4.79 · California Institute of Technology Abstract In this article we consider the role of the three principal celestial bodies, the Earth (Gaia), the Sun (Helios) and the Moon (Selene), as well as the Sky (Ouranos) in the ancient Greek cosmogony. This is done by the analysis of antique Greek texts like Orphic Hymns and the literary remains of the writers and philosophers like Aeschylus, (Pseudo) Apollodorus, Apollonius Rhodius, Aristotle, Euripides, Hesiod, Homer, Hyginus, Nonnus, Pausanias, Pindar and Sophocles, as well as by the analysis of texts of Roman writers like Cicero, Ovid and Pliny.

Гея, Хелиос, Селена и Уран – трите главни небесни тела и небето в древно-гръцката космогония Discover the world's research Department of Astrophysics, Astronomy and Mechanics Physics Faculty, University of Athens-Zografos 157 84 2 Astronomical Observatory, Volgina 7, 11060 Belgrade, Serbia 3 322127 Needles, Street, Chatsworth, California 91311, USA etheodos@phys.uoa.gr zanispetros@socal.rr.com (Research rep ort. Accepted on 21.09.2010) Abstract. In this article we consider the role of the three p rincipal celestial bodies, the Earth (Gaia), the Sun (Helios) and the Moon (Selene), as well as the Sky (Ouranos) in the ancient Greek cosmogony.

This is done by the analysis of antique Greek texts like Orphic Hymns and the literary remains of the writers and philosophers like Aeschylus, (Pseudo) Ap o llodorus, Apollonius Rhodius, Aristotle, Euripides, Hesiod , Homer, Hyginus, Nonnus, Pausanias, Pindar and Sophocles, as well as by the analysis of texts of Roman writers like Cicero, Ovid and Pliny. Key words: Gaia, Mother Earth, Helios, Sun, Ouranos, Sky, Selene, Moon Гея, Хелиос, Селена и Уран – трите главни небесни тела и небето в древно-гръцката космогония Е. Теодосиу, В. Н. Маниманис, М. С. Димитрийевич, П.

Мантаракис В тази статия ние разглеждаме ролята на трите главни небесни тела – Земята (Гея), Слънцето (Хелиос) и Луната (Селена), както и Небето (Уран) в д ревно-гръцката космогония. Това е направено чрез анализ на а нтич ни гръцки текстове като Орфеевите химни и литературното наследство на писатели и философи като Есхилус, (Псевдо) Аполодорус, Аполониус Родиус, Аристотел, Еврипид, Хесиод, Омир, Хигинус, Нонус, Паусаниас, Пиндер и Софокъл, както и анализ на текстове на римски писатели като Цицерон, Овидий и Плиний.

Our aim here is to analyze, on the basis of ancient Greek and Roman texts, the role of the three principal celestial bodies, the Earth (Gaia), the Sun (Helios) and the Moon (Selene) as well as the Sky (Ouranos) in ancient Greek cosmogony. Since the remotest antiquity, human beings worshipped the divine couple of goddess Gaia (Gaea, Earth) and god Ouranos (Uranus, Sky), the primal pair. Hesiod’s Theogony (1914) begins with Gaia and concludes with the polytheistic reign of the Olympians. The genesis of the elements of nature and the genesis of personiﬁed gods behaving like humans proceed in parallel: "in the beginning the gods and Gaia were born" (Theog., 105). Gaia’s mate, Ouranos, surrounds her and fertilizes her.

Bulgarian Astronomical Journal 16, 2011 Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos 91 In juxtaposition with Gaia, who is the deiﬁcation of our planet, Mother Earth is the deiﬁcation of the ground, whose products support human ex- istence, and which gives the space where they are born, they live and they die. Beyond the cosmic duo of deities, Ouranos and Gaia / Mother Earth, humans worshipped the light-giver and life-giver Helios (Sun), the source of every life form on Earth. For all people, in all regions of the Earth, the Sun, Sky and Earth are the eternal witnesses of human acts and the natural avengers of the violations of the laws. From the age of the emergence of Greek philosophy comes the theory that the solar rays that fell on the wet Mother Earth created the ﬁrst living creatures, while mythographers consider as progenitors of all things the Sun and Mother Earth.

The Moon gave primal units for the measurement of time: the deﬁnition of the luna r (synodic) month and of the week; its role is therefore crucial in the invention of the ﬁrst calendars, which served as the foundation for all ancient religions. In this paper, we will consider and analyze the role of Gaia/Mother Earth, Ouranos, Helios and Selene in ancient Greek mythological Cosmogony. 2. Gaia According to the cosmogony of the Orphics, Gaia (Gaea) pre-existed, along with Chaos and Eros-Phanes, during t he Creation of the Universe. These three cosmic beings were born from the cosmic egg, which in turn either originated ex nihilo or was produced by Nyx (the Night). Gaia, one of the primal deities, is a cosmogonical symbol of the material aspect of the Universe, and not just of the earth as a ground (Demetrakos, Mega Lexikon, 1964, vol. 3, p. 1534).

Chaos symbolizes the space of the Uni- verse and Eros symbolizes the motive and world-creating power that uniﬁes and transforms the Universe. In the oldest Orphic cosmogony Gaia is born with the intervention (’ener- gy’) of this cosmogonic Eros, who "put together everything" (Orp hic Fragm. Kern, 1922, 1). In the later version of Orphic cosmogony Gaia and the Sky (Ouranos, Uranus) are formed from the two halves of the huge cosmic egg born by the timeless Chronos (Time) (Orphic Fragm. Kern, 1922, 57). In Hesiod’s Theogony (1914), the primal entity of the Universe is Chaos: ". . . ﬁrst Chaos was created" (Theog. 116), which was a formless mass without any structure; an abyss or an ’undecorated’ space. After the creation of Chaos, Erevos (= Darkness) and Nyx (= Night) were born; Nyx gave birth to Ether and Hemera (= Day).

