Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821 – 880)
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Jenny Strauss Clay
Abstract
The Typhonomachy (Theogony 821 – 880) has long been deemed an anomalous and inorganic intrusion into the Hesiodic text. The main reason for such a judgment is that the Typhoeus episode is an unnecessary and redundant doublet of the Titanomachy that precedes. In addition, Gaia’s role in giving birth to the monster seems to contradict her benign role both before (624 – 628) and after the Typhoeus episode (883 – 885). Looking afresh at the passage through the wider lens of the cosmogonic program of the Theogony allows us to grasp its function within the overall economy of the poem. Typhoeus, offspring of Gaia and Tartarus, takes us back to the very origins of cosmogony. The Typhonomachy brings us to a critical temporal crossroad where a recrudescence of the primeval irrupts into and threatens the evolved universe. If at issue in the Titanomachy was the kingship in Heaven, at stake in the Typhonomachy is the very existence of the cosmos itself.
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Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Introduction
- Magic and Ritual
- Magic and Ritual
- Überlegungen zu einigen griechischen Wetterritualen
- And You Will Be Amazed: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Greek Magical Papyri
- Lawsuits with Headless Foes: A Greek Incantation Motif
- A Syntactic Approach to the Orphic Gold Leaves
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Accumulation, authority, and the cultural lives of objects: materiality and ancient religion
- Familiarity and Phenomenology in Greece: Accumulated Votives as Group-made Monuments
- The Cultural Biography of a Pilgrimage Token: From Hagiographical to Archaeological Evidence
- More than text: Approaching ritual papyri from Oxyrhynchus as inscribed objects
- Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion
- Divine Names
- Divine Names
- “Noms de dieux!” Gods at the borders
- Nommer les dieux hittites : au sujet de quelques épithètes divines
- Le culte de Zeus Brontôn : l’espace et la morphologie du dieu de l’orage dans la Phrygie d’époque romaine
- Séquences onomastiques divines à Ostie-Portus
- Myths of Origin
- Myths of Origin
- Ex arches: Looking Back at Greek Myths of Origin
- Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821 – 880)
- Herakles and the Order of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony
- The Politics of Beginnings: Hesiod and the Assyrian Ideological Appropriation of Enuma Eliš
- Our Co(s)mic Origins: Theogonies in Greek Comedy
- At the Origins of Dionysus and Wine: Myths, Miracles, and Festivals
- Creation in the Poimandres and in Other Creation Stories
- The God Aion in a Mosaic from Nea Paphos (Cyprus) and Graeco-Phoenician Cosmogonies in the Roman East
- Ἀρχή and δῖνος: Vortices as Cosmogonic Powers and Cosmic Regulators. Study Case: The Whirling Lightning Bolt of Zeus
