The Dynasties of the Gods (Greek Pantheon)

That's right, gods can have dynasties too. In fact, pretty much every god historically (or should I say mythologically) has had dynasties. Don't believe me? Oh, you will when I'm done.

Let's start with the most well known of all historic gods. That's right, I'm talkin' about Zeus! Thought I was gonna say the Judea-Christian god, didn't you? Zeus is quite possibly the most famous god of legend and song and there are many good reasons for that. However, when it comes to dynastology, Zeus, his siblings and family, and his ancestors encompass one of the most complex and contradictory genealogies ever fabricated. I say fabricated because it was created; no Greco-Roman gods ever existed, although some may have been based on real people. Yet despite that lack of existence, the Greco-Roman gods are probably one of the best known royal families out there even today.

Seriously, think about this. I mean, who in the western world hasn't heard of Zeus/Jupiter, Hera/Juno, Poseidon/Neptune, Aphrodite/Venus, Athena/Minerva, Apollo, Artemis/Diana, Ares/Mars, Hephaestus/Vulcan, Hermes/Mercury, or Hades/Pluto? THEY'RE OUR PLANETS for crying out loud! Wait, you may say, that's not all of our planets. How about Earth, Saturn, and Uranus? That would be a very intelligent thing to ask and I tell you right now that our planet-namers knew their Greek history well. While all the previously mentioned gods were Zeus' siblings or children, the remaining three planets are their ancestors. Let me continue this wonderful little dynastological moment below:

Zeus, also known as Jupiter, was the King of the Gods — as in the chief dynast immortal — except he was born once to...

Cronos, known to the Romans as Saturn, the King of the Titans (pre-Zeus gods) — who was the chief dynast before Zeus and after his father...

Uranus, who was the primordial god of the Sky, who wed...

Gaia, Mother Earth herself, and the daughter of Chaos, from whence all things came to be.

Thus Zeus is the last king of a long and ancient monarchy of Greco-Roman gods who span to the very beginning of time. Gaia and Uranus both had lots of other gods and demigods and not-so-gods, as did Cronos, and Zeus, thus establishing cadet branches. Are these really important since they were all fictional? Yes, because virtually every Greco-Roman family in Antiquity established descent from one of these individuals. They did this to establish precedence, status, power, a claim to titles or wealth...pretty much the same reason people like to be related to anyone famous today. Back in Greco-Roman times, being related to a god was considered a very important and normal thing. For example, the family of Julius Caesar could trace its ancestry back to the founding of the Roman Republic in the 500s BCE, and they claimed to trace it farther to Venus herself.

This pattern of tracing ancestry wasn't restricted to the Greco-Romans, though. Once we get into the early Middle Ages, the so-called Dark Ages, the Germans took over northern Europe with its own myths. Their ancestor was a sketchy character named Odin, or Woden, of Wednesday fame, who was many things to different peoples. But the gist of it was that Odin was the ancestor of all the Germans. Apparently, if you go back enough, to around 400 CE, you'd find him. That's according to the Anglo-Saxons at least. The Scandinavians had other ideas about him.

Anyway, Odin wasn't alone in his dynasty. He had a wife, Frigg (Friday), many children such as Tyr (Tuesday) and Thor (Thursday), and relatives such as Sól (Sunday) and Máni (Monday). Indeed, Saturday is the only day that doesn't directly relate to a German god; it relates to the Greco-Roman Titan Saturn instead. As noted earlier, Odin was the claimed ancestor of all the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian kings during the Migration Period (300 - 700 CE) and many other Germanic tribes also claimed some link to Odin or his kin. As with the Greco-Roman gods, kinship to a German god meant that power, authority, respect, and wealth were assured for those deriving their descent from one of them.

So, we've established that the Greeks, Romans and Germans all attempted to derive their descents from mythical god dynasties. But surely the Christians were better than those pagan primitives, right? Um, no. Christians are as guilty as anyone...

Virtually every westerner has either read or heard the story of Adam and Eve. They're humanity's ancestors, after all. It's no surprise then that Christians since the very beginning have attempted to trace their ancestries to YHWH, or the Judeo-Christian God. True, it's not exactly in vogue in these enlightened days but I guarantee you there are people out there that don't only believe they are descended from Adam and Eve, they think they know the actual genealogy. Let me just say: you don't.

Since God created Adam and Eve, technically Judeo-Christians cannot be descended from God directly. Thus Adam and Eve are the earliest possible humans from whom people can descend. SO pretty much every High Medieval monarchy fabricated a genealogy showing their descent from Adam and Eve. The oddest thing is, they often did this while retaining other German and Greco-Roman gods in their ancestries. That's because when the Christians began making up these genealogies, it didn't really matter how they were descended from Adam and Eve, just that they were. In fact, the late Anglo-Saxons made Odin into a 100% breathing human to have him descend from Adam and Eve too. Quite silly, really.

Noah's Ark is another famous Biblical story directly connected to Adam and Eve. The logic is that if you are descended from Adam and Eve, it has to go through Noah and his three sons since the whole world was destroyed except for them (and their unnamed wives, concubines, and anyone else not mentioned being saved). Thus you get the first division of the world into dynasties: Shem became the Semites or Asians, Ham became the Hamites or Africans, and Japheth became the Japhethites or Europeans. Pretty much all traditional European ancestries trace back from fictional members of Japheth's family. For example, apparently Japheth had a granddaughter named Europa. The fact that this wasn't included in the Biblical book of Chronicles is rather suspicious. This may also explain some of the antagonism of Europeans against Jews and Muslims over time because the church used this ancient fictional rivalry as impetus to war and bigotry. Shem saw his father naked, thereby shaming his entire family including his descendants, which includes the Jews and the Arabs. The Catholic Church, then, used this to theologically justify the inquisition against the Jews and the Crusades against the Muslims.

But I digress. The importance of the descents from gods is very important to ancient societies and, while it faded as enlightened ideals overthrew traditional concepts of divine descent, the idea continued through the Renaissance and into our modern times. James I of England wrote a treatise on the Divine Right of kings which brought the ideas fabricated in these ancient fictional descents into a context that could still be used even to the present. And it is partially because of this Divine Right concept that the people rebelled against monarchs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because the people felt that divine descent did not imply a right to rule.

What irony that monarchic egotism destroyed the majority of the world's monarchies.