We Need to Bring Back the Greek Gods
Why does Jesus get to have all the fun?
Programming note: I’ve gone on a mini-hiatus from Trump news. It’s exhausting. Let’s have some fun.
I learned through a word of the day recently that Momus is the Greek god of censure and ridicule. This seems about right for our times.
Momus was booted off Mount Olympus for mocking other gods, but that would never happen today.
Today, he’d be a star. Or miraculously propagandizing and lying his way to a second U.S. Presidential term despite his $83.3 million defamation/sexual assault fee, a million and a half indictments, a federal conviction, and a discard pile of unpaid lawyers.
In light of all the problems we have, it’s clear we need to reconsider breathing new life into our old friends, the Greek gods, who may have more going for them than we might remember. We could, in other words, all use an old reliable friend.
Let’s take a look at a few of these awesome dudes and dudettes and see if we can’t help them find their way back into our hearts.
Overview
The first thing we’ll discover about Greek Gods is that they are basically NSFW.
Also, some of the males are not particularly well-endowed. Consider Apollo:
It’s natural to assume that his statue was the victim of snarky vandals with a bone to pick, but I have it on good authority that the current state of the statue is representative of Apollo’s true self. People who know my writing can attest to my meticulous research, so it’s silly to challenge me on this.1
Either way, there’s no doubt that Mount Olympus was the world’s first heaven-sanctioned nudist colony in the Western World.
As gods go, they are very immature, which is another reason we should welcome a comeback. Western society these days, especially in the United States, is like one big toddler exhibit.
We need gods who represent us.
Are you ready for your quick survey of Greek gods? Strap yourself in! If you feel super adventurous, find yourself a good Discord BDSM channel and group chat this shiz.
List of major Greek gods and goddesses
I’ll be quoting from Wikipedia a lot because I’m lazy and my heavily researched articles usually only get read when I’m trashing that weirdo who thinks he’s king, anyway.
Aphrodite
Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty, love, and eroticism. There’s little doubt that she has the most fun on Mount Olympus. The ancient poet Hesiod wrote that she was derived from Uranus’ severed genitals. So, not only was Uranus cursed with a horrible name, but, yeah... severed.
Her lovers included Adonis, Ares, Anchises, and her hubby, Hephaestus. There’s a fun story about Ares and Hephaestus that I’ll tell later.
Aphrodite was generally depicted in an au naturel state, which is entirely appropriate for her godly line of work.
Two of her kids, Phobos, and Deimos, ended up as weirdly shaped tiny moons circling Mars, which is probably attributable to the fact that Greek gods are criminally incestuous.
Let that be a warning to you good folks in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional district.
Apollo
According to Wikipedia, Apollo is “the god of music, arts, knowledge, healing, plague, prophecy, poetry, manly beauty, and archery.” Kind of a one-stop shop, but this is really all you need to know about Apollo:
Fun fact: If you listen with the sound low, it sounds like Apollo is saying something about Cybill Shepherd2 and Kirk says in response, “You know of her?” (:026 in)
Apollo had to put on some clothes for this G-rated Star Trek episode, but if Quentin Tarantino ever does a Star Trek reboot,3 I think we can count on not only a full frontal buffy Apollo but a detailed scene on exactly what happened to that penis.
Ares
According to Wikipedia, Ares is the…
“…God of courage, war, bloodshed, and violence. The son of Zeus and Hera, he was depicted as a beardless youth, either nude with a helmet and spear or sword, or as an armed warrior.”
Despite considerable research, I’ve been unable to determine why a naked toddler is chewing on his leg. It may be because The Iliad4 says that Ares is the most unpopular god around. Or, it may be that he and Aphrodite cuckolded his brother, Hephaestus, who happened to be Aphrodite’s husband.
That whole cuckolding business is a long, sordid tale, well beyond the seven-minute or so reading limit that some people claim defines high readership on places like Substack. If demand warrants it, I’ll be happy to write up a separate tome for that.
Artemis
Wikipedia says Artemis is the…
…Virgin goddess of the hunt, wilderness, animals, the Moon and young girls.
