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Typhon was the last and greatest enemy of Zeus: a monstrous, serpent-like giant who challenged the Olympians and ended up buried under a volcano. The Greeks also gave his name to the Egyptian Set, and that double identity runs through the pages on this site. These are the pages where I wrote about him.
The battle with Zeus
On Mount Etna I tell the best-known version: after a fierce battle Zeus defeated Typhon and imprisoned him beneath the mountain, and the volcano’s eruptions were explained as Typhon thrashing to break free. Mountains lists Etna as the forge of Hephaestus and the prison of Typhon.
The fight had other settings too. In The Extraordinary Truth Behind Greek Mythology, the BBC programme follows the version in which Typhon met Zeus at Mount Casius, cut out his sinews and hid them in the Corycian Cave, echoing a Hittite myth of a snake monster who defeated the storm god. The Temple of Zeus Hidden for Centuries in Egypt links the same Mount Kasios to the battle, and notes that the Canaanites worshipped Baal there long before the Greeks. On Baal I compare Zeus against Typhon with Baal against Yam or Mot.
The Red World records a Thracian tradition, passed on by Apollodorus, that Mount Haemus was named after the stream of blood that gushed out on the mountain when Zeus struck Typhon with a thunderbolt.
Typhon among the Phoenician gods
Philo of Byblos places Typhon in the generations of the gods. On The Phoenician history I quote him:
Three more children were born to Kronos in (or ‘by’) Peraea, Kronos, named after his father, Zeus Belos, and Apollo. In their time there also lived Pontos, Typhon, and Nereus, father of Pontos and son of Belos.
Philo of Byblos, The Phoenician History
Set, the Egyptian Typhon
The Greeks identified Typhon with Set, the brother and enemy of Osiris. The semi-mythical aspect of Manetho’s king list lists Set (Typhon) as a ruler of 350 years, a god of chaos and conflict, before Horus. On The first man Hephestus, Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Pre-Adamite Man gives Bunsen’s Egyptian sequence of gods, with Typhon coming after Osiris as his brother. Seth notes that the name Seth was later linked to an Egyptian deity who started as a giver of light and became associated with the adversary Typhon.
The bone of Typhon
Ignatius Donnelly found Typhon in the history of the magnet. On The antiquity of some of our great inventions he writes:
The ancient Egyptians called the loadstone the bone of Haroeri, and iron the bone of Typhon. Haroeri was the son of Osiris and grandson of Rhea, a goddess of the earth, a queen of Atlantis, and mother of Poseidon; Typhon was a wind-god and an evil genius, but also a son of Rhea, the earth goddess.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
Related pages
- Mount Etna
- Mountains
- Baal
- The Phoenician history
- The semi-mythical aspect of Manetho’s king list
- The first man Hephestus
- The antiquity of some of our great inventions
- The Red World
- The Extraordinary Truth Behind Greek Mythology
For every page I tagged with Typhon, see the Typhon tag archive.
