Theogony (the term)
An account of the birth and genealogy of the gods (Greek theos, god; gonos, birth). The type is Hesiod's poem of that name, which asks the Muses "how at the first gods and earth came to be"; the Voluspo's history of the world and the Heliopolitan creation story of the Egyptian texts are theogonies in the same sense, and Herodotus turns the Egyptian one into a chronology of divine dynasties.
Why this wins its question: Defines the term by the poem that named it and shows the three other theogonies this corpus cites, each with its opening passage.
Key takeaways
- The word is Hesiod's title and his program (Theog. 108–115): who came first, who was born of whom, how they shared the honours.
- Every tradition here has one — Voluspo 3–18, the Heliopolitan sequence (Budge Lit. ch. VI), Herodotus's dynasties (Hdt. 2.144–145) — and none of them agrees on where to start.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Hesiod's poem defines the genre by its own program: "Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea … and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus … and tell me which of them first came to be" (Theog. 108–115).
The Voluspo is a theogony in verse: the seeress begins before earth or heaven, "when Ymir lived" (Voluspo 3), tells how "Bur's sons" made Midgard (Voluspo 4), how the gods named the times and built at Ithavoll (Voluspo 6–7), and how three gods made the first humans from Ask and Embla (Voluspo 17–18); Vafthruthnismol gives the same matter as questions and answers (Vafthruthnismol 20–35).
The Egyptian theogony is the Heliopolitan sequence Budge prints from the "Book of overthrowing Aapep": the self-created god produces Shu and Tefnut, "the one god became three", they produce "Keb, the Earth-god, and Nut, the Sky-goddess", and "the gods and goddesses next created were five, namely, Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and Nephthys" (Budge Lit. ch. VI) — with rival creators at Memphis, Hermopolis and Thebes.
Herodotus retells the Egyptian theogony as dynasties: "the eight gods who are said to be the earliest of all", then "the second dynasty (that of the so-called twelve gods)", then "the third, which came after the twelve", with Horus "the last divine king of Egypt" before the human kings (Hdt. 2.144.2, 2.145.1).
Apollodorus gives a theogony in prose, beginning "Sky was the first who ruled over the whole world" and running through the Titans, the Cyclopes, the birth of Zeus and the war (Apollod. 1.1.1–1.2.1), which is why he and Hesiod are the two witnesses cited side by side for every Greek genealogy in this corpus.