"Kronos was very worried
about having children
because he was concerned that
his son would be greater than him
and would supplant him.
The Father fears being
replaced by The Son,
that's human psychology,
I mean, go to Freud and
actually Freud found it
in classical mythology.
So this fear of losing Your Power to
the next generation was real.
If you had A Kid and you had something
worth taking, at some point you needed
to keep an eye on The Kid.
So his solution to this problem
was to swallow alive
all of his offspring.
As soon as his wife gave birth
he would actually ingest them.
Now, of course, since they're immortal,
the children that Kronos swallows
are not dead, they're just locked
away inside of his belly.
He's trying to control them and keep
them from developing a power base
so they might be able to overthrow him."
And seizes more Power than
any god ever had.
This is The Story of Zeus,
Greek mythology's
Supreme Commander.
To us, it's A Myth
but to The Ancients
it was Reality.
A way to make sense
of a terrifying world.
Some Greeks believed Zeus
was the one true god
centuries before Christ.
And that nature's worst catastrophes
were a sign of his wrath.
This is the myth of Zeus
as it was originally told,
and the surprising truth behind it.
If you control The Sky
You control The World.
In Greek mythology that Power
belongs to one god :
Zeus.
He reigns as the enforcer of justice,
the master of Men and Gods.
Zeus was the king of the gods
but he was also responsible
for dispensing justice both
to The Gods and to Mortals
on the Earth.
This is something really cool
about Greek mythology.
Because one of the things that
you were supposed to do as a Greek
when you worshipped the gods
was simply to do what was required
to keep the gods from squashing you.
As commander of the skies
Zeus has the power of
nature at his disposal.
That gives him the most
devastating weapon of all.
The most powerful symbol of Zeus
is the lightning bolt.
This is what Zeus carries,
it's his main accoutrement,
and it's a thing that makes him
the most powerful of all the divinities.
Attributing lightning to Zeus
was a way for the Greeks
to explain the unexplainable.
In a time before science,
mythology put faces on the forces
that shaped the world.
The Greeks used mythology to try
and figure out why the world
operates the way that it does.
They didn't have scientific explanations
yet for how the world came into existence
or why lightning strikes
here but not there,
or why it strikes then
and not some other time.
The natural world was
very frightening to them,
so they associated it with the divine.
These were symptoms of the gods' power
that they could use to punish people
who hadn't worshipped them properly
Zeus' command over nature would
make him Greece's most feared god.
But how did he get there?
What we know of Zeus
begins with the writings
of the ancient Greek author Hesiod,
around 700 BC.
His book, called Theogony,
was the ancient Greek story of Creation.
What the book of Genesis
is to our own world.
Theogony is Hesiod's attempt
to make sense of the world,
to bring order to it,
by telling the story of a dynastic
family rivalry that winds up
in a well-ordered Cosmos that is
the world that you and I know today.
In the myth, Zeus doesn't
start out as the king of the gods.
He rises from obscurity to challenge
his father for control of the universe.
And that won't be easy.
His father is Kronos.
He is king of the Titans,
the most powerful gods in the universe.
The Titans are an older
order of Greek god.
They're pretty rough around the edges,
they're not too bright,
they're also not very well civilized.
As leader of the Titans,
Kronos is expected to produce offspring,
so he mates with his
own flesh and blood,
his sister and fellow Titan, Rhea.
*** shows up quite
a bit in mythology.
Among the gods there's nobody else
at the beginning to have sex with
so they end up marrying one another.
There's an old time
aristocratic idea that says that
no one else is good enough for
our family except only our family.
And the Greek gods definitely seem
to ascribe to this kind of principle.
These two Titan siblings,
Kronos and Rhea,
produced the next
generation of Greek gods.
Mythology's household names,
the Olympians.
Among them are Hades,
Poseidon, and Zeus.
But they will not simply
inherit the Earth,
they must fight for it.
Kronos was very worried
about having children
because he was concerned that
his son would be greater than him
and would supplant him.
