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative TheologyClarke, James Freeman
Islamic
Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology
Clarke, James Freeman
Christianity and other religions; Religions
Then Gaia intermarried with Uranos, and produced the Titans and Titanides,
namely, Ocean, Koeos, Krios, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis,
Mnêmosynê, Phoebe with golden coronet, and lovely Thethys. Lastly came
Kronos, or Time; with the Cyclôpes and the hundred-headed giants. All
these children were hid in the earth by Uranos, who dreaded them, till by
a contrivance of Gaia and Kronos, Uranos was dethroned, and the first age
of the gods was terminated by the birth from the sea of the last and
sweetest of the children of the Heaven, Aphroditê, or Immortal
Beauty,--the only one of this second generation who continued to reign on
Olympus; an awful, beauteous goddess, says Hesiod, beneath whose delicate
feet the verdure throve around, born in wave-washed Cyprus, but floating
past divine Cythera. Her Eros accompanied, and fair Desire followed.
Thus was completed the second generation of gods, the children of Heaven
and Earth, called Titans. These had many children. The children of Ocean
and Tethys were the nymphs of Ocean. Hyperion and Theia had, as children,
Helios, Selênê and Eôs, or Sun, Moon, and Dawn. Koeos and Phoebê had Lêtô
and Asteria. One of the children of Krios was Pallas; those of Iapetus
were Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Atlas. Kronos married his sister Rhea,
and their children were Hestia, Dêmêtêr and Hêrê; Hadês, Poseidôn, and
Zeus,--all, except Hadês or Pluto, belonging to the subsequent Olympian
deities.
The Olympian gods, with their cousins of the same generation, have grown
into persons, ceasing to be abstract ideas, or powers of nature. Five were
the children of Kronos, namely, Zeus, Poseidôn, Hêrê, Hestia, and Dêmêtêr;
six were children of Zeus, Apollo and Artemis, Hephæstos and Arês, Hermês
and Athênê. The twelfth of the Olympian group, Aphroditê, belonged to the
second generation, being daughter of Uranos and of the Ocean. Beauty,
divine child of Sky and Sea, was conceived of as older than Power.
These are the three successive groups of deities; the second supplanting
the first, the third displacing the second. The earlier gods we must needs
consider, not as persons, but as powers of nature, not yet humanized.[219]
The last, seated on Olympus, are "fair humanities."
But now, it is remarkable that there must have been, in point of fact,
three stages of religious development, and three successive actual
theologies in Greece, corresponding very nearly to these three legendary
generations of gods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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