Subsequently, the ’broad-chested Gaia’, as Hesiod characterizes her, one of the three primeval elements of th e Universe -along with Chaos and Eros-, gives birth to Ouranos, Pontos (= sea) and the mountains (Theog. 123 +). Another version identiﬁes Chaos with Ouranos proper, thus deﬁning Gaia and Ouranos as the ﬁrst cosmic-divine couple of Creation. Ancient Greeks begin the genesis of gods and of nature with a feminine entity, Gaia, which appears after Chaos and before Eros. Gaia is b o th the natural element that 92 E. Theodossiou et al. produces and supports the world, and the Mother Earth, with the birth of Ouranos, of the Ocean and other aquatic deities. Initially, the divine reproduction is asexual, i.e. the fertility of Gaia is not associated with any god. In a second stage, however, Gaia appears to mate with her ﬁrst-born son Ouranos (Theog. 147), while she had produced him without the intervention of a masculine entity.

Our ano s (Uranus) was the most appropriate of all mates, as he was surrounding her totally an d he was destined to be the abode of the gods. In this way, Gaia and the Sky formed the ﬁrst divine couple. Whenever Night was succeeding Day, Ouranos was uniting himself with his own mother. Gaia was being fertilized by his raindrops as by sperm, so she gave birth to many children (Homeric Hymns , 1914, 30, 17 and Theog. 127): Six Titans (the Ocean , Creius, Hyperion, Japetus, Coeus and Cronus), six Titanids (Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys), three Cyclops (Arges and Steropes = lightning, Vrontes = thunder) and the three Hecatonchires, huge creatures with 100 hands each: Vriareos (= powerful), Gyes (= giant) and Cottus (= angry). Uranus started to worry because of the number and the steadily growing power of his children; he feared that some day they would push him aside.

Therefore, he imprisoned them in Tartara, a dark and cold place in the depths of the earth. Gaia, displeased by Uranus’ violent behavior against their chil- dren and by his violent daily embracing, produced a hard scythe from her interior and gave it to her sons, asking them to mutilate their father, thus depriving him of his reproductive power. Cronus (Kronos), the youngest of all Titans, decided to punish his divine father himself, and all his half-brothers and half-sisters except Ocean agreed with that. When night fell, Uranus, full of passion, spread his vast body over Gaia and then Cronus, seizing the op- portunity, cut oﬀ the genitals of his father using Gaia’s scythe.

From the droplets of blood that fell on earth from the wound, other creatures were born: the three Furies (Alycto = the non-stopping chaser of the guilty ones, Tissiphone = the punisher of murder, and Megaera = the malevolent), the Giants (Enceladus, Porphyrion, P´allas, Polybiotes, Ephialtes, Clytios, Hip- polytus, Eurytus, Gration, Agrios, Theon, Alcyoneus, Athos, Vesvicus and Echion) and the Meliades Nymphs, spirits of hatred and violence (Theog. 182+). Finally, from the seminal foam and the god’s sperm that fell into the sea, emerged Aphrodite on a seashore of Cyprus (Theog. 187-206). Uranus understood the betrayal and realized that he had lost his power: wounded and having lost his reproductive ability (and hence his divine power), he retired high on the celestial vault, where he stayed forever, uttering a curse against Cronus: to also loose his power by his own oﬀspring.

In Homer, the powerful and primeval Gaia is mentioned as overseer of the oaths: she is invoked, along with Uranus and the holy water of Styx, by goddess Hera when she swears (Homer, 1924, Iliad. XV 36-38). Homeric heroes, such as Agamemn on , also invoke Gaia in their oaths, along with Zeus, Helios and the Furies (Iliad XIX 258-265). Menelaus, before his duel with Paris, asks to validate the oaths of their agreement by sacriﬁcing two lambs, one white and one black, to Helios (the Sun) and Gaia, respectively (Iliad III 103+). Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos 93 Finally, there is a version according to which Gaia, after the ’abdication’ of Uranus, joined Ocean and gave birth to gods and goddesses of the waters.

However, Gaia and Uranus are not considered just the parents of th e g ods, but also the parents of humans, as the Homeric Hymn to Gaia, ’the mother of gods’, mentions: "Praise to me the mother of t he gods and of all people" (Homeric Hymns, 1914). Gaia is seldom d epic ted in a whole-body representation in art. Usually the goddess is shown from waist up, a fact hinting that the rest of her body is the ground or soil, that is the earth itself, whose deiﬁcation she was. 3. Ouranos (Uranus) Uranus, whose name comes from the Greek words oros and ano (Demetrakos, Mega Lexikon, 1964, vol. 10, p. 5289), that is who is above the mountains (Aristotle, On the Heavens (De Caelo) 400a, 7), was in Greek mythology the personiﬁcation of the celestial vault or dome, of the primeval cosmogonic force. He was the sovereign of the ﬁrst generation of beings on Earth.

For this reason, Uranus plays an important role in Hesiod’s Theogony, while according to pseudo-Apollodorus: "Uranus was the ﬁrst to rule the entire world" (The Library (Bibliotheca), 1921, A, 1, 1). In the Orphic tradition Uranus is mentioned as son of Nyx (the Night) and brother of Gaia, while elsewhere he appears as son of Ether and Gaia or Nyx. In either case, Uranus belongs to the ﬁrst generation of beings, the oldest of gods and of the elements of nature. According to Hesiod, in the prevailing version, he was the ﬁrst born son of Gaia, who conceived him when she was sleeping next to Eros, without fertilization, "to surround her and to be an eternal and safe abode of gods" (Theog. 486). Uranus is the ﬁrst masculine element, the father of gods in Greek mythology. We already mentioned how Uranus lost his power and retired on the ce- lestial vault, where he stayed forever.