She’s also a god of archery, like Apollo. Nothing bad can be said about her because I’m thinking that she’s the inspiration for one of the only likable characters in Game of Thrones.
My fantasy is for her to appear in Steve Bannon’s “War Room” studio and give him a taste of George R.R. Martin’s style of politics.
Athena
Athena is the “Goddess of reason, wisdom, intelligence, skill, peace, warfare, battle strategy, and handicrafts,” says Wikipedia. She was born “from Zeus’s forehead, fully formed and armored, after Zeus swallowed her mother, Metis,5 whole.”
What a family.
There’s a big city in Greece you may have heard of that’s named after her.
Demeter
When you live in an ancient society, you must have a deity for agriculture. Demeter fills the bill for the Greeks. She’s the sister of Zeus, which wouldn’t be noteworthy except that she gave birth to Persephone through Zeus.
This is strange because, surely, Zeus could have had his pick of ladies, right? So what does he do? He picks his sister.
Like I said before. What a family.
Demeter is a daughter of Cronus and Rhea. Like all Greek gods apparently do when they’re hungry and there’s no food around, Cronus swallowed another god, this time his daughter, Demeter.
According to the story, he regurgitated her. I can imagine really bad family juju here because as soon as that happened, Cronus probably said to his daughter, “You make me sick!”
This is one advantage of Christianity over the Greek Gods. When starvation comes into play, Jesus throws bread and fish around. Greek Gods eat each other.
Dionysus
Dionysus is the God “of wine, fruitfulness, parties, festivals, madness, chaos, drunkenness, vegetation, ecstasy, and the theater,” according to Wikipedia.
If I were a Greek god, I think I’d want to be Dionysus, although even in my most drunken stupors during my youth I never walked around like this:
Now that I’m old, of course, I do it all the time.
His birthing story is fun. According to Wikipedia:
Zeus snatched him from his mother’s womb and stitched Dionysus into his own thigh and carried him until he was ready to be born.
How did Zeus know if the kid was ready to be born if he was stuck in Zeus’s thigh?
Oh shit. Alien. Kinda.
Hades
The badass of God World. Not a good dude to invite over for dinner, unless maybe you’re planning on swallowing another god, which was, after all, kind of trendy back in the day.
Needless to say, I bet he’s one of those dudes who doesn’t leash his three-headed dog while walking him.
Hephaestus
As I said earlier, Hephaestus is the husband of Aphrodite. He was a keen metallurgist, so good that he was able to build automatons long before science fiction writers started thinking about them. Isn’t that cool?
One of those automatons was a sort of barely visible chain link net that he sent to trap his wife Aphrodite and her lover Ares while the two of them were sharing bed linens in their usual naked state. Then he made them do a walk of shame in Mount Olympus in front of the other gods.
He also used his smithing skills to make a golden throne for his mother Hera. When Hera sat in it, she couldn’t get up. Hera was then forced to subscribe to the first heavily advertised product for people who can’t get up.6
Why did he do this? Who knows? Just a rebel child, I guess.
Hera
Speaking of Hera, she is the queen of the gods, although you wouldn’t know it after that last story, right? According to Wikipedia, she is the…
…goddess of women, marriage, childbirth, heirs, kings, and empires. She is the goddess of the sky, the wife and sister of Zeus,7 and the daughter of Cronus8 and Rhea9… Zeus’s many infidelities drive her to jealousy and vengefulness.
You can understand her angst. Put yourself in her shoes, assuming she wears them. Her husband is sitting at the kitchen table, stitching an unborn infant from one of his lovers into his thigh: “Zeus, honey, what the hell are you doing?” Things go downhill from there.
Hermes
Wikipedia says that Hermes is the…
…God of boundaries, travel, trade, communication, language, writing, cunning and thieves.
The Greek gods have no boundaries, which tells me he isn’t very good at his job. They’d just as likely have sex with their sister or swallow her whole than help her with the wedding plans.
