Let’s talk about the Titans...
Like many of you, I am fascinated by the Titans as the “previous generation of gods”, as the “gods before the gods”, as the “lost pantheon”. And like many of you I read Riordan and his take on the Titans and loved it.
But there is a problem I see arising everywhere. The repetition of something oddly specific - something present and popularized by Riordan himself. The idea that for example “Coeos was the Titan of hindsight”, “Crios was the Titan of the stars”, “Japet was the Titan of mortality”. It is repeated everywhere as if it was fact. But it is wrong.
Let’s consider it in two steps, shall we?
1) Yes, Titans are the gods of something. Well... some of them are
A first confusion arose from the fact that several of the deities we know as “titans” are explicit deities of given concept. Themis and Mnemosyne were the embodiment of justice and memory, Rhea and Tethys were important and well-defined figures, Prometheus was a hero of legends and Helios was the sun... This led to the idea that ALL of the Titans had to be the “god of something”. After all, if half of the Titans were attested deities of given concepts, the other had to, right? Because all the Greek gods embodied or reflected something, so they HAD to, right?
Well... no. One has to consider that the Titans are mythologically distinct in two groups: those that “survived the war” so to speak, and thus became part of the Greek mythological tales ; and those that “lost the war” and completely left the story (such as Kronos’ brothers - except Okeanos). But this distinction isn’t just mythological: it is also a religious and cultural difference. All the Titans that “survived the war” in texts are actually deities whose cult and worship was well-installed and attested in Ancient Greece, or whose folkloric presence was undeniable, while those that “lost the war” were not present in any form in Greece’s religion and culture, often limited to one obscure literary mention.
Of course, from the fictional point of view of “They were locked in Tartarus so of course they wouldn’t be known or venerated” it makes sense... But we are talking here from a real-life point of view, an actual look at those entities. We have to take into account that the “surviving Titans” were actually considered equal to and regularly mixed with the other “Olympian” gods, to the point that a lot of texts and legends don’t actually specify they are Titans or doesn’t identify them as such. Which led to so many retellings of Greek mythology where these deities are not Titans but Olympians or “other Greek gods”. Which are NOT wrong interpretations of mythology - it just depends on which side you stand on. Titan wasn’t a clear-cut religious category, but rather a literary and poetic construct (but more on that later), and all in all they were all gods - so after the war, that “destroyed” the Titans, the gods became just gods.
But from a logical, outside-story, real-life point of view... it is very probable that these “Titan gods” did not start as Titan at all. It is possible that they simply started as gods. They were gods, deities, part of the same pantheon as the Olympians, and only later through epic and poetic texts did the “Titans” appear, invented by authors for their cosmogny - a new pantheon that mixed together the well-known deities (well-known because they “survived” the war) and literary inventions (to fill the gap and explain who was defeated - they couldn’t have picked gods part of Greece’s religion).
This explanation of the inclusion of “actual” deities alongside literary inventions seems to be the most reasonable one, and is especially revealing when you compare the discrepancy between these enormous and important figures, such as Themis, and these unknown figures with no background or backstory, such as Theia or Crius. Now I am not saying that the authors didn’t try to have these “invented Titans” mean something - after all you can’t just drop a random name between “Justice” and “Memory”, or have some random name birth “Sun, Moon and Dawn”. There was probably allegories and symbols in those invented figures, they probably were meant to embody or personify something... But people shouldn’t treat them as if they were actual gods of Ancient Greece - at least until we find archeological proof that there were cults of them.
That being said...
2) Where does this Titan-system comes from?
There is a “Titan system” that keeps being repeated around the Internet. A reading of mythology that claims things such as how Theia is the goddess of “brightness and sight”, how Coeos is the “lord of insight, curiosity and intellect”, how Japet embodies “mortality”. A part of it appeared in Age of Mythology ; it was heavily used by Riordan in his books ; it is in fact described by the website Theoi - which is a huge and very useful resource when it comes to Ancient Greek texts, Greek gods analysis and mythology comparison.
But this “system” and these “interpretations” have to be taken with CAUTION! Because when you actually read the reasoning behind those interpretations, you realize that these are not “truths” about the Titans. These are theories, and hypothesis, a guessing game based on clues - but nothing certain, and sometimes the guesses even feel stretchy.
Given studying all of the Titans would take too much time, I will only take four cases: the “defeated brothers of Kronos”. Iapetos, Coios, Crios and Hyperion.
A) Hyperion. This one is actually the one we know the most about, and the interpretations of him are pretty correct. Hyperion’s name itself means “he who is above” and hints at a celestial position, reinforced by how Hyperion gave birth to the three main “light-givers” of the world: Helios the sun, Selene the moon and Eos the dawn. It makes sense to identify him as “Titan of light”. Even more; the name Hyperion was known to be use as an epithet or synonym of Helios himself, the sun-god, who was also known as the god watching humanity from above - to the point we can even claim that the literary Hyperion was probably invented by splitting Helios from his alternate name. (After all, Homer does call regularly Helios “Hyperion”, while Hesiod splits the two, and it is pretty much agreed that the Homeric pantheon reflects an “older” state of Greek mythology and the Hesiodic one a “newer”).