The father fears being
replaced by the son,
that's human psychology,
I mean, go to Freud and
actually Freud found it
in classical mythology.
So this fear of losing your
power to the next generation
was real.
If you had a kid and
you had something worth taking
at some point you needed
to keep an eye on the kid.
So his solution to this problem
was to swallow alive
all of his offspring.
As soon as his wife gave birth
he would actually ingest them.
Now, of course, since they're immortal,
the children that Kronos swallows
are not dead, they're just locked
away inside of his belly.
He's trying to control them and keep
them from developing a power base
so they might be able to overthrow him.
To the Greeks who told the myth,
this was an appalling act.
Cannibalism was as
deplorable then as now.
We see the Greek authors giving
voice to their fears through mythology.
Cannibalism, sacrifice,
were horrible taboos,
but when you project
these things on to the gods
it gives you a safe place to explore
the consequences of what might happen.
Rhea is horrified.
All five of her children
have been swallowed alive.
Now she is pregnant again.
But this time she has a plan.
She sneaks away and gives birth
in secret to a son,
the future king of the gods,
Zeus.
But Kronos is expecting
another child to swallow,
so Rhea wraps a rock in a baby
blanket and presents it to him.
Without thinking twice he grabs
the bundle and gulps it down.
So the plan of Rhea is put into place.
Kronos has swallowed down
the stone instead of Zeus.
Zeus then as an infant
is spirited away
and is put in what
the ancient mythtellers
tell us is the folds of the Earth.
Zeus has been saved
by his mother's cleverness.
It's a memorable story,
but could that secret cave at
the heart of the myth really exist?
It seemed the ancients thought so.
They believed Zeus had been
born in the island of Crete
in this mountain cave.
The cave on the island of Crete
is perhaps the most important sanctuary
for the veneration of Zeus.
It was considered as one of the possible
places where the baby Zeus
was kept hidden from his own father.
Excavations at the cave have revealed
that it was a major pilgrimage site
for visitors from across
the ancient world.
It was a place that people
would go to worship Zeus.
How do we know? We've excavated
thousands of dedications to Zeus,
and ritual objects to Zeus
from all over the Mediterranean.
One find in particular ties
directly into the myth of Zeus.
Amongst the material remains
were these cool shields
that probably were along the walls
and were put up there
to indicate the clanging of shields
that the people defending Zeus
used to muffle his crying
when he was a baby,
so that Kronos could not hear it.
A chosen son, hidden to save his life.
For Christians and Jews, the story
of Zeus' birth is very familiar.
Many religious and mythological
traditions have stories
of sacred or divine children
who are hidden away
in order to protect them so that
they can grow to adulthood
and fulfill their destinies.
We think, perhaps, of Jesus
who is hidden away in the manger
so that Herod will not
be able to get to him.
Or of Moses who is
hidden away in Egypt.
In the myth, Zeus quietly
comes of age inside the cave.
He has a kind of training period
there out of the eyes of Kronos,
and is able to acquire his strength
and develop into a man.
Zeus spends his childhood preparing
to fulfill his self-appointed destiny:
To challenge his father
and the Titans
for control of the Universe.
Zeus has escaped the fate
of his siblings,
who were all swallowed
alive by their father,
the Titan Kronos.
Inside a remote cave hideaway
he has matured into a fully formed god.
Now he is ready to begin
the epic power struggle
he was born to wage
to avenge his father's savagery.
To liberate his five Olympian siblings
from his father's belly,
and to seize control of the world
from the Titans who now rule it.
The stakes for him
are tremendously high.
If he succeeds he'll be
master of the universe,
but if he fails, he may well be the one
who winds up down in Tartarus.
Tartarus, the lowest level of Hades,
and the ancient Greek
equivalent of Hell.
Tartarus was the part of Hades
where the damned went,
the people who were bad
or committed offences against the gods
on Earth would be sent to Tartarus.
If Zeus fails in his attempt to seize
power from Kronos and the Titans,
he'll be damned to this place
for all eternity.
But if he wins,
he'll command gods and men from
his throne atop Mount Olympus.