Also, if dressing like this is his idea of boundaries, it explains a whole hell of a lot about Greek god family life:
He’s yet another son of one of Zeus’s adulterous affairs, this time a goddess named Maia, who was part of the Pleiades. I can see the attraction:
The Pleiades had better luck being converted into heavenly bodies than did poor Phobos and Deimos, probably because they were nymphs.
One of Hermes’s duties is to escort humans into the afterlife. That would be quite the adventure with this guy leading the way. Can’t wait.
Hestia
Hestia is so chill that nobody’s heard of her. The Romans turned her into a star, though, and called her Vesta. She is the goddess of hearth, home, and family. This explains why nobody has heard of her. Can you imagine trying to keep Zeus’s family under control? I’m surprised she’s not a crab nebula.
Her priestesses are the Vestal Virgins of Procol Harum fame. Procol Harum, during one of their more hallucinatory episodes, wrote “One of sixteen vestal virgins were leaving for the coast.”
Incidentally, countless Boomer lives have been ruined in an attempt to interpret this song’s lyrics:
Persephone
The most important thing to remember about Persephone is that one of the most underrated songs by one of the most underrated bands of the 1970s was named, “Persephone.” You can barely see this video, but that’s kind of what makes it cool:10
She was also another victim of Zeus’s familial interfamily sexual exploits and eventually became the wife of Hades.
Poseidon
According to Wikipedia, Poseidon is the…
…God of the sea, rivers, floods, droughts, and earthquakes. He is a son of Cronus and Rhea, and the brother of Zeus and Hades. In some stories he rapes Medusa, leading to her transformation into a hideous Gorgon and also to the birth of their two children, Pegasus and Chrysaor.
As you can see from this clip, Poseidon is capable of wrecking the best dinner plans:
Zeus
What can I say about Zeus that hasn’t already been said? He’s the head of this scurrilous crew, and, frankly, his head isn’t screwed on quite right. He is king of the gods, so he gets to do whatever he wants, and so he does.
As the king of gods, he deserves an article of his own. I’m out of time (already well past the seven-minute mark), so you’ll have to research him on your own.
If you’re wondering what happened to Momus, he’s in a list of “lesser” gods11, like Ananke, “The goddess of inevitability, compulsion, and necessity,” according to Wikipedia,12 and Uranus, who I think Wikipedia may be miscategorizing, because a “god of the heavens” seems like a pretty big deal to me. Even if he does have a heavily mocked name.
I’ll leave you with this little ditty from Styx, who were named after a goddess said by Wikipedia to be “the personification of hatred.”
This seems about right. I lost a lot of friends playing their music.
As always, thanks for reading!
Regular readers are also familiar with my use of copious footnotes, some of which are pointless.
You have to be part of the fading, almost extinct generation of humans like me to know who Cybill Shepherd is.
Contributors. 2002. “American Actress.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. March 11, 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybill_Shepherd.
Sharf, Zack. 2023. “Why Quentin Tarantino Stark Trek Movie Was Never Made.” Variety. December 19, 2023. https://variety.com/2023/film/news/quentin-tarantino-star-trek-movie-never-made-1235846350/.
“The Internet Classics Archive | the Iliad by Homer.” 2025. Mit.edu. 2025. https://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.html.
Contributors. 2002. “Oceanid of Greek Mythology.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. March 16, 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metis_%28mythology%29.
Before you get yourself into a Greek-style lather and yell at me for making fun of old people, be aware that I’m old myself, and after my recent health scare, couldn’t get up. I know it’s rough out there, but laugh a little.
“Zeus - Wikipedia.” 2023. Wikipedia.org. 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus.
Contributors. 2002. “Ruler of the Titans in Greek Mythology.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. January 2, 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronus.
Contributors. 2002. “Female Titan in Greek Mythology, Mother of Zeus and Mother of Hera.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. June 27, 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhea_%28mythology%29.
Take a moment to listen to this beautiful song. It will improve your mood and help you remember there is good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.
Contributors. 2025. “Lists of Greek Mythological Figures.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. January 22, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Greek_mythological_figures#Personified_concepts.
Contributors. 2004. “Personification of Inevitability, Compulsion and Necessity in Greek Mythology.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. March 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananke.