Mythology Explained

Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss the seven heavenly virtues. What virtues constituted the seven heavenly virtues changed over time, so we're going to begin with the first iteration and continue on through to the version that's still predominant today in Christianity.

Let's get into it.

The seven heavenly virtues can be broken down into two groups: the four cardinal virtues, which are rooted in ancient philosophy and come from man, and the the three theological virtues, which are rooted in religion and come from God. The dividing line between these two groups is the boundary between mortality and divinity. The four cardinal virtues (temperance, justice, prudence, and fortitude) are innate to humanity. On the other hand, the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love, love being the greatest of the three) are not accessible to humanity by themselves, requiring the assistance of God. Pertaining to Christianity, the four cardinal virtues were grouped together by Ambrose, a 4th century theologian, and were subsequently adopted by the church. These four virtues stem from a much older philosophical tradition that can be traced back to ancient Greece, beginning to coalesce in the pre-socratic era, then becoming more concrete through the works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.The three Theological virtues, by contrast, are enshrined in scripture, named by Paul the Apostle in Corinthians 13: "So faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss all 12 of the elder Titans, the 12 first-generation Titans born to Gaia and Uranus

Let's get into it.

Starting us off is Cronus

In Hesiod's theogony, the 12 first-generation Titans are the eldest children of Gaia, the personification of the earth, and of Uranus, the personification of the sky. After them were born the trio of Uranian cyclopes, god-like except for having a single eye, and the trio of Hecatonchires, monstrous behemoths with 100 arms and 50 heads. Uranus tolerated the Titans, but he despised his younger children, especially the Hecatonchires, whom he thought abominations and kept imprisoned within the earth. They were unsurpassed in size and unassailable in strength, and having them trapped inside of her subjected Gaia to constant anguish. Cronus, who detested his lusty father, rose up to be his mother's champion. He ambushed his father and castrated him with a sickle of adamant, this act separating earth and sky, two planes previously conjoined, and marking his ascendancy to the throne, deposing his emasculated father. Cronus learnt of a prophecy that told of his usurpation by one of his children. He endeavored to preempt prophecy by swallowing each of his children the moment they were born, but he was deceived by Rhea, his wife, who gave him a stone to swallow in Zeus' stead. Zeus was raised in secret, and when he was a man grown, he came out of hiding, freed his siblings, and waged war against the Titans; and the result of this cataclysmic conflict was the imprisonment of Cronus and many of the other Titans in the depths of Tartarus.

At number 2 we have Rhea

Rhea is a Titan who can be categorized by the earth-mother archetype. Life and fertility certainly constituted the majority of her purview, but, less intuitively, so was death, in implicit and secondary fashion, within her sphere of influence, because, while antithetical, it was also complementary, punctuating the end of the life cycle so that subsequent new life could begin.

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00:00 - start
01:16 - Mesopotamia
05:39 - Egypt
07:50 - Noah's Ark
09:50 - Greek & Norse
10:41 - Ancient Mesopotamian Flood Myths

Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video we're going to discuss the Great Flood, tracking down its origin and looking at several versions of it manifest in various mythologies and religions. We're going to begin with ancient Mesopotamia, at why the great flood myth originated from this region - at least, why the oldest extant version of the great flood myth originated from there - then moving on to ancient Egypt to showcase that ancient civilizations founded around rivers had a habit of incorporating flooding into their mythology. After this, we're going to cover the story of Noah's Ark, the biblical flood, then paying a cursory glance to the great floods that appear in both Greek and Norse mythology. Finally, we're going to wrap the video up by delving into two versions of the great flood myth that came out of Mesopotamia: one that centers on Ziusudra, who survived a world-destroying flood by building a boat - this version being the oldest in existence - and a second that centers on Atrahasis, who also survived a world-destroying flood by building a boat.

I've include timestamps in the description so that you can skip ahead if you're only interested in certain segments.

Let's get into it.

Mesopotamia, which means something like 'between two rivers', is compounded from two
Greek words: meso, the Greek word for 'between', and potamos, the Greek word for 'river'. It was an ancient region that spanned over what is today Iraq, as well as parts of Turkey, Kuwait, Syria, and Iran.