In Greek myth, Mount Olympus
is the towering home of the gods,
but it's also a real location.
It's the highest peak in Greece,
rising nearly 10,000 feet
above sea level.
And it's a natural setting
for supernatural powers.
The Greeks really believed
that their gods actually lived
physically on Mount Olympus.
It was important for them to actually
have a sense of where heaven was,
where the gods actually resided.
It is from his home base
on Mount Olympus
that Zeus engineers his rebellion
against Kronos and the Titans.
Zeus is gonna have to get others
to come in and help him out
so that he can achieve supreme power.
This is the ultimate family feud.
And so it is to his own flesh and blood
that Zeus turns first.
He knows his strongest allies
will be his five siblings, the Olympians,
now fully-formed adults.
But still trapped deep inside
Kronos' stomach.
If they can be liberated,
the Olympians could tip
the scales in Zeus' favor,
and help him destroy the Titans forever.
He wanted to free his
brothers and sisters
so he concocted a potion.
Quietly, Zeus enters Kronos' lair
and slips the drug into
his nightly cup of mead.
Kronos drinks it and
becomes violently ill.
First he vomits up the stone his wife
had given him in place of baby Zeus.
According to tradition,
that rock is the cornerstone
of ancient Greece's most sacred site,
the Temple of Delphi,
home of the Oracle.
Delphi is a sanctuary in Greece
where people would come from all around
to consult with god;
it was a direct phone line up to heaven,
to ask the answer to
anything you wanted.
To this day, thousands of years
after the story was first told,
the stone that Kronos supposedly
vomited is still there.
At the very centre of the Temple
complex at Delphi is an egg-shaped stone
that was understood to be
the exact stone
that played the role of
being the substitute for Zeus
that Kronos swallowed.
And if you go there today,
to the Temple of Delphi,
the locals will still tell you
that the stone that's there
is the actual one that was
in Kronos' belly.
In the myth, after throwing up
the sacred stone,
Kronos regurgitates Zeus'
five siblings.
And they are ready
to join Zeus' revolution.
What marks Zeus as a
different kind of leader
from those that have come before,
is his intelligence.
He's able to persuade and
convince those around him
that he should be leader,
and he's able to build coalitions.
Zeus now has his siblings by his side,
but he still needs more muscle
to take on the Titans.
And there are some other estranged
members of the family
who are out for revenge.
Forgotten brothers of Kronos.
The Cyclops,
and the Hundred-Handers.
But to find them
Zeus has to go to Hell.
Kronos had feared the powers
of these Hundred-handers and the Cyclops
so he'd locked them
down into Tartarus.
Zeus knew that if he could get
their power on his side
he could marshal it to
his own ends.
He goes down and talks
to the Hundred-handers and says,
"I will pay you great respect.
"And I know that my father Kronos
has mistreated you.
"Now I've freed you
and now you owe me.
"
And even they are moved and say,
"Yes, great Zeus, we realize not only
are you very powerful,
"but you also know how
to treat people well.
"So we appreciate that and we will
now fight on your side.
"
In gratitude for being liberated
the Cyclops present Zeus with a gift,
the power of lightning.
Lightning is one of the most
devastatingly powerful forces in nature.
When lightning arcs through the air,
the air is briefly
raised to a temperature
that can be more than 50,000 degrees,
that's five times the surface
temperature of the Sun.
The lightning bolt gives Zeus
the power to rule the universe.
With this lightning bolt, no one is
going to be able to overthrow him.
The battle lines are drawn.
The Titans will fight from Mount Othrys,
the Olympians from Mount Olympus.
Between them lies the
Plain of Thessaly.
But this isn't just a
mythical battlefield.
Thessaly is actually, if we take into
consideration the modern map of Greece,
is the central part of Greece.
It's the biggest plain and the
most fertile plain in Greece
from ancient times to today.
Thessaly has a long, bloody history,
stretching from the Greco-Persian
wars of the 5th Century BC,
to the World Wars
of the 20th Century AD.
