Myth Universe

Myth Universe

By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

July 20, 2019

I

The Big Bang came about fourteen billion years ago. The first living beings were Gaia the Mother Earth and Ouranos the Father Heaven. Then came the Titans, then the gods. The Titans Cronus and Rhea gave birth to Zeus, who would become the most powerful of all gods. Zeus would later rebel against them, and the wise Titan Prometheus would side with him. When humans were created, Prometheus give them fire. 

II

This made Zeus angry, and he chained Prometheus on the top of a mountain in the Caucasus, the mountain range in what is now Eastern Europe. It was partly punishment, but there is also a secret agenda. There was a prophecy that one of his sons would rise against him, and he wants Prometheus to tell him who is the mother because he had so many children. Prometheus never revealed it despite the extreme torture of his being eaten alive by an eagle everyday because he can't die. Later on, one of Zeus's sons, Hercules, would set him free. 

III

There are so many stories in Edith Hamilton's 1940 classic "Mythology," where she collected many of the stories in Greek, Roman and Norse myth. The greatest demigods are all there – Hercules, Theseus, Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, the wonder twins Castor and Pollux and more. A whole chapter is for famous love stories, like about Orpheus and Eurydice where he went to Hades to get her back, but on the way home, he looked back at her though he wasn't supposed to, and she was teleported back to hell. There is also the tragic affair of Pyramus and Thisbe, where Pyramus thought Thisbe was dead so he killed himself, but Thisbe was alive, and when she saw Pyramus dead, she also killed herself.  

IV

And there is Cupid and Psyche, a story from the second century Latin writer Apuleius. Psyche was a beautiful young mortal girl, and the God of Love, Cupid a.k.a Eros, fell in love with her. They married, with the condition that she never look at him. So of course she did, and he left. She looked for him, finally confronting his mother, Venus, a.k.a. Aphrodite. What followed next was a real Filipino soap opera, with the wicked stepmother maltreating the martyred heroine. But it has a happy ending, and they all lived happily ever after on Mount Olympus.     

Photo courtesy of Kobo