So the word ouranos in Greek means the sky or celestial vault, where stars and all celestial bodies are positioned and move: the ﬁrmament, stretching from z enith to the horizon, regarded as a hemisphere placed above the surface of the earth and supported on it along the horizon line by columns (Iliad VI 108). On ouranos all celestial phenomena take place. According to Homer, the stars are attached to it a nd move along with it: the celestial vault is the one that rotates incessantly (Iliad XVII 425). Of course, today we know that this perception is totally wrong: the ’sky’ in that sense does not exist. After taking power, Cronus re leased all his half-brothers and half-sisters from Tartara. The Cyclops and Hecatonchires, however, started after a while to lay cla ims upon his power and they became dangerous. Therefore, Cronus threw them aga in into Tartara and he put a terrible monster, Campe (= caterpillar) to guard them. This period is the second generat ion of immortal deities, where Cronus reigns with his wife Rhea and Titans imp o se his power in the world.

Yet, the increasing cruelty and injustice of Cronus, who was devouring his own children in order to avoid being dethroned himself, ﬁnally led Gaia to help Zeus (the Greek analog of Roman Jupiter) against the Titans, giving him a potion that would force Cronus to disgorge the baby gods he had 94 E. Theodossiou et al. devoured. It should be noticed here that the primal Gaia still inﬂuences the course of the world, appearing at certa in crucial moments to g ive a solution. Zeus, after being advised by Gaia, also released the Cyclops and Heca- tonchires. The three Cyclops, with their awesome weapons, the lightning and the thunder, and the three Hecatonchires with their 300 hands in total, man- aged to obtain a decisive victory against the Titans on Mountain Othr ys. The Titans were defeated and were thrown deep in the earth, in Tartara, where the Hecatonchires guard them.

According to professor of Geology at the University of Athens Mariolakos Elias: "The end of the Titans means i) a relative abatement of earthquakes and volcanic activity, and ii) the end of the direct and decisive inﬂuence of the natural environment in the life of prehistoric humans. It is the period when the food-gatherers and hunters are turned into farmers and animal breeders (Mariolakos, E., 2009, Geomythotopoi, p. 5). It should be added th at ancient Greek art did not treat the myth of Uranus as a subject; nevertheless, in the Vatican Mu seums there is an ancient depiction of him on the chariot of Helios (the Sun god). According to an alternative Greek tradition, probably even older than the prevailing myth, initially Uranus and Gaia were very close. But due to the frequent inﬁdelities and illegitimate children from other females, Gaia as Earth ﬁnally detached herself from him and agreed to meet him only in certain time periods.

From an astronomical point of view, this tradition is an excellent attempt to explain the cycle of the year’s seasons and the place of the Earth in the Universe, as the other mates and children of Uranus were the other moving planets and the stars of the celestial vault (Helios Encyclopaedia, 1957, vol. 4, p. 920). There are also other traditions about Gaia, such as the one mentioned by Diodorus of Sicily (1935), in which Gaia was a beautiful mortal woman, under the name of Titaia. She was loved by Uranus and they had 18 children, named ’Titans’ after their mother. As Titaia was a wise and prudent woman, having oﬀered many services to humans, after her dea th humans deiﬁed her and gave her the name of Mother Earth. 4. Mother Earth A special and important p lace in worship was held by Mother Earth, the universal mother and supreme goddess, called for this reason by Greeks Hy- pertatan Gan.

This worship, however, was addressed to Earth not as a celestial body, neither as a personiﬁed deity with a human appearance, but rather as earth-chthon, as a part of nature with its soil, groun d and underground, which feeds and sustains humans. Man is ’accused’ by tragic poet Sophocles (5th century BC) as the one being that dares to disturb the supreme goddess, since he doesn’t hesitate to hurt her by "ploughing it with his plough, incessant- ly furrowing her year after year" (Sophocles, 1994, Antigone, Vol. II., verse 330+). Regarding earth-nature as the omnipotent goddess Mother Earth must have begun in the age when the ﬁrst agricultural societies and their festivals developed, festivals full of mysticism for the primeval cycle of life (sprouting - Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos 95 Fig. 1. At the period of Emperor August (1st century AD) people were picturing the Earth as a sweet mother with two children in her lap, inside a ﬂowery natural environment.

Later on, Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia stressed some ominous points: he wrote that we humans excavate Earth’s bowels by digging mining holes upon which we live; we wonder when gaps open or the ground shakes, as if these signs were not the expression of wrath of the holy mother. Inside dark corridors we search for treasures, as if the soil on the surface of the ground were not generous and rich enough. fruit bearing - maturing - decay - seed - seed ing - ’rebirth’). However, starting from prehistoric times, it can be said that the ﬁrst humans, from the moment they started to observe life on Earth they understoo d that both they and the rest of animal and plant life were attached to the triptych life-r eproduction- death. The survival of humans depended on earth’s vegetation, as they and the animals they were hunting were being fed by the gifts of nature (Eliade, 1978). The primitive humans, by carefully observing the life cycle of plants, th e seeding of Mother Earth and subsequent sprouting aid ed by rain from Uranus, discovered the corresponding cycle of animal sexual reproduction..