And it is here that the ultimate battle
of the gods will play out.
Armed with a weapon of mass destruction
and an elite fighting force
Zeus braces for
an Earth-shattering battle.
And to this day, a real place
may still bear the scars.
Mythology's defining moment
is now at hand.
The battle between father and son
is about to begin.
It's the old guard of Kronos
and his Titans
versus the new blood
of Zeus and the Olympians.
The outcome will determine
who controls everything.
From the top of Mount Olympus
Zeus sends a fury of lightning
down upon his father's army.
The fighting shakes
the Earth to its core.
The only way we can
conceive of this battle
is simply worlds colliding.
All the forces in the universe
smashing together at once.
You've got the Hundred-handers
over on one side
that are ripping off
huge hunks of mountain
and throwing mountains
at the other side.
From the Titans you've got a lot
of just brute force and brute strength.
They're able to take a punch
and keep coming back over and over.
It's an apocalyptic scene,
and not entirely a myth.
Experts have recently determined
that a real event, just as frightening,
actually happened in
the ancient world.
About 3,600 years ago,
the Greek island of
Santorini experienced
one of the most devastating
volcanic explosions ever.
Its effects were felt as
far away as California.
The volcanic blast was the single
largest seismic event on Earth
in the last 27,000 years.
To give you an idea of how massive
it was, imagine a mountain
about 3.
5 miles tall being blown
into the sky all at once.
In 2006, scientists discovered
that the Santorini eruption
was even larger than originally believed.
Excavations uncovered deposits
of volcanic ash piled 20 storeys deep,
blanketing a 30-mile
radius around the island.
Based on this evidence, it's now
believed the eruption unleashed
the equivalent power of
An explosion that powerful would have
annihilated much of the Greek world.
For the survivors, who knew little
about how volcanoes work,
it could only have been
the wrath of the gods.
When the ancient myth-tellers
told the story of great cataclysmic
battles that shook the Earth,
they weren't doing so in a vacuum.
There had been massive seismic events
that had happened in the memory of some
of the earlier generations of Greeks
before these myth-tellers had
written down their stories.
As the clash of the gods
plays out in the myth
it appears Zeus is finally about
to seize control of the universe.
His powerful allies
have tipped the balance
and the Olympians
are closing in on victory.
But the Titans have one last
weapon at their disposal
From the depths of Tartarus
they call forth a colossal beast,
Typhon.
Typhon is a tremendously strong,
powerful monster
that's challenging Zeus himself.
It's a last gasp effort,
and the final monster, the final
challenge he has to put down
in order to secure his reign
over the universe.
It is a supernatural death match.
A decisive struggle
between good and evil.
And it will all come down
to the ultimate weapon.
As Zeus and Typhon are engaged
in this final epic battle,
Zeus eventually gets the upper hand
and wins via his lightning bolt.
With one final assault,
Zeus drives Typhon and his
Titan allies down into Tartarus,
where they are damned to spend
eternity in a fiery abyss.
According to the ancients,
it was across the Mediterranean,
in the island of Sicily that Zeus'
enemies descended into Hell
through the volcanic crater
of Mount Etna.
Local legend says
Typhon is still inside
and has been behind all of the
volcanos eruptions over the centuries.
Greeks used this myth
as a way of explaining why lava was
constantly pouring out of the volcano.
They explained that as either
the remnants of Zeus' lightning
constantly shooting out,
or of the flames of Typhon
who's still breathing just a little bit
exploding flame out of
the centre of the volcano.
It is also said that Typhon
causes destructive windstorms.
In fact, his name is the basis
for the word "typhoon".
But in the myth, the storm clouds
are broken for the time being.
Zeus' victory over his father
makes him the king of the gods,
the absolute ruler of the Universe.
So goes the myth.
But what is the link to reality?
In 2003, at the base of Mount Olympus,
a lost temple was discovered.
It was the centerpiece of an ancient
city known as Dion,
and it was dedicated to Zeus.
