Interactive Greek Gods Family Tree

This "tree" presentation of the Greek pantheon is oriented toward presenting the lineage of any figure the user may choose as a starting point. It applies a family tree motif insofar as it can be applied to a mythology in which "birth" is a loosely defined concept. The "parentage" of each figure is noted, to enable the student to go backward or forward, and to situate the figure at hand within the traditional categories into which the pantheon has been sorted (e.g. sea gods, sky gods, earth gods, and so forth.). To accomplish this visually, a figure with two "parents" will appear twice on the tree. This enables the user to trace lineage through either parent, having at hand a cross-reference to the other parent's ancestry as well. Though perhaps less efficient than the typical family tree visualization, this methodology attempts to capture more authentically the rather frenetic stories of creation – a completely different experience than the systematically linear creation story in Genesis. More importantly, it also attempts to convey the functional way in which myths arise. Some aspect of the world is noticed, and a story appears. The telling of the story characterizes its behavior anthropomorphically and gives it context by including ancestors and children. "Beginning at the beginning" of the tree will enable the student to follow the succession that we know as the full pantheon. However, beginning at any point on the tree will give students a sense of the intuitive way in which "where it came from" and "what it led to" were described in story, the far more likely way in which the Greek cosmos became populated by the gods and their offspring.

It would be foolhardy to call any depiction of the Greek pantheon "authoritative." The information presented here is primarily a reflection of (but not in any way connected with) the work done by the Theoi Project (www.theoi.com), a self-defined work in progress. Decisions about how this tree is presented were often made by consulting the Encyclopedia Mythica as well as www.pantheon.org, to establish some level of consensus where various options for organizing the pantheon were possible. Nonetheless, any student of the sources knows that, short of making a commitment to a single source and sticking with it no matter what, any effort to represent the pantheon will deviate in its details from other attempts. Rather than pitting this representation against others and debating the discrepancies, the student (or teacher) is well advised to approach this tree with the intention of appreciating the complexity of the pantheon and the way in which the connections and relationships capture experience in ways that only stories can. Myths are what the literary critic Northrup Frye called "useful fictions" – not untruthful, but rather truthful in the sense that they feel real, whether or not they are factual. Using this tree as one tool among others in the study of Greek mythology should help the student understand this distinction.