The two rivers indicated by the word Mesopotamia are called the Tigris river and the Euphrates river. They originate in Turkey, enter Iraq via the Northwest, run the length of Iraq, and end in the Southeast, where they flow into the Persian gulf. Mesopotamia was the ancient region that existed between and around these two rivers.

The phrase ''cradle of civilization' is used to describe Mesopotamia. The reason for this is that our oldest archeological evidence for many of the most seminal innovations that helped drive-forward human civilization were first conceived of and put into use there, including: cities, schools, laws, mathematics, writing, the wheel, mass-produced bricks and ceramics, the sail, and time-keeping.

The Tigris and the Euphrates rivers are the reason our earliest record of the great flood myth is from Mesopotamia, both for developmental and narrative reasons.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Tithonus, a man cursed with immortality, but not with agelessness, so that there was no limit to how frail and feeble he could become, deteriorating endlessly.

Let's get into it.

Barring people condemned to unending torture in Tartarus, perhaps no one, with the exception of Prometheus, suffered more greatly than Tithonus - be they man, monster, or god - and if he wasn't the person that endured the most suffering, he's certainly on a short list of top contenders. Life should have been joyous for him, as he started out with every advantage a person could hope for, being of well-bred stock, both royal and divine. Indeed, his pedigree was impeccable. Laomedon, king of Troy, was his father, and Strymo, daughter of the river Scamander, was his mother. You might remember Scamander from the Iliad. Achilles provoked Scamander's ire by clogging his waters with corpses, which culminated into a morbid, sodden dam that impeded his flow. Scamander then unleashed his might against Achilles, and were it not for other gods intervening, the hero would have been battered and drowned, left dead after the raging rapids had ceased their attack and receded. Another tie in with the Iliad was that Priam, who ruled as king of Troy, was Tithonus' younger brother. Now, you might think that Tithonus' plight was connected to the Trojan war, but this wasn't the case. He became ensnared in his predicament before the drums of war announced the imminent arrival of a 1,000 Greek ships slicing through the surf, set to punch their hulls into the sands of the Trojan coast.

Tithonus caught the eye of a goddess. She was called Eos - Aurora to the Romans - goddess of the dawn. Tithonus was said to have been exceptionally handsome, and his lean-muscled body and comely countenance caught Eos' eye. And since Greek mythology is absolutely rife with instances of beautiful women noticed by lecherous gods, peppering in a few mortal men to be preyed on seems only fair. Eos had garnered a wanton reputation, setting her sights on, then stalking, seizing, and whisking away handsome men. She abducted Cephalus, who desperately desired to be returned to his wife, but this enraged Eos, precipitating a series of events that led to the death of his wife at his own hands. Orion, the giant hunter, a character was also taken by Eos.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss the three sons of Zeus who, had they reached adulthood, would have become more powerful than their father, who would have succeeded Zeus, either claiming the crown by force or ascending to the throne with their father's blessing.

Let's get into it.

In Greek mythology, from the beginning creation when Chaos, the great void, came into being, to the time of the Olympian gods and the rule of Zeus, there was a series of usurpations in which the son supplanted the father. Uranus, the personification of the sky, was the first king. His son, Cronus, ambushed and castrated him, seizing supremacy of the cosmos and becoming the second king. And Cronus' son, Zeus, led the Gods in the war against the Titans, a cataclysmic 10 year conflict that resulted in the defeat of the Titans, their imprisonment in Tartarus, and Zeus becoming the new king, the third king, of the cosmos.

With Zeus as the king of creation, it was almost as if the cosmos, its divine hierarchy, once plastic and prone to upheaval, had crystallised, satisfied with Zeus on the throne and no longer wishing for the cycle of son supplanting father to perpetuate. Giving credence to this is the fact that Zeus had three sons destined to be as or more powerful than himself and none of them survived past childhood: two of them prevented from being born and the third ripped to pieces by the Titans when he was just a boy.

We're going to spend the rest of the video going over the story of each of the three children who would have been more powerful than Zeus, these stories being those of the unnamed son nearly born to Thetis, the unnamed son nearly born to Metis, and Zagreus, whose life was brief and whose end was brutal.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Geb, the god of who personified the earth in Egyptian mythology, the Egyptian counterpart of Gaia, the goddess of the earth in Greek mythology.