Therefore, it was concluded that Ea rth was alive and in order to give birth ’she’ ne eded to come into contact with the masculine entity. For this reason, humans per- soniﬁed Earth as a feminin e entity, while the fertilizing masculine entity was the sky with the rain, or some large r iver, such as the divine Nile in Egypt (the ancient Egyptian religion is the only one in the world in which the Sky is personiﬁed as a female deity, Nout, see Theodossiou 2007, p. 28). 96 E. Theodossiou et al. The Mother Earth (Terra Mater), due to the vague character of her wor- ship, is sometimes identiﬁed in Greek literature as Rhea, Hestia, Hera, but mostly as Demeter, whose own name comes from Ge-meter = Earth-mother, denoting the womb that encloses the seeds.

Indeed, the worship of Gaia as Mother Earth goddess diminishes over time, without disappearing complete- ly, and is replaced by the better-deﬁned worship of Demeter a s the goddess of agriculture; Gaia’s role is thus reduced to the dream-giving, story-telling, and to the feeding of plants and children. The miraculous divine union of Uranus-Sky and Earth, out of which gods, humans, and all living things are born, is reﬂected in the cry of Eleusis Mys- teries ’hye, Kye’; with this cry the mysts were ca lling the Sky to pour his fertilizing rain, so that the earth (here personiﬁed as Demeter) could use her womb to produce all kinds of oﬀspring. As opposed to Gaia, which is the deiﬁcation of our world-planet, Mother Earth is essentially the deiﬁcation of soil-ground, whose products sustain humans and which gives them the space on which they are born, live and die. The presence of Gaia as a p rimeval element-material and deity is apparent in the founding of the ﬁrst oracle, which catered o nly to the gods.

Later on, identiﬁed with Mother Earth, established her oracle in Delphi; this is why she is also called ’protomantis’ = ﬁrst foreteller (Aeschylus, 1989, Eumenides, Pythias 2). The Dodone oracle was also dedicated to Gaia; there she was worshipped together with Zeus as "fruit-giver and mother" (Pausanias, 1935, Phocis 12, 10). Finally, Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia (1971) wrote that the Sky belongs to the gods, but the Earth belongs to the human race. The Earth welcomes us when we are born, it gives us food to grow and it receives us in her lap when we die. This earth suﬀers from human actions that destroy its surface and cut into its body as men search for gold, silver, copper and lead; men open wells into its depth in quest for precious gems and excavate its bowels. (Pantermalis, Ancient Greek mines, 1995, p. 42).

Finally, the questions about Earth, as they were summarized by Aristotle (On the Heavens 1956, II 293a, 15+), were culminating with the question of the place of Earth in the Universe, of its exact shape and of its size. 5. The Couple of Sky and Earth As a corollary, it can be said that in Greek cosmogony, as in the creat ion myths of t he other Indoeuropean people, the great creation activity taking place continuously in nature is exempliﬁed in the following simple picture: One divine couple, the ﬁrst of creation, gave and still gives birth to all beings. The fertilizing ’father’, in this case Uranus, and the conceiving ’mother’, in this case Gaia, who also feeds her children. This ﬁrst divine couple is united by Eros, and in the erotic-cosmogonic symbolism the Sky-Uranus embraces and fertilizes Earth-Gaia through the rain. Their union is presented as an omnipotent reproductive ability, which multiplied the number of gods, a fact praised by Orpheus (Proclus in Tim. 3, 1820, p.

137, 11) as creation of the primeval Chaos (or Erevos) and of the Day (Orphic Hymns IV: Incense to Uranus, and XXVI: Incense to Earth). Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos 97 Besides, this same symbolism is hidden in the union of Semele (who per- soniﬁes Earth) and Zeus, the celestial god who fertilizes his beloved woman with lightning, the harbinger of rain. ’Earthly’ Danae is fertilized in the same way, by the ’celestial’ Zeus transformed into golden rain. Metaphorically, the celestial god, with his beneﬁciary waters, softens the parched womb of the earth for the development of life. Since Mother Earth and Uranus were the progenitors of life, humans (who depended on earth’s vegetation) had to either pacify or challenge god Uranus to copulate more frequently with Mother Earth for richer production. This cosmogonic theme of the primeval couple of Sky and Earth is found not only in ancient Greece, but in almost all ancient civilizations.

Accord- ing to some scientiﬁc evidence, many prehistoric societies were matriarchic (’matriarchy’ in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007) The ﬁrst human societies were intimately aware of nature. They believed that humans, animals, plants, rocks and minerals, all were the descendants of Mother Earth; therefore, everything had a soul and any living creature had the same rights on life. At the dawn o f history human societies respected the oth er life forms because they knew that their diﬀerences were just morphological. People be- lieved that rain was the intercourse of Sky and Earth (the masculine a nd the feminine). They knew that everything depended on this event, including the survival of the other forms of life on the land. For pre-Socratic Greek natural philosophers, however, it should be added that Earth and the Sky were regarded as a continuous bo dy, united at the ends of the horizon. Earth of the Homeric Universe was a circular ﬂat disk surrounded by a huge circular river, the Ocean, a model ﬁrst appearing in th e Orphic Hymn ’X.

TO PAN, The Fumigation from Various Odors’, verse 15: "Old Ocean too reveres thy high command, whose liquid arms begirt the solid land." This mythical ’river’ is diﬀerent from the seas: it is something that d eﬁne s the boundaries of the terrestrial world. Above all, Ocean is the primal a nd orig- inal creative element, the starting point of all things (Iliad, XIV 246). This mythical ’river’ has no sources, nor estuary, it is ’apsorroos’, i.e. cyclically moving or backward-ﬂowing. Its current goes back to where it started in a ceaseless and eternal ﬂux. This Ocean supports the sky, which is above Earth’s circular disk as a huge vault.