So clearly he is a sun or light figure ; and it is something that Diodorus Siculus, in his “Library of History”, understood very well: when he re-wrote the Titans as the “ human inventers of primitive civilization”, he gave to Hyperion the discovery of the movement of the celestial bodies and of the cycle of seasons, leading to him being called in legend the “father of the sun and the moon” when, according to Siculus, he was just a man who studied them very closely (the whole text was an attempt at proving that Greek myths were just real stories of men that got taken out of context - after all Siculus was an historian).
B) Coeos/Coios. We can’t guess much from his children, unlike Hyperion, as he fathered the strange duo of Leto and Asteria ; but from his name we can find what he possibly meant, as “Koios” comes from the Greek word for “query”, “questionning”. This is a clue that opens up to a LOT of various possibilities and interpretations - the most notably being a tie to the “prophetic” and “knowledgeable” grandchildren of Koios, Apollo son of Leto and Hecate daughter of Asteria (yeah people tend to forget Apollo and Artemis are Hecate’s cousins). A great open road of interpretations... But sometimes people will also use to defend their theories the “other name” of Koios, “Polus” or “Polos”, which is supposed to mean the celestial axis, the north pole or something like that... Completely ignoring the fact that this alternate name comes from ROMAN texts, not Greek ones. While interesting when considering the figure as a whole, it makes any attempt at recreating its “Greek self” wrong.
C) Crios. As with Coeos we can only trust the eventual clue left by the name, as we know Krios was the Greek word for “ram”. And once more the possibilities are VAST. As with most Titans we can only rely on his children to bring additional information, but the trio of Crios children is even more mysterious and disparate than Coios’: Pallas, Perses, Astreos. For some “the ram” has to be understood as a constellation, and they’ll read star-thematic and signification in Crios’ children. For others the “ram” rather indicates a form of animality and will highlight the animal nature of Crios children (associated with horses, dogs, goats...). But in truth? We know nothing. We cannot ignore that the children of a deity are always important for the meaning of the deity’s role, especially in Hesiod’s writings (Themis births the Fates because fate is just in a Greek’s mind) - but people tend to be too simple in their reading and forget how complex things can be (after all, Mnemosyne isn’t the mother of the Muses because she is a goddess of art - she births the Muses because art is nothing without memory).
D) And then comes the “worst offender” so to speak... Iapetos. Japet as we call him in France. Heralded by many as the “god of mortality” when truly there is NOTHING that tells us that. People that defend this theory use three elements. One, the fact his children were involved in the creation of humanity and mortal beings: but in truth only two of his children were involved in that, as the other two had no link whatsoever to humanity. Two, the meaning of his name: “iaptô”, “the piercer”. It is true that Iapetos name reveals a brutal, hostile nature as something that pierces, that empales, that stabs. But does it truly mean he is a being of death or mortality? It could just as well mean he is an entity of violence, war or brutality. And third, the idea that he is a “Titan of the west”.
And there I have to burst one of the most-beloved modern beliefs about the Titans... The whole thing of the “Titans embody the four cardinal points” is bullshit. Riordan took it back and reinvented it for his fiction, okay. And Theoi.com promotes it - but this is a very stretchy interpretation, probably born out of a comparative mythologist who was bothered the Greeks didn’t had the same “guardians of the four cardinal points” that other Indo-European mythologies had. NO ANTIQUE TEXT WHATSOEVER can even lead to guessing that the four Titans were embodiments of the cardinal points. THERE WAS NO FRIGGIN LINK BETWEEN THE FOUR TITAN BROTHERS AND THE CARDINAL POINTS in Ancient Greece. Heck the idea that they represent the cardinal points because they were four Titans who held the sky doesn’t even stand in front of Hesiod’s text, as the Theogony makes it clear the FIVE Titans brother held down their sky-father.
So the idea of the “cardinal Titans”, while truly lovely from a poetic point of view, and clever as a mythological reinterpretation, is not “accurate” or “true” to mythology.
And all of this shows that in truth, when dealing with “not-well-known Titans” one should always be VERY careful, because while some are attested deities that “became” Titans (Helios or Themis, who all seem pretty “Olympian” from a worship point of view and yet are Titans), others are just names invented to fill a fictional family tree and a poetic pantheon - significative names, open to interpretation, but not the names of actually recognized and known figure of Ancient Greeks. You ask an Ancient Greek what Iapetos was a god was and they’ll be confused because they don’t have a god named Iapetos, but if they read Hesiod’s text (and they probably did given how popular and widespread it was), they’ll answer “Oh he’s not a god! He’s this character from Hesiod’s poem!”. Remember that when it comes to Titans, either you have a solid and complex deity ; either you have just a name and nothing else.
