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Tartarus is the deepest place in Greek myth, the pit below the underworld where defeated gods were locked away. On this site it keeps coming up whenever one generation of gods overthrows the one before it: Uranus uses it against his children, Zeus uses it against the Titans, and later writers place it on an island in the west. These are the passages I found, side by side.
Among the first things
Hesiod puts Tartarus at the very beginning. What Are Creation Stories? quotes the Theogony in Evelyn-White’s translation:
Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth
Hesiod, Theogony, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White
A genealogy of the gods describes it as the deep abyss that serves as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked.
The prison of Uranus
The first to use it as a prison is Uranus. On Uranus – The primordial Age, he fears the power of his own offspring and casts the Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires into the deepest abyss of Tartarus, far beneath the earth. Uranus tells the same story, and A genealogy of the gods adds that this angered Gaia, which set the next revolt in motion. For the one-eyed smiths themselves, see Cyclopes.
The Titans locked away
The next turn is the war between the Olympians and the Titans. Mount Othrys says the battle lasted ten years and ended with the Titans imprisoned in Tartarus, a deep abyss in the underworld. The Olympian Gods adds that the Hecatoncheires, once prisoners there themselves, became its guards. According to Philo, Kronos was a Phoenician deity has Cronos defeated and imprisoned there, and Ancient Wars sees the victory as the moment Zeus redistributed the cosmic domains. On The antiquity of some of our great inventions, Donnelly reads the War of the Titans as a rebellion in Atlantis, fought with thunderbolts so violent that the earth trembled down to lowest Tartarus.
The Romans kept the story. Ovid opens his second age with it, quoted on Ovid’s Four Ages in Brookes More’s translation:
When Saturn had been banished into night and all the world was ruled by Jove supreme, the Silver Age, though not so good as gold but still surpassing yellow brass, prevailed.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.113-116, Brookes More, Boston, Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922
Not every Titan story ends in the abyss. Pleione is one of the 3,000 daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys, the Oceanids tied to water and nature. In the video The Titans, Paul Wallis notes that Josephus treated the clash of the Titans as history and set the Titans beside the Nephilim, as non-terrestrial beings mingling with humans.
An island in the west
Donnelly gives Tartarus a place on the map. On The Kings of Atlantis become the Gods of the Greeks he writes:
Tartarus, the region of Hades, the gloomy home of the dead, was also located "under the mountains of an island in the midst of the ocean in the remote west."
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
For him that island is Atlantis, and the gods who were sent below were its kings.
Other prisoners
Not only gods end up there. The forbidden fruit tells of Tantalus, a mortal who stole ambrosia and nectar to share with humans and was condemned to eternal hunger and thirst in Tartarus. On Archangel Uriel, some texts give the archangel the role of overseeing Tartarus.
The videos widen the circle. The Real Anunnaki mentions a tradition of 600 Anunnaki imprisoned in the netherworld by Marduk, and suggests they may be linked to the Titans in Tartarus or the fallen watchers of Enoch. The Exiles of Capella links the rebels cast into Tartarus with exiles from the star Capella, and Hell and the Hexagram compares the primal forces of nature to the Titans Zeus imprisoned there, a picture of chaos and disorder. For the wider underworld, see Hell.
Related pages
- Hell
- A genealogy of the gods
- Uranus – The primordial Age
- Mount Othrys
- The Olympian Gods
- Cyclopes
- Ovid’s Four Ages
- The Kings of Atlantis become the Gods of the Greeks
For every page I tagged with Tartarus, see the Tartarus tag archive.