In the Orphic Hymns, the Sky is mentioned as the sovereign of the World, surrounding the Earth as a sphere; it is the abode of the go ds and rotates like a spinning-top; personiﬁed, he guards everything, not just in his place, but also on Earth: "Uranus ruler of the world, spinning like a sphere around Gaia, house of the blessed gods, moving with whirlings, guard of everything on both sky and earth" (O rphic Hymns) IV, Incense to Uranus). On the other hand, the Sky was for ancient Greeks a metallic vault made of copper or iron, held up there by very tall columns or, according to an- other view, by some giant. Homer combines these two views by having Atlas supporting the columns (Homer, 1919 , Odyssey i 53-54). Hesiod in Theogony (1914, 517e) writes that Zeus was the one who had assigned this duty to Atlas.

So the sky for them was made of a solid metallic material, called ’poly- chalcus’, that is ’of much copper’ (Iliad V 504, Odyssey ii 458, iii 2, Iliad XVI 98 E. Theodossiou et al. 364, XIX 351), ’copper’ (Iliad XVII 424-425) and ’iron’ (Odyssey xv 329 and xvii 565). The space between sky and Earth, according to the view recorded by Homer, was ﬁlled at ﬁrst by the dense air: aer (Iliad XIV 288). Over this layer and towards t he direction of the sky there was the clean and transparent ’ether’, lighter than the air. Above the ether was the ’polychalcus’ sky.

Of course, one should not assume th at the Homeric sky was a barren metallic dome; it was, as Homer sings, full of life, the life of the stars that decorate it: he calls the sky ’full of stars’ (’asteroeis’) (Iliad VI 108, XV 371) and star-decorated (Odyssey ix 534-535). On this celestial dome, Helios, the god of the Sun, travels on its path, so he is described with the adjective ’uranodromos’, that is ’sky-running’ (Odyssey i 7-9). 6. The Sun and the Sun-god Helios From prehistoric times, humans admired the starry night sky, with its thou- sands of naked-eye stars twinkling on its vault. But their joy was greatest at dawn, "the rosy-ﬁngered E os" (Hesiod, 2006, Works and Days, 609), when the diﬀuse sunlight gradually prevailed over the darkness of the fearful night.

They naturally worshipped the light-giving Sun, since they realized that ev- erything on earth owed its existence and life to the inﬂuence of its rays. According to archaeologist Chr. G. Doumas: "The word ’als’ in Homer means the sea when observed from the land. The presence of this root in tablets of Linear B writings as component of other words indicates a long-standing use, during which it evolved into a versatile noun of the third declension that easily makes compounds with other roots. . . the fact t hat with the original root so many a nd various needs of the Greek language, e.g. alios / helios [= sun], shows both the close relationship of the aegean society with the sea and the strong inﬂuence of the liquid element upon the history and the culture of that age." (Doumas, 2010, The ancient monuments of the names, p. 16). "Indeed, from ’als’ (genitive form: alos) came the adjective ’alios’, which, even though it is recognized as the doric type of ’helios’ = sun, it essential- ly means the one that is related to the sea...

The depiction of the Sun on the proto-Cycladic pan-shaped vessels of the 3rd millenium BC is probably an indication of the importance assigned to it by the Cycladians of that period. The islanders of the Aegean Sea and the inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Greek peninsula see every morning the Sun rising from t he sea" (Doumas, 2008, The aligenes Aegean Sun, p.15), as described in the ﬁrst verses of Rhap- sody iii of the Odyssey: "When the Sun, leaving the lake, ascended towards the all-copper sky to shine on both immortals and the mortal people of the life-giving earth. . . ". The Sun is the ’rad iating one’, the ’ﬁery one’ and as such it symbolized the celestial representation of the universal father, being essentially the repre sen- tative of God’s spirit (Demetrakos, 1964, vol. 7, p. 3 250) .

The Sun’s appear- ance in the morning, its culmination at noon and its majestic disappearance for the night (or during the eclipses) inﬂuenced much human thought. Dark- ness fallin g every evening after sunset ﬁlled the soul of the primitive human with stressful questions. With time, the savants of the society assigned to Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos 99 the Sun supernatural divine properties, since as a god ’he’ could appear or disappear at will, both daily and during the much more rare eclipses. All ancient people worshipped the light- and life-giving Sun.

The Sun was Samas of the Assurians, Bel of the Semites, Bel-Marduk of the Babylonians, El or Outou of the Sumerians, Baal of the Phoenicians an d Chananeans, Moloch of the Ammonites, Chimoch of the Moabites, Ammun-Ra of the Egyptians, Surya of the Indians, Mithra of the Persians, Indi of t he Inka, Tonatiuch of the Aztecs, Sol of the Romans, Swarog or Yarila of Slavic tribes, Belenos of the Celts, Helios and Phoebos-Apollo (the symbol of sunlight) of the Greeks. The worship of the Sun god was universal and prevalent, since for ancient humans the Sun was the source of life, light a nd warmth, a guarantee of the celestial order of the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, a c reative force for nature and, more mundanely, an aid for orientation. Besides, the Sophoclean phrase "everybody adores the rotating solar orb" (Achilles Tatius, 1917, frag.

672 Nauk2), is true for all ages (Sophocles, 1892, Trachiniae, 738, 2). 7. The Sun-Helios in Greek mythology In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (ca 8th century BC) the external aspect of the bright appearance of the Sun is especially stressed along with the notions associated with sunrise and sunset. According to Hesiod, the Sun-god, Helios, was the son of Titans Hyperion and Theia (Theog., 371-372), or of Hyperion and Eu rypha essa (Homeric Hymn to Helios 31, 2), while his sisters were Selene (the Moon goddess) and Eos (the personiﬁcation of dawn). Pindar celebrates Theia as the mother of Helios in his 5th Isthmian Ode (1997): "Mother of the Sun, Theia of many names, for your sake men honor gold as more powerful than anything else; and through the value you bestow on them, o queen, ships contending on. . .

