Curated playlist
Planetary gods
- ZeusZeus is the supreme deity of the Greek pantheon, and yet even the gods rise from their seats when he enters the room. That detail, preserved in ancient sources, says everything about the order of things on Mount Olympus. He is the king who…
- Jupiter (god)Jupiter, king of the Roman gods, takes his name from two ancient words: the Proto-Italic djous, meaning "day" or "sky," and pater, meaning "father." Sky Father. The name alone tells you what the Romans believed they were dealing with. For…
- Mercury (mythology)Mercury stands at a crossroads that no map can show: the boundary between the living and the dead, between buyer and seller, between the world of gods and the world of thieves. He was one of the twelve Dii Consentes, the inner council of…
- Set (deity)Set, the ancient Egyptian god of deserts, storms, disorder, and violence, is one of the most contradictory figures in the entire Egyptian pantheon. He murdered his own brother. He stood guard against the forces of chaos at the prow of the…
- Mars (mythology)Mars, the Roman god of war, was not simply a deity of battle. He was also a guardian of crops, a father of the Roman people, and a protector whose sacred animals spoke prophecy from the branches of oak trees. His very name gave the world a…
- HermesHermes is an Olympian deity in ancient Greek religion, and his story begins in a cave on Mount Cyllene, in the dead of night, where Zeus secretly made love to Maia. On the very first day of his life, the rapidly maturing infant crawled…
- Neptune (mythology)Neptune, the Roman god of freshwater and the sea, had a festival timed not to stormy weather or crashing waves but to the worst heat of summer, when rivers ran low and springs nearly dried up. Every year on the 23rd of July, Romans…
- CronusCronus, leader of the Titans and ruler of the mythological Golden Age, was the deity Greeks credited with bringing the harvest and feared for devouring his own children. He overthrew his father Uranus by castrating him with a stone sickle,…
- Uranus (mythology)Uranus is one of the oldest divine figures in Greek religion, a being so ancient and so vast that he was not a god who ruled the sky but the sky itself. In Hesiod's Theogony, the foundational text that Greeks came to treat as the standard…
- AresAres, the Greek god of war, was one of the most feared and least loved of the Twelve Olympians. Son of Zeus and Hera, he embodied something that made even his own divine family deeply uneasy: not the glory of war, but its raw, uncontrolled…