Let's get into it.

Geb was one of the most important and one of the most powerful gods in Egyptian mythology. Geb's iconography almost always has him depicted in human form, his green skin symbolising all the plants that grew along his surface. The fields of grain that stretched across the land were said to sprout from his ribs, and in general, the vegetation that carpeted the earth was said to grow on his back. Because of this, he was deeply connected to fertility - that of the earth, of course, but also of livestock. He was thought to be the ultimate source of all freshwater and so maintained a close friendship with Hapy the god of Nile inundation, cyclical flooding keeping the banks of the Nile extraordinarily fertile. As the personification of the earth, Geb was a chthonic deity. It was thought that he swallowed up the dead and that he was the master of all the snakes of the earth. By turn, he could be life giving or life taking, for he could sustain life through the bounty of the earth or could bring death through various disastrous phenomena, such as earthquakes. He often presided over divine disputes, as was the case when Horus and Set vied against each other for the throne. And once the kingship finally passed from the gods to humanity, the pharaohs were said to sit on the throne of Geb.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Asclepius, the greatest healer in all of Greek mythology. He was the son of Apollo, the god of healing, trained in the healing arts by the immortal centaur Chiron, and though he brought much good into the world with his restorative power, he would eventually be killed by Zeus, who believed that the powers Asclepius had cultivated - specifically, his power to bring the dead back to life - were too potent to be wielded by mortal hands, that unless Asclepius' life was put to an end, the crystalline divide that separated the realm of mortality from the realm of divinity would be eroded, upsetting the natural order; Zeus' execution of Asclepius precipitating a cascading sequence of events that resulted in the the death of the cyclopes who forged Zeus' thunderbolts and resulted in Apollo becoming the slave of a mortal man for one year.

Let's get into it.

Asclepius was a man renowned for his miraculous healing ability, later attaining his apotheosis when he became deified as a god of healing and medicine. There are many versions of his parentage, each one with Apollo as the father. Arsinoe was the mother in one, but more commonly it was Coronis, a Thessalian princess, who was the mother; and with her there are multiple versions of Aslcepius' birth. In one, after having intercourse with Apollo, she later lay with another, a mortal man, whom she actually favoured over the god. This enraged Apollo, so he killed her (another telling says that it was the golden arrows of Artemis that Killed Cornis). Before her body was consumed by the fire of the funeral pyre it was laid on, either he or Hermes cut open her belly and pulled the child free from her body, making for one of the more gruesome and unconventional births in Greek mythology.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In Today's video, we're going to discuss the 12 Olympians gods, the 12 greatest gods who lived in Olympus, the abode of the gods, which was located in Thessaly atop Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in all of Greece. (There's also some information that suggests Olympus was suspended in the sky high above the earth and its mountains.) The entrance of Olympus was a gate made of clouds that was watched over by the seasons, and beyond were the magnificent palaces of the gods, made by Hephaestus himself - a place of paradise where its divine denizens feasted on nectar and ambrosia, where the winds never blew, rain never poured, and snow never fell.

A couple of comments before we get going: first, though he was among the most powerful gods in Greek mythology, Hades wasn't counted among the 12 Olympians because his residence was in the underworld; second, though the 12 Olympians were the greatest of the gods who lived atop Olympus, they weren't the only gods who called Olympus home; others included: Hebe, the goddess of youth, Iris, the goddess of rainbows, the three graces, the nine muses, and many others. Third, while 11 of the 12 Olypians (Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter, Athena, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Hermes) are chiselled in stone, Dionysus and Hestia sort of shared that 12th spot, different listings featuring one or the other. I've decided to honour both, meaning our list of Olympians actually comprises 13 gods.

Let's get into it.

1- Zeus

Also called Ombrios ("Rainmaker"), Keraunios ("Thunderer"), Nephelgeretes ("Cloud-Gatherer"), and Agoraios ("of Mount Olympus"), and known as Jupiter to the Romans, Zeus was the supreme deity of Greek mythology. He was the god of the sky and its various atmospheric phenomena, including: lighting, thunder, rain, and cloud cover. Beyond the celestial domain where he held absolute mastery, matters of state and gouvernance also fell within his purview. Furthermore, as the highest authority in all of creation, maintaining the rule of law was also of paramount importance to him, with the keeping of oaths, honouring the rules of hospitality, and the protecting of supplicants chief among his concerns.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss the Hecatonchires, a monstrous trio of giants boasting superlative size and strength, each of them with 50 heads and 100 arms. Their names were Briareus ("The Mighty One"), Cottus ("Wrathful One"), and Gyges ("Son of the Earth"). They were imprisoned deep within Gaia for an age, were instrumental in bringing about the defeat of the Titans, and became the guardians of Tartarus.

Let's get into it.

Beyond their father imprisoning them and their fighting alongside Zeus to defeat the Titans, both of which we'll get to shortly, the Hecatonchires seldom feature in Greek mythology. One of the only occasions any of them make an appearance is recounted in the Iliad. Thetis, the mother of Achilles, stumbled upon a coup. Hera, Poseidon, and Athena joined their strength to supplant Zeus. Thetis came upon them while they were shackling him, so she went and fetched Briareus, one of the hundred-handers, here said to be the Sea-god's son. No fighting ensued, for the mere presence of the Hecatonchires was enough to cow the gods and have them abandon their play for power; even Poseidon, the sovereign of the sea, was intimidated into inaction, utterly overcome by the air of power that emanated from the giant. Here's the passage:

"That day the Olympians tried to chain him down, Hera, Poseidon lord of the sea, and Pallas Athena... [You] quickly ordered the hundred-hander to steep Olympus, that monster whom the immortals call Briareus but every mortal calls the Sea-god's son, Aegeon, though he's stronger than his father. Down he sat, flanking Cronus' son, gargantuan in the glory of it all, and the blessed gods were struck with terror then, they stopped shackling Zeus."

Briareus, called Aegaeon by hu manity, was the only Hecatonchires to have a personal mythology that went beyond the tragedy and triumph of the Hecatonchires as a group, this evidenced in part by him coming alone to rescue Zeus. As time went on, passing from the Greek era to the Roman era, he became confused and conflated by later writers. Ovid described him as a sea deity, perhaps a characterization derived from the Iliad calling him "the Sea-god's son", and Virgil made him a fire-breathing monster of the same ilk as the race of giants who assailed Olympus. There is also a story In which Briareus acts as arbiter in settling a land dispute between Poseidon and Helios.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Asmodeus: one of the most nefarious and notorious demons in Hell's hierarchy, a malevolent entity that blights marriages, killing husbands or compelling husbands into the arms of other women, and robs virgins of their beauty and chastity, one of the seven princes of hell who personify the seven deadly sins, him embodying the deadly sin of lust, and one of the nine kings of hell.

Let's get into it.

The prophet Zarathustra, also called Zoroaster, lived sometime between the years 1500 and 1000 BC. He founded Zoroastrianism, the ancient pre-Islamic religion of Iran. There is still some remnant of it there today, though it was widely suppressed and scoured when Islam superseded it. Many religious refugees fled to India to escape Muslim persecution; as a result, the Parsees, who today are descended from the Iranian Zoroastrians who fled to India, are considered to be the principal stewards of the Avesta, which is the sacred text of Zoroastrianism. One of the demons of Zoroastrianism is called Aeshma Daeva, meaning 'raging demon', and he is thought to be the antecedent Asmodeus, meaning Asmodeus is of ancient Iranian origin, later being incorporated into Jewish lore and becoming one of the most fearsome and formidable demons of Christianity.

Other names for Asmodeus include, Asmodai and Asmoday, which takes us to The Lesser Key of Solomon, a grimoire that codifies 72 demonic entities of Hell's hierarchy. There is an individual entry for each of the 72 entities in which their rank, appearance, and power is outlined, as well as how to invoke them through summoning and binding.

The 32nd spirit, Asmoday is described as a king characterised by greatness, strength, and power. He has three heads: that of a bull, that of a man, and that of a ram. He has the treacherous tail of a serpent. Gouts of flame shoot from his mouth. And his feet are webbed like those of a goose. He rides a hellish dragon and wields a lance with a banner than billowes beneath the blade.

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