" As Titans, Theia and Hyperion (= he who hovers above earth) belong to the same generation as Cronus; all of them were children of Gaia and Uranus (Patsi-Garin, 1969). Homer, calling Helios ’Hyperionides’ (Odyssey xii 176), stresses his con- crete bond with life, as since their birth, humans behold the solar ’augeae’ (daybreaks): they live "under the stars of the sky and the light of the Sun" (Iliad IV 4 5), rejoicing when they see "the bright light of the Sun" (Iliad V 120). Eventually, when a person dies "he abandons the light of the Sun" (Iliad XIX 2). The Sun for Homer is the god who "sees everything and hears every- thing" (Iliad III 277).

This characteristic of Helios is stressed by the adjec- tives ’panoptes’ (Aeschylus, 1983, Prometheus Bound 91), ’the overseer of everything’ (Aeschylus, 1984, The Libation Bearers, 982-9 86) , ’the prevailing one by sight’ (Sophocles, 1892, Trachiniae,101) and many other references of the ancient Greek tragic poets, who stress that these ’over-seeing’ abilities of the Sun render him a guarantor o f the keeping of oaths; always Helios was a 100 E. Theodossiou et al. witness of truth (Homeric Hymn 3, 381, Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus 660), "index of justice, guardian of oath keeping, eye of justice" (Orph. Hymn 16).

In Greek mythology in general, Helios is presented as the god who travels around Earth and watches the administration of justice shedding light on good and evil (Segal, C.P., 1992, pp. 3-29, McCarthy, D.J., 1978, p. 185, West, M.L., 1997, p. 20). Helios was considered a very important god, and Homer reports that sacriﬁces were oﬀered to Gaia and Helios (Iliad III 104, 276). As far as his other attributes are concerned, Helios was worshipped in Corinth (Pausanias, 1918, Corinth Book II, 3:2, 4:6 and 5:1) as god of storms, thunderstorms and other sky forces. Additionally, it has been suggested that the ’Horse monument’ (Pausanias, 1935, Book III 20, 9) with the seven "columns. . . . . . who they say are statues of the planets", was a part of the worship of Helios.

Also, in Hermione there was a temple dedicated to Helios (Pausanias, 1935, Vol. II, 34, 10). Indeed, in the Christian church of Taxiarches was found a part of a circular altar of the 3rd century AD with the following inscriptio n: "To Helios the king god, to Hyperion altar. . . " (Jameson, M. and Runnels C.N., 1959, p. 15). The special place of Helios with respect to the Olympian gods (although Helios is a celestial and not one of the 12 Olympian gods), is connected with his importance for the life of the Olympians. Diodorus (1935, Bibl. Histor. V 71) writes that Zeus before the battle with the Giants sacriﬁces to Helios, Uranus and Gaia. This is why Aeschylus refers to Helios as ’the overseer of everything’ (Aeschylus, 1989, Eumenides).

From about the 5th century BC and after, Helios loses its status as a distinct deity and begins to mingle with Apollo, the Olympian god of sun- light. After the battle with Giants, Helios was identiﬁed with Zeus, who, as a celestial and Olympian god relative to the celestial light included the divine substance of Helios. However the gradual increase in Zeus’ strengths forced the Helios part out of his substance wh ich Apollo then usurped to become a deity with many of the characteristics of a pure Sun god. The identiﬁca- tion of Helios with Phoebus-Apollo (phoebus = shining) is traced throughout the whole ancient Greek literature after Parmenides and Empedo c les (Diels, 1996, Vorsokratiker, I2 108, 29.157 , 10 and DK -Diels-Kranz, 1996, 28 A 20, 31 A 23), up to Plutarch and Crates Ascondes of Thebes.

Eratosthenes reports this identiﬁcation of Helios with Apollo (Spandagos, 2002, 24) writing that Aeschylus suggests in one of his works that Orpheus identiﬁed Helios with Apollo and placed him at th e center of his worship, refusing to oﬀer honors to Dionysus. Similarly, in Saturnalia by Macrobius (1969), it is written characteristically: ’Item Orpheus Liberum atque Solem unum esse deum eundemque demonstrans de ornatu vestituque eius in sacris Liberalibus ita scribit’ (Saturnalia 1.18.22, frag. 238). Nevertheless, although this Helios-Apo llo identiﬁcation began at least since the 5th century BC, it was not widely accepted until centuries later.

According to Homer, Helios started his trip every dawn from the eastern ocean or from Ethiopia, the land of the ’sun-burned people’ (Odyssey I 24- 26); he crossed the sky with his winged four-horse chariot, pulled by four beautiful ﬁre-breathing white hor ses: Eous, Aethiops, Bronte and Sterope (Hyginus, 1933, Fabulae 183): Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos 101 "Eous; by him the sky is turned. Aethiops, as if ﬂaming, parches the grain. These trace-horses are male. The female are yoke-bearers: Bronte, whom we call Thunder, Sterope, whom we call Lightning" These equine names allude to the power of the God, the succession of the celestial phenomena and the maturing of the fruits. Other authors report other names for the Sun’s horses: Lampon, Aethops, Aethon and Flegon (Gelling & Davidson, 1969, p. 14+; Glob 1974, pp.

