Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video,
we’re going to discuss how Hades could usurp Zeus and rise to become the new king of Olympus.
I’d like to preface this video by saying that Hades wasn’t an Evil God. In fact, using a
contemporary lens, Hades was downright chivalrous and honorable when you compare his romantic
pursuits to those of his two brothers, Zeus and Poseidon, both of them prolific philanderers,
cajoling, coaxing, and coercing men, women, magical creatures, and goddesses;
both of them powerful and predatory gods who only take their own pleasures into account,
disregarding notions like consent and virtues like restraint.
As far as I can tell, the dichotomy of good and evil as represented by two diametrically
opposed nexus points seems to have been retroactively applied to the Greek pantheon,
shaping the portrayal of Greek mythology in popular culture; movies like Disney’s ‘Hercules’
and ‘Clash of the Titans’ portray Zeus as a force for order and good, while Hades is portrayed as
evil and covetous. This seems like a direct extension of how good and evil are portrayed
in the Judeo-Christian tradition, whereby good and evil are largely conveyed through God and Satan.
Anyway, completely disregarding how the ancient Greeks perceived the lord of the underworld,
we’re going to harness today’s disparaging conceptualization of Hades and run through
an elaborate scenario in which Hades overthrows Zeus and becomes the new Lord of the Cosmos.
Let’s get into it. There are three chief factors
on which success is predicated: Zeus needs to be overcome, incapacitated, and deposed, the crux
of the matter; Poseidon needs to be temporarily contained to preempt him from vying against Hades
for the crown in Zeus’ absence; and Hades needs to operate in complete secrecy to insulate himself
from any culpability, which will keep the other gods from turning on him after he takes action.
The most important tool in executing this plan is Hades’ Helm of Darkness,
one of three great weapons, the other two being Zeus’ lightning bolts and Poseidon’s trident,
forged by the Uranian Cyclopes during the Titan war. It grants the wearer perfect invisibility,
something absolutely crucial to Hades’ success. Beyond the great boon of invisibility,
Hades will also need luck on his side, as well as hydra venom. His gambit won’t guarantee success,
but even if events don’t unfold fortuitously for him, he’ll still be able to keep his actions from
being found out, allowing him to bide his time and use another vector of attack in the future.
And just a quick word on the hydra before we get into the execution of Hades’ plan.
Hercules’ second labour was to kill the Lernean Hydra, in my opinion the most
perilous of his labours. After defeating the hydra by either severing or bludgeoning all the heads,
cauterizing the stumps so that no new heads would sprout forth, Hercules dipped his arrows
in the monster's venom. Then, because the centre head was immortal, meaning it couldn’t be put
to a permanent end, Hercules buried it. The venom that augmented his arrows is incredibly lethal,
allowing Hercules to later defeat several foes with relative ease.
Donning the Helm of Invisibility, Hades leaves his chthonic fortress. His first stop is where
Hercules defeated the hydra. Hades unearths the head, still preserved by immortality,
and dips four daggers into its venom, two for Atlas and two for Zeus, coating their blades in
liquid-death for his impending cosmos-rearranging machination. He then travels forth to where
Atlas resides, where he is condemned to bear the unending burden of the heavens upon his shoulders
for eternity. Still invisible, Hades slices Atlas’ throat with a precise flourish of one
of his daggers, replacing any cries of pain with muted gurgling, instantly weakening him with the
poison-coated blade. He continues his attack by carving flesh and severing ligaments and tendons,
quickly reducing Atlas to a bleeding mess of lacerations. Gravely injured, Atlas can no longer
bear the weight of the heavens. He collapses and the sky begins to fall. (If you’re interested in
what would happen if Atlas no longer held up the sky, we made a video exploring that scenario in
depth that we’ll link in the description. While we found that what would happen isn’t clear, for the
purposes of this video, we’re going to assume that the sky does indeed fall when no longer held aloft
by the tireless efforts of Atlas, functioning as a living pillar that keeps earth and sky separate.)
