Curated playlist
Chthonic beings
- DemeterGrief over her stolen daughter made the goddess Demeter let crops wither and mortals starve.
- HadesBy around the 5th century BC, the Greeks had largely stopped saying Hades's name aloud.
- DionysusZeus sewed the unborn Dionysus into his thigh after the child's mother died. That is why Dionysus is called twice-born.
- OsirisIn Egyptian myth, Set tricked his brother Osiris into a box and threw it into the Nile. Isis then searched for the body.
- HermesOn his first day of life, the Greek god Hermes stole Apollo's cattle. He also invented the lyre by nightfall.
- PersephonePersephone was gathering flowers when Hades burst through the earth and carried her off.
- AtumAtum, the creator god of ancient Egypt, once told Osiris how the universe would end. According to the Coffin Texts, he said that after millions of years only the two of them would remain, both in the form of serpents. That is a startling…
- StyxThe name Styx means Shuddering, and the Greeks gave it to both a goddess and a river of the Underworld. Few figures in mythology were a person and a place at the same time. Why would the rulers of Olympus bind their promises to a stream?…
- TriptolemusTriptolemus, a hero of Eleusis in Greek mythology, stands as a boy between two goddesses in a 5th-century relief now in the National Museum in Athens. The goddesses are Demeter and her daughter, the Kore. Demeter is handing him a golden…
- ErinyesIn Aeschylus's Oresteia, Athens put a man on trial for killing his mother. The Erinyes accused him.
- HecateIn the 1st century CE, Ovid wrote of Hecate: "Look at Hecate, standing guard at the crossroads, one face looking in each direction." Hecate belonged to ancient Greek religion and mythology. Artists usually showed her with torches, a key,…