Titans as Pre-Olympian Stratum

Kerényi names the Titans in The Gods of the Greeks as “gods who belong to such a distant past that we know them only from tales of a particular kind, and only as exercising a particular function.” They are “celestial gods, but gods of very long ago, still savage and subject to no laws.” The Titans mark the stratum of divine being before the Olympian order — a stratum the Greek imagination did not erase but subordinated.

The name Titan is, Kerényi notes, “since the most ancient times, deeply associated with the divinity of the Sun”; the Titans were originally sun-gods of a primordial and un-juridical kind. Only Kronos and Helios received, in the later mythographic sensibility, any remnant of worship. The rest were vanquished, enchained, and cast into Tartaros — an iron-walled abyss as far below earth as earth lies below sky — where, in the Hesiodic narration Kerényi transmits, “the Titans are hidden in darkness, and can never escape.”

The psychological weight of the stratum is structural: the Olympian order does not stand free of the Titanic ground it conquered. Beneath the law-bearing Zeus lies the lawless solar-savage generation. The pantheon is built on an unassimilated substrate. This is why the mystery-cults — Dionysiac, Orphic, Eleusinian — can reach back into pre-Olympian material to find their sacred content: the Titans are never gone, only buried, and the mysteries remember what the civic order represses.

Relationships

• theogonic-procession
• hesiodic-cosmogony-chaos
• neumann-great-mother
• gaia-as-foundation

Primary sources

• kernyi-gods-greeks (Kerényi 1951, “Stories of the Titans”)
• theogony (Hesiod)