Dion was a city that was built
at the base of Mount Olympus
and so it's very close to the home
of the Olympian gods and goddesses
and where Zeus lived
in Greek mythology.
In fact, the name of the town,
Dion, means Zeus.
The Dion temple dates back
to the 5th Century BC.
The golden age of Greek mythology.
Scattered around the site
on marble blocks
with unmistakable engravings -
eagles.
In ancient Greece eagles were
the divine symbol of Zeus.
But there's more.
This headless statue was found
in a nearby riverbed.
Carved into its 2,400
year-old base are three words:
"Zeus the highest".
There's a debate among experts
about what this reference
to "the highest" means.
Some believe the statue
could be a missing link
between Greece's worship of many gods
and the single-god philosophy
of Christians and Jews.
And that this find is proof
that the Greeks were embracing
the idea of one god on their own,
before the arrival of Christianity.
The Greeks sometimes identified
that highest god with Zeus,
after all the word Zeus in its
dative form "theos"
is where we get our word "deus",
so there is an etymological reason
to understand Zeus as the highest deity.
Starting in about the 3rd,
we have different philosophical
and theological schools that arise,
and that start to propose a very
strong view that there is only one god
and that all the ancient
stories and tales
are actually just metaphors
that reflect different aspects
of what this divinity is all about.
For the people who worshipped at Dion,
it's clear that Zeus was different
from all the other Greek gods.
In fact, he may well have been
the only one that mattered.
In the myth, Zeus has achieved
the absolute power he has long sought.
But that power will soon be threatened
by an unexpected foe.
The king of the gods
is about to be betrayed
by the person closest to him.
Zeus has won his epic
clash with the Titans.
He now sits atop Mount Olympus
as king of the gods
and master of mankind.
The ancient Greeks worshipped
Zeus above all others,
even though he was fatally flawed.
The ancient Greek gods
are very relatable.
They have faults, they have strengths,
they have weaknesses,
they have all the things
that normal human beings would.
In fact, when the Greeks, in these
early times, think about their gods,
one way of trying to understand it
is that they see their gods
as being a lot like you and I,
just really, really big.
According to the myth,
Zeus has one very human weakness
that threatens to be his undoing.
An uncontrollable sex drive.
Zeus likes the ladies.
That's one of the most endearing
and enraging things about him.
It's that he has this very,
very human character
that he never saw a girl
that he didn't like.
Zeus will stop at nothing
to seduce his conquests.
He even uses disguise.
Zeus visits mortal women
in various guises.
Whatever it takes to
consummate the relationship.
So in different tales, we hear of
Zeus turning into an eagle,
turning into a swan,
turning into a bull,
turning into all these different shapes,
turning into human beings to mimic
a woman's husband's face,
to trick the women as best he can
into having a union with him.
A beautiful young goddess named Metis
is the first to capture Zeus' attention.
He takes her as his wife.
Metis is a very attractive
and appealing young woman
and the quality that
really sets her apart
is that she has practical wisdom.
In fact her name in Greek
means "practical wisdom".
When Zeus spies her he
finds her very appealing.
But Zeus' affection for Metis is
overshadowed by a dark prophecy
that threatens his grip on power.
He is told that she will bear him a child
who will one day seize his throne.
Suddenly Zeus, like his father,
must fear his offspring.
Zeus is representative
of this awful tradition
that starts literally
from the dawn of time
of sons destroying their fathers
in order to take prominence.
But Zeus vows that this time
will be different,
and he takes a drastic step
to make sure of it.
He swallows his wife
alive.
Once again, family love
falls prey to power.
It's history repeated.
But this horrifying act will
make Zeus stronger and wiser.
By swallowing her, Zeus internalizes
Metis' cunning and prudence all at once.
She becomes a part of Zeus.
In a sense she's probably
imprisoned in his stomach
but he also takes on these greater
qualities of intellectual ability.
This to us seems a little strange
but it's important to remember
that for the Greeks, one of the places
that some Greeks thought that
they carried their wisdom
and their ideas
was actually in their stomach.
So when Zeus swallows Metis
he takes her into the part of himself
where really a lot of
his best thinking was done.
