Zeus Dragon

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“The Gods, as they affirm, were not from the beginning, but every one of them has come into existence just like ourselves. And in this opinion they all agree. Homer speaks of

Old Oceanus,

The sire of Gods, and Tethys;

and Orpheus (who, moreover, was the first to invent their names, and recounted their births, and narrated the exploits of each, and is believed by them to treat with greater truth than others of divine things, whom Homer himself follows in most matters, especially in reference to the Gods)— he, too, has fixed their first origin to be from water:—

Oceanus, the origin of all.

For, according to him (Ὀρφεύς), water was the beginning of all things, and from water mud was formed, and from both was produced an animal, a dragon with the head of a lion growing to it, and between the two heads there was the face of a God, named Heracles and Kronos. This Heracles generated an egg of enormous size, which, on becoming full, was, by the powerful friction of its generator, burst into two, the part at the top receiving the form of heaven (οὐρανός), and the lower part that of earth (γῆ). The Goddess Gê; moreover, came forth with a body; and Ouranos, by his union with Gê, begot females, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos; and males, the hundred-handed Cottys, Gyges, Briareus, and the Cyclopes Brontes, and Steropes, and Argos, whom also he bound and hurled down to Tartarus, having learned that he was to be ejected from his government by his children; whereupon Gê, being enraged, brought forth the Titans.

The godlike Gaia bore to Ouranos

Sons who are by the name of Titans known,

Because they vengeance took on Ouranos,

Majestic, glitt'ring with his starry crown.”


- Orphic Fragment 57, translated by B. P. Pratten in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2. The original quote comes from a work by the 2nd century AD Christian philosopher Athenagoras the Athenian. (Translation taken from The Orphic Fragments of Otto Kern on HellenicGods.org)


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“If the absurdity of their theology were confined to saying that the Gods were created, and owed their constitution to water, since I have demonstrated that nothing is made which is not also liable to dissolution, I might proceed to the remaining charges. But, on the one hand, they have described their bodily forms: speaking of Hercules, for instance, as a God in the shape of a dragon coiled up; of others as hundred-handed; of the daughter of Zeus, whom he begat of his mother Rhea; or of Demeter, as having two eyes in the natural order, and two in her forehead, and the face of an animal on the back part of her neck, and as having also horns, so that Rhea, frightened at her monster of a child, fled from her, and did not give her the breast (θηλη), whence mystically she is called Athêlâ, but commonly Phersephoné and Koré, though she is not the same as Athênâ, who is called Koré from the pupil of the eye;—and, on the other hand, they have described their admirable achievements, as they deem them: how Kronos, for instance, mutilated his father, and hurled him down from his chariot, and how he murdered his children, and swallowed the males of them; and how Zeus bound his father, and cast him down to Tartarus, as did Ouranos also to his sons, and fought with the Titans for the government; and how he persecuted his mother Rhea when she refused to wed him, and, she becoming a she-dragon, and he himself being changed into a dragon, bound her with what is called the Herculean knot, and accomplished his purpose, of which fact the rod of Hermes is a symbol; and again, how he violated his daughter Phersephoné, in this case also assuming the form of a dragon, and became the father of Dionysus. In face of narrations like these, I must say at least this much, What that is becoming or useful is there in such a history, that we must believe Kronos, Zeus, Koré, and the rest, to be Gods? Is it the descriptions of their bodies? Why, what man of judgment and reflection will believe that a viper was begotten by a God (thus Orpheus:—

But from the sacred womb Phanês begat

Another offspring, horrible and fierce,

In sight a frightful viper, on whose head

Were hairs: its face was comely; but the rest,

From the neck downwards, bore the aspect dire

Of a dread dragon);

or who will admit that Phanes himself, being a first-born God (for he it was that was produced from the egg), has the body or shape of a dragon, or was swallowed by Zeus, that Zeus might be too large to be contained? For if they differ in no respect from the lowest brutes (since it is evident that the Deity must differ from the things of earth and those that are derived from matter), they are not Gods. How, then, I ask, can we approach them as suppliants, when their origin resembles that of cattle, and they themselves have the form of brutes, and are ugly to behold?


- Orphic Fragment 58, translated by B. P. Pratten in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2. The original quote comes from a work by the 2nd century AD Christian philosopher Athenagoras the Athenian. (Translation taken from The Orphic Fragments of Otto Kern on HellenicGods.org)


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