Moirae's Mirror - August

Hello all!

This month's Moirae's Mirror is something I've gotten some questions about, that might also interest/amuse you: specifically, some family trees! 

We begin, naturally, with the children of Kronos and Rhea. Now in the original myths, there are a lot more than just Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, but this fact actually makes it all pretty gross, since if we go by those, pretty much everyone has kids with close relatives. So... I've changed things around so that's not how it looks. The first step to this was of course to separate the Rhea/Kronos family into a few different ones. 

As you can see, they have three direct descendants: the brothers. Hades is first, and his only direct descendant (albeit an adopted one) is Makaria. The Hades of FoA is a lifelong bachelor, so there's no one to add in the partner sense that's relevant here. Poseidon is next; he is married to Amphitrite. The thing is, they have a lot of children, and furthermore Poseidon is almost but not quite as bad as Zeus when it comes to illegitimate children, so the lack of any of those other people on here is just for the sake of simplification. What Poseidon's doing isn't really all that important to the story, as none of those kids really have major roles to play, nor will many of them likely even be mentioned. 

Now, of course, there is Zeus. Most of his 'partners' and kids are also not included, and my goodness are there so many of them. I have, however, included all of the major deities that are his children, and the people with whom he had them. Athena is only his child, created spontaneously rather than gestated in the usual way. (Hera actually has such a child on her own as well; the young goddess Hebe). Together, they have Ares. As in some other cases, additional deific children have been removed or given other parents here to avoid squicky situations. Where I've done this, I've tried to use alternate parentages found in other myths, but there may be times when I have to just... reassign arbitrarily. 

Anyway, Zeus has also had kids with Maia (Hermes), Leto (Artemis and Apollo), and Dione (Aphrodite), so all of those are half-siblings with each other, Ares, and Athena.

Here is the same tree from the perspective of Hera. As you can see, Leto is in fact her sister, so... that's great. In addition to being half-siblings, Ares is actually cousins with Athena and Apollo. Weird, but not the same kind of squick I'm trying to avoid, so I've left it in there. Hera's (And Leto's, and Dione's, and Asteria's) parents are the Titans Phoebe and Coeus, which as mentioned I've done just to keep everyone separate as needed. 

As you may notice, we have an interesting new addition here: a relative of Hera's who is not a relative of Zeus's—namely, Asteria. And in what might be a bit of a surprise for those who haven't explored her outing, Hekate is Asteria's daughter, making Hera her aunt. Hekate is therefore also cousins with all the children of Hera and her sisters, which is all the third-generation people on this chart except Hermes, with whom she shares no relation. 

And finally, we have a much less confusing tree! This one belongs to the PC. Themis, Iapetus, Pleione, and Atlas are their grandparents, which does in fact mean that their father, though mostly-human, has a bit of mixed blood himself, in the way many Greek heroes do. Relevant to note here is that there are no fewer than three distinct 'Elektras' in Greek mythology. This does not refer to the human woman who appears in, e.g., the Orestes, nor the oceanid nymph who was the mother of Iris, goddess of the rainbow. 

Rather, this is the star-nymph Elektra. Some myths say her children were fathered by Zeus, but others say Corythus, a human king of Italy, and so naturally that's what I went with for present purposes. 

Anyway, that's it for today in genealogy charts; I hope you enjoyed them. :)