With Metis gone, Zeus
is in need of a new wife.
And like his father before him,
he finds one in his own family.
His sister, and fellow Olympian, Hera.
She's not like Zeus' earlier conquests.
She's mythology's
most powerful goddess.
The king of the gods has met his match.
Between Zeus and Hera
we actually see
a relationship which is between two
people who are on some level equals.
So, in some of the conflicts
between Zeus and Hera
I think we can see as the Greeks
culturally working out
what would it look like if you had
two people with equal power
within a relationship.
She's the queen of the goddesses
and she has wonderful beauty,
she's supremely intelligent,
she's mighty,
but she's also exceedingly jealous
because Zeus is always
running after other women.
The king of the gods
continues to step out
with an endless string
of *** partners.
He conceives well over 100 offspring
with a host of lovers,
both divine and mortal.
If I'm not mistaken, Zeus never
has an encounter with a woman
that does not produce a child.
So in that sense, it's extreme
virility, it's extreme power.
Zeus' ability to sleep with anybody
matches a kind of fantasy
of what ancient Greek males
would hope or desire their lives to be.
Men fantasized about such things
and they thought if there was
an all-powerful god out there
he would surely act
on those fantasies.
Zeus' promiscuity provided a perfect way
for Greeks to connect
themselves to him.
Every corner of the Greek world
boasted of having its own
hometown loved child.
As Zeus' fame and power grow
across ancient Greece,
more and more cities and towns
wanted to be associated with him.
And they therefore claimed that
there was some kind of actual liaison
between Zeus and some mortal
woman within their family tree
that then produces the offspring
that produces the local
ruling families.
Evidence of this connection
can still be found in cities
throughout the Greek world.
Athens, Thebes, Magnesia,
Macedonia,
all are named after children of Zeus.
But there is one individual
who isn't happy about
Zeus' abundant fertility.
In the myth, his wife Hera,
has had enough.
She vows to make the king
of the gods pay dearly
for his chronic philandering.
She doesn't like to be humiliated
in front of the other gods
so she will take it out
on her husband.
Hera gathers the other
Olympians together
and lays the groundwork
for a revolution.
Hera goes to her fellow Olympian
gods and says,
"Why is Zeus in charge?
"He is no more important or
powerful than the rest of us.
"If we all get together we can
kick him out.
"
So in fact they rise up
and they bind Zeus with chains.
Zeus awakes from a nap
to find himself tied down.
A prisoner in his own bed.
It is the ultimate betrayal.
A conspiracy carried out
by the siblings he once saved.
The gods' revolt was the greatest
threat that Zeus ever faced.
There was never any sense
that mortals could challenge his power.
But the combined power of
all of the Olympian gods
really could have defeated him.
This was indeed one of the most
horrifying moments in Zeus' career.
He was actually about
to lose everything.
But just when all seems lost
help comes in the form
of an old ally.
The Hundred-handers.
When they hear Zeus is in
trouble they come to his rescue
breaking his chains as the
Olympians run for cover.
Zeus survives de coup attempt.
Now is time to exact his revenge.
His wife Hera is sentenced to hang
from the sky by golden chains.
His son, Apollo, and brother Poseidon
are condemned to hard labor.
They are ordered to build one of the
ancient world's most iconic monuments,
the massive walls of Troy.
It's another example of myth
explaining the unexplainable.
To the ancient Greeks,
the walls of Troy seemed too strong
to have been built by man.
So Zeus's punishment
of Apollo and Poseidon
helped explain their existence.
Their ruins survive to this day.
In antiquity people thought
it had been built by the gods,
or some kind of divine intervention
on behalf of the Trojans.
In the myth, Zeus has dealt justice
to those who crossed him.
But it will be human beings who
bear the brunt of his wrath.
That wrath will arrive in
the form of a massive flood.
One that may even be linked
to the Biblical story of Noah.
Greece's most powerful god
has survived a coup attempt.
He dealt swift justice
to the conspirators,
but he's not through yet.