99-103, and Green 1991, pp. 64-66, p. 114+). Every evening, Helios completed his journey and then rested in the West, in the land of Hesperides. The notion of the ’ﬂaming’ or ’ﬁery’ nature of Helios is very common among the Greek tragic poets: "baked by the ﬁre of the sun" (Aeschylus, 1983, Prometheus Bound 22), "High o’er the earth, at whose ethereal ﬁre. . . " (Euripides: Ion 3 4), "Hot ﬂame of the King" (Euripides, 1996, Phaethon 776). Euripides describes sunrise as follows: "Now ﬂames this radiant chariot of the sun / high o’er the earth, at whose ethereal ﬁre / the stars into the sacred night retreat" (Euripides, 2004, Ion 82-84).

This description has often been compared with a depiction of Helios on a Greek vase of the 5th century BC that is kept in the British Museum; there, Helios is depicted with a ray- surrounded h ead , riding a winged four-horse chariot, rising from the sea, in which child-like apparitions swim, denoting the stars that go to hide. Fig. 2. At the period of Emperor August (Ink drawing: The rise of the Sun with his 4-horse chariot. The vanishing stars of the night are depicted as children sinking in the sea (Greek vase, 435 BC - British Museum). The Sun, completing his daily (diurnal) course on the celestial vault, rested every night on a golden bed made by the hammer of the god Hephaestos (Vulcan), in order to shine again the following day over the world. Helios had many sons and daughters. With Oceanid Perseis they had three children: Circe, Passiphae and Ae¨etes (Apollonius, 1962, Argonautica 3, 1, 2 and Homer: Odyssey XII 3).

Circe was famous for her magical powers and for her love for Ulysses (Theogony, 1914, 957). Passiphae, wife of king Minos of Crete, is identiﬁed with the Moon an d considered the primeval deity of light, as her name states (passiphaessa = apparent to all). It was due to Passiphae 102 E. Theodossiou et al. that the worship of Helios was widely practiced in Crete, where he was adored under the form of a bull (Bekker, 1814-1821, Anecd. Gr. 344, 10). The myth of Passiphae falling in love with a bull (the zodiacal constellation Taurus = the Bull) reﬂects a very ancient tradition, according to which the bull-shaped sun-god and the cow-shaped moon-goddess were united with a holy wedding. In another myth, Ae¨etes was king of Aea, who refused to give the Golden Fleece (a symbol of sunlight) to Jason and the Argonauts.

Helios had two other daughters, Phaethusa and Lampetie, and a son, Phaethon, with Clymene.. Once, Phaethon got permission from his father to cross the sky with his chariot. However, when Phaethon saw the huge constellation S corp ius (the scorpion) he became freightened and lo st control of his fat her’s chariot. Its horses bolted and the chariot started to go up and down, threatening the Earth with destruction. Then Zeus saved the world by killing Phaethon with one of his thunderbolts. Phaethon’s body fell on the bank of the river Eridanus. His sisters, the Heliads, who mourned him, were transformed into poplars, the holy trees of the god Helios, and their tears became amber. Ink drawing: The fall of Phaethon. Fig. 3. Ink drawing: The fall of Phaethon.

Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos 103 ’Phaethon’ was also a name given to of Helios himself because of its ra- diant light (Iliad XI 730, Odyssey v 479, xi 15 , Homeric Hymn 31.2). In his Theogony (1914), Hesiod writes of Phaethon and Hyperion as ’substances’ of god Helios (Theog. 987 and Nagy, 1990, p. 235). Additionally, Phaet hon is mentioned by both Nonnus (1940, Dionysiaka 38.167) and Ovid (1857, Meta- morph. 2007, 1.747-79: Phaethon’s parentage, struggle with Epaphos and 2.42: Phaethon and his father). Helios, according to Greek mythology, also had numerous other aﬀairs with other women; subsequently, he had many other sons and dau ghters, collectively known in ancient Greek literature as Heliades.

A famous c enter of Helios worship was Rhodes; as Pindar (1997) reports (Olymp. Ode 7, 69), the whole island belonged to him. The famous Colossus was a giant statue of Helios (this statue was one of the ’seven wonders’ of the ancient world), an artwork by Rhodian sculptor Chares from Lindos (Pliny, 1971, Historia Naturalis 34.63), a student of Lysippus (3rd cent. BC). Every four years a Sun festival was celebrated on the island, called Ali(ei)a or Helieia (Nilsson, 1906, p. 427), during which they oﬀered to Helios a four-horse chariot thrown into the sea. Helios stayed in Rhodes with Nymph Rhodos, a daughter of Aphrodite, and together they had seven sons, named: Ochimos, Cer caphus, Actis, Macar, Candalus, Triopes and Tenages, and their wisdom is exalted by Pindar (1997, Olymp. Ode 7, 72-75).

In Greek art the personiﬁcation of the sun is often depicted as a young man bearing a radiant wreath and a tunic, standing upon a four-horse chariot, as on the metope of the Hellenistic temple of goddess Athena in Ilion (Troy). Of more astronomical interest is a statue of Helios in the Vatican. He is depicted as a young man bearing a radiant wreath, and has an extra feature: a wide belt with the symbols of the zodiac. Moreover, there is the tradition, mentioned among others by Home r (Odyssey xii 127), that in Trinacria island (Sicily),Helios had seven herds of cattle and seven herds of sheep, each having ﬁfty animals. They grazed steadily every day, never getting more or less.

According to the explanation given by Aris- totle, the lunar year consisted of 50 weeks, each having 7 days and 7 nights; therefore the 50 times 7 cattle and the 50 times 7 sheep were denoting the 350 days and 350 nights, respectively, which make the lunar year used by a ncient Greeks according to the original calculations (Theodossiou & Danezis, 1995, p. 315). The worship of the Sun-god was universal, while very ancient practices originating in it, such as the orientation of temples of several religions towards the East, were kept until our days in the conscience of people. 8. Selene, The Moon According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Selene was the daughter of Hyperion and Theia, and sister of Eos (the Dawn) and of Helios, who illuminates her eter- nally du e to their relation a s half-brothers. The word selene comes from selas = light (Demetrakos Mega Lexikon, 1964, vol. 13, p. 6489).

