Titans, Gods, & War in Heaven

The Greeks symbolized the continuing process of unified Divinity transforming itself into diverse entities and qualities – the ‘One’ becoming ‘Many’ – as the appearance of the Titans: the elder gods who descended (by the power of the Logos) from the stars to the level of our sun. These were the children of Uranus and Gaia. They included Cronus and his wife Rhea, the ruling Titan deities, who represented heaven (sky) and earth (land) on the one hand, and also embodied the necessary qualities of Time and Space respectively. There were a great many others as well, such as Oceanus, Tethys, Hyperion, and Themis. And many of these had children and grandchildren, among whom were Prometheus and Atlas.

According to legend, Uranus hated his children and forced them to be held captive within Gaia. They conspired against him with their mother’s aid, but when the time came to rebel they all recoiled in fear, with the exception of the brave Cronus. When Uranus approached his wife, Cronus fell upon him and castrated him with a sickle.

The story represents the separation of the Eternal world from the Material world. Uranus (divine ‘Being’) has by now impregnated matter (‘Becoming’) with all the seeds and forms and qualities that it requires. He had kept his progeny hidden and latent, but now it is time for them to live. His castration means that he will no longer fertilize Gaia, and thus a door (the Threshold) between ‘the Above’ and ‘the Below’ has been closed by the advent of Time (Cronus), and the creative process in this world thenceforward must continue to unfold automatically, abundantly, and mechanically on its own.*

Cronus and Rhea soon gave birth to the next generation of gods, the ‘Planetary’ gods – symbols of the highest ideals, who will take over from the Titans after a great War in Heaven.

(* This legend is also found in the story of Noah in the Old Testament. Noah is a symbol of high, spiritual Individuality, the divinely appointed figure from whom the whole regeneration of human life would come forth after the purging Flood: in other words, Noah, like Uranus, ‘seeded’ the world. According to the Old Testament, his son Ham was later punished for coming into his father’s tent and seeing him naked in his sleep. But in the story preserved in legends, Ham (or, in some stories, Ham’s son Canaan) was punished because he castrated Noah.)