And if you think there’s no way this attack would go largely unnoticed until the sky fell, remember
that Hades brazenly charged his chariot into a meadow in broad daylight and abducted Persephone;
only Zeus and Gaia, those complicit in the abduction, and Helios, from his advantage high up
in the sky, knew or saw anything. The only reason Demeter was alerted is because of Persephone’s cry
as Hades races away with her. As you can see, Hades clearly learned from his mistake,
because this time around, his first move was noise control, slicing Atlas’ throat.
So the sky begins to fall, and here, in the intervening time before it plummets
and effectively conjoins with the earth, is where Hades is most dependent on luck
moving events in his favour, as what happens next is entirely outside of his control.
Hades, of course, races back beneath the earth to death’s domain,
but what isn’t so predictable is how the other gods, those ensconced on Olympus, will react.
To understand Hades’ gamble and how what happens next might unfold in a sequence
conducive to bringing his goals t fruition, we need to spend a little time discussing Hermes.
You see, Hermes spends quite a lot of time in the underworld. When Zeus is forced to ask Hades to
relinquish Persephone, it is Hermes he sends to entreat him. When Hercules needs to brave
the the underworld to ask Hades permission to subdue Cerberus barehanded and haul the great
three-headed hound beyond the gates that separate life and death, Hermes, along with Athena, guides
the hero as he plunges into the heart of the dark. But most importantly, he is a psychopomp,
meaning it is his responsibility to shepherd the souls of the deceased to the underworld.
Now, you might be asking yourself, how is this relevant to Hades’ play for power?
Well, if the sky were falling, presumably the gods would have to evacuate from their celestial abode
and find refuge somewhere the sky wouldn’t crush them. This seems to leave two options:
the depths of the sea, where Poseidon rules, or the underworld, where Hades rules. Because
Hermes frequents the underworld, it seems likely that it would be his instinctual destination
in an emergency situation that allows virtually no time for planning and preparation, and because it
is Hermes, of all the gods, who most commonly leaves the majestic and magnificent halls of
Olympus - after all, he is the divine messenger who functions as the intermediary between heaven
and the other realms, namely, the underworld, earth, and sea - it seems likely that he would
gain a good deal of authority in such a crisis, as his quick decision making, predicated on countless
journeys, running countless errands, would become indispensable. As said, a good measure of luck is
needed, but after weighing the information at hand, it’s plausible, perhaps even probable,
that the gods of Olympus, as led by Hermes, would take shelter with Hades beneath the earth.
The divine denizens of Olympus being herded into the underworld by a collapsed sky,
now crushing against the earth again as it did in the primordial past before even the gods or Titans
were born, creates two very important advantages for Hades. First, Poseidon and all the sea gods
are trapped underwater. This is crucial because it precludes Poseidon and the bevy of aquatic deities
and monsters beholden to him from intervening in what transpires between Hades and the gods of
Olympus. Second, it gives Hades a power advantage over Zeus. Let me explain: after the Titan war,
Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus each drew lots to fairly divide the cosmos amongst the three of them.
To Hades went the underworld, to Poseidon the seas, and to Zeus the skies. The earth was
deemed too sacred to be subsumed into any one of their spheres of influence, so ultimately, it was
left to Gaia, with the three brothers sharing stewardship over it. Each brother is the most
powerful in their respective domain. On earth, presumably Zeus is the most powerful because he
is the most powerful god and the terrain doesn’t favour any of the three brothers. This is all
to say that in the underworld, it is Hades, not Zeus, who is the greater of the two. Furthermore,
there’s an argument to be made for Zeus being severed from his lightning, perhaps the most
powerful weapon in Greek mythology. He doesn’t conjure lightning himself, rather it is forged
for him by the three Uranian Cyclopes. Relying on the account of the Roman Poet Virgil, their forge,
meaning where fresh lightning is crafted by the cyclopes for Zeus, was located beneath Mount Etna.