Now, mankind will experience
the full measure of his rage.
In ancient times, fear
of Zeus' punishment
kept a lot of Greeks
out of trouble.
When people did something wrong
they would have to be very careful
that Zeus did not smite them
with a thunderbolt.
They're many examples
in Greek history
of Zeus destroying entire cities
and civilizations because
he felt that they
had overreached themselves,
that they had blasphemed
against the gods,
that they had become too proud
to be allowed to live any longer.
The Greek author Hesiod wrote
that without the fear of Zeus' wrath
humans would live like beasts
and the weak would be in
the hands of the strong.
Zeus is the order bringer.
Zeus is the bringer of justice
and the bringer of civilization.
When natural catastrophes
occurred in the real world,
the Greeks believed that they were
sent by Zeus to punish evil men.
Often stories were invented to explain
what had made
the supreme god so angry.
According to the myth,
Zeus' most frightening moment of wrath
comes after he sees humans
engaging in cannibalism.
Cannibalism was as important as it
was in ancient Greek religion
because they considered it
to be so heinous.
In fact, identification
of eating human flesh
is something that you would
attribute to wolves or dogs
but hardly to human beings.
Zeus is no stranger to cannibalism.
His own father Kronos once
swallowed all of Zeus' siblings.
When he is confronted with the sight
of mortals doing the same thing
he becomes enraged and vows
to destroy the human race
with a catastrophic flood.
Nine days and nights pass.
The rain is relentless.
And the Earth slowly drowns.
The waters reach the peak
of Mount Parnassus,
which stands over 8000 feet high.
In all corners of the Earth,
the human race perishes.
When the rain stops
only two mortals are still alive.
Incredibly they have survived
the storm by building an ark.
A raging flood, an ark,
and only two surviving humans.
The parallels with the
Old Testament are striking.
It could be the Biblical flood of Noah,
it could be Zeus' deluge,
it could be similar sorts
of giant watery disasters
that we see figuring in a wide number
of different cultures around the world.
All these stories go back to a
natural catastrophe that affected
the collective memory of peoples
living in the Eastern parts
of the Mediterranean Sea.
A deluge like the one
described in these myths
would have devastated humanity.
But could such a flood
have really happened?
In the past decade,
scientists have uncovered some
stunning clues that prove it did.
Research has shown that as the
Ice Age ended about 7,000 years ago
runoff from melting glaciers
surged into the Black Sea basin,
vitally submerging nearly
For these people, their
entire world was flooding.
And it surely must have seemed
like they must have angered the gods
to have brought down this kind
of disaster upon themselves.
Could this be the real life disaster
that spawned the story of Zeus' flood?
In the myth, Zeus has held on to
power in the face of strong opposition.
But there's one more challenger
he didn't count on,
Jesus Christ.
In the 1st Century AD, his message
would take the world by storm
and dethrone Greece's
dominant god.
When Christianity came and
promised salvation in the afterlife
it gave people something to believe in,
something that could happen to them
after their death,
Christianity found many followers.
Zeus' stranglehold
on humankind faltered
as this new religion spread across
the Mediterranean world.
Ultimately, the same civilization
that worshipped him
would reject him.
In antiquity there was no more
powerful force than Zeus
except from one, Fate.
Not even Zeus himself
could overturn it,
much as he wants to on occasions
try to change fate or re-direct it,
he himself is even subject
to its dictates.
Before the rise of Christianity,
Zeus' myth captivated the Greek
world for thousands of years
and made him the most feared
and respected of all the gods.
But he was only one of many,
from Greece and beyond,
who would live their mark on Mankind.
Some are still familiar names -
Hercules,
Hades,
Medusa.
And each of their stories
is a window into a long lost world.
A code waiting to be deciphered.
These myths reveal to us
in a uniquely powerful way
the hidden strata that lay
underneath our conscious, awake lives,
our understanding of the world.
Like an archaeology of the human mind
we can dig into them and see
the deep recesses of human psyches.
And I think that's what makes
these myths so powerful.