In Greek mythol- ogy Selene or Selana (Pindar, Olymp. Ode 10, 75) is the ﬁrst and only lunar deity, at least in pre-classic and classic p oetry, also called by the adjectives 104 E. Theodossiou et al. An ink drawing of the metope of the temple of Athena in Ilion (Troy) with a relief Fig. 4. An ink drawing of the metope of the temple of Athena in Ilion (Troy) with a relief depiction of ray-headed Helios standing on his chariot, most probably based on an older work by Lysippus (Staatliche Museen, Berlin Aegle, Passiphae, Mene, Titanis (as daughter of two Titans) and Phoebe as sister of Phoebos-Helios. As Greek mythology evolved, other goddesses were correlated with the Moon: Hecate, Artemis and Hera. Selene is usually imaged as a feminine form bearing a crescent as crown, riding a horse or a chariot with two winged horses (diphros).

Sometimes she is described as le adin g a herd of cattle so that her crescent-shape d crown resembles a bull’s horns. Her brother Helios rides a four-ho rse chariot, while Selene rides a two-horse chariot; her two horses have one of their sides white Gaia, Helios, Selene and Ouranos 105 and the other black, a metaphor meaning that only the one side of the Moon’s surface is illuminated by sunlight. According to various local traditions Selene had one daughter with Aer (air), called Drosos (the morning Dew). In the Attica tradition she gave b irth to Pandia, daughter of Zeus (pan + dia = all-godly), worshipped along with her mother in the Pandion festival. In an Arcadian tradition the Moon was a lover of god Pan and she was worshipped in common with him on Arcadian Mt Lykaio. In Elis and Karia they believed that Selene was in love with a mortal man, Endymion, whom she met every night on Mt Latmos, and had 50 daughters with him, as many as the lunar months of an Olympiad.

In a tradition of late antiquity me ntioned by Quintus Smyrnaeus (Fall of Troy, 1913, 10. 334 ﬀ), Selene also had a love aﬀair with her brother Helios. The oldest known depiction of Helios in a Greek sculpture is on the eastern gable of the Parthenon, where the birth of goddess Athena is imaged. Helios and Selene also framed the composition of the birth of Aphrodite on the throne of the statue of Zeus in Olympia (Pausanias, 1935, Vol. I I, Elis 1, Book 5, 11, 8) and a similar dep iction is alluded to by the ’sunset’ mentioned by Pausanias o n the gable of the temple of Delphi (Pausanias, 1935, Phocis, Vol. IV, Book X 19, 4: The temple at Delphi). Selene was worshipped throughout Greece, but especially in Peloponne se.

It is known from the history of the Persian Wars that the Spartans, in order to start a military campaign took seriously into consideration the lunar phases. Near the city of Thalames there was a well-known oracle of Selene, where the ephoroi of Spart a stayed overnight asking her advice; a local spring was named after her (Pausanias, 1935, Laconica, Vol. II, Book 3, 26, 1). The p air Helios-Selene was ﬁnally correlated with the pair of Olympians Apollo-Artemis, to which similar characteristics were at tribu ted , along with the same symbols: for Selene these were silver, the bull horns and the crescent. At a symbolic level, the Moon is the feminine component of the creation of the World and the entrance (due to its ’secret’ appearance at night) to- wards the apocryphal nature of humanity and of the Universe, i.e. towards what remains inexpressible from the usual observation of nature. The Moon is the luminous image of cyclical time; representative of the constant ﬂux of everything.

The inﬁnite new moons symbolize the inﬁnite time moments of any end that signals a new beginning. Selene is a chthonic (earth) deity in the antithesis sun-earth, light-darkness. On the other side, Selene is the goddess with the white arms that drives away the darkness of night when it is full. The rosy-ﬁngered Eos (dawn), Selene’s sister, brings the ﬁrst light of the new day. Hecate, the three-form chthonic deity, is another expression of her; Ores, the Hours or the year’s seasons, are considered her daughters. Another metaphor of the Mo on is a huge luminous clepsydra, a water-clock, ﬁlled during its waxing phases and emptying during its waning phases. It gave the deﬁnite measure of time with the succession of its phases. The ancient Greek tragic poets presented Selene-Moon as a very beautiful young woman before which all the other stars paled, when its silvery ﬁgure appears on the celestial dome. 106 E. Theodossiou et al. 9.

Conclusions Since the most ancient times, humans worshipped the primal divine couple, goddess Gaia and god Uranus, who were the ancestors of the other gods that gave their names to the planets of the Solar System. Hesiod’s Theogony starts with goddess Gaia and ends to the polytheistic reign of the Olympian gods. Uranus surrounds Gaia and fertilizes her. In juxtapo sition with goddess Gaia, a deiﬁcation of our planet, Mother Earth is essentially the de iﬁcation of ground and soil, whose products sustain humans and oﬀer them the space on which they live and die. The birth of the nature’s elements comes in parallel with the birth of gods, who metap hor ically behave as people. Cronus symbolizes Time, Rhea the ﬂux an d Hera (an anagram of Aer) air along with all the variations of weather. The light-giving Helios, the Sun, is the source of every life form on Earth. For all people on Earth the Sky, the Sun, the Earth and the Moon (especially the full moon at night) seemed as approp riate eternal witnesses of human acts and the natural avengers of cheatings.

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Question: The prefix 'helio' relates to which celestial body?
Answer: The sun