Since they’re already underground, they probably just stayed put when the sky came crashing down,
kept from darkness by the glow of forges and the incandescence of the metal on which they work.
So we have Zeus, already at a power disadvantage by nature of being in Hades’ domain, cut off from
his trump card: the crackling black cloud fury that helped him win the Titan war, the Giant war,
and defeat Typhon. And now comes the second moment where Hades needs the wings of luck
to propel his plan forward. Given the cataclysm of the sky falling, as well as the many dismayed
gods narrowly avoiding entombment by said sky, it stands to reason that there would be a fair
amount of chaos and confusion in the underworld. Using shock and pandemonium as accomplices, Hades,
still donning the helm of invisibility, capitalises on an opportunity to separate
Zeus from the herd and attack him without any of the other gods bearing witness.
Empowered by his domain, using surprise and invisibility to his advantage,
Hades descends upon Zeus in a fury, dual-wielding venom-coated daggers. Over before it started,
Hades cuts Zeus’ throat, cuts out his sinews, basically paralysing him, and chains him.
He then carries Zeus to some remote recess known only to him in the endless labyrinth of caverns
that lead in every direction. Once there, he seals Zeus in a bronze container - picture a sarcophagus
that leaves the head exposed. As a final precaution, Hades removes the helm of invisibility
and places it on Zeus’ head, rendering both Zeus and the bronze container, which cocoons Zeus like
a bulky single-cast suit of armour, invisible, leaving the soon to be former king of the gods
completely incapacitated and hidden. Before we move on to the last stage,
let’s quickly touch on three precedents that supports Hades’ move against Zeus:
first, in the Iliad, Diomedes, a Greek hero, wounds both Ares and Aphrodite on the battlefield,
showing that gods can be severely injured by cutting weapons;
second, in some accounts of Zeus’ battle against Typhon, such as the one given by Apollodorus,
Typhon wrestles a sickle away from Zeus, then uses it cut out his sinews, debilitating him,
in which state Zeus is carried inside the Corycian cave, where he is held prisoner until Hermes shows
up and rescues him. Third, the Aloads, a twin pair of giants sired by Poseidon, chain Ares and seal
him in a bronze jar for 13 months, all the while depriving the god of war of ambrosia and nectar,
the nourishment of the gods. In the Iliad, it is said that Ares became so withered and
weakened in this state of isolated deprivation that he teetered on the precipice of death,
which might have claimed him were it not for Hermes coming to the rescue.
To summarize, Zeus is incapacitated by by three layers of restraint, ligament and tendon excision,
chains, and a brass-suit-of-armour-like coffin enclosing his whole body from the neck down;
the Helm of invisibility, in addition to being hidden away in a secret crevice of the underworld,
makes it so that no one will find him; and the deprivation of nectar and ambrosia guarantees
that he will only grow weaker as time passes. With Zeus out of the way, Hades returns to the
other gods. He can feign ignorance as to what happened above ground, and when asked where
he was, he can say that someone stole his helm of darkness and that he was searching for it. Without
Zeus leading the gods, and with Poseidon stuck in the sea, Hades can rise up and take charge of the
situation. After everything has been made right - perhaps he orders the Hecatonchires to work in
shifts to keep the sky aloft until Atlas is healed and can resume his post - Hades emerges as the new
head of the pantheon, having proven himself as a capable leader in a time of crisis and calamity.
Of course, he would lead the effort to find Zeus, scouring every inch - almost every inch,
that is - of the underworld. With the sky back in place, Zeus removed from the equation,
and Poseidon absent, trapped as he was in the sea, Hades emerges as the new king of the gods.
Hades appoints one of his daughters as regent of the underworld
and moves his seat of power to Olympus, absorbing Zeus’ domain into his own sphere of influence.
And that’s it for this video! If you enjoy the content please
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