>>18286939
The Logos is the rational principle, cosmic order, and divine intelligence that governs the universe. This is also a perfect description of Zeus, thus the two can be equated.

>>18286939
Source of picrel? Looks glorious.

>>18286941
But is there some sort of basis in Hellenic myth? Considering that Kronos came before Zeus

>>18286952
The Logos is a philosophical concept and remember, Greco-Roman philosophers had a more complicated view of their religion and its gods. They believed the traditional myths to be absurd but didn’t reject them entirely, instead they viewed them as allegories or tried to strip away the more “supernatural” elements (like centaurs, sirens, etc) to make them more palpable. They believed the gods weren’t actually anthropomorphic beings as traditionally depicted but rather abstract metaphysical spirits who all emanated from a single divine source. Under this framework “Zeus” isn’t an old man literally living atop Mount Olympus but rather he is the Logos; the rational principle, cosmic order, and divine intelligence that governs the universe.

They argued that the only reason the gods were depicted as humanoid was because people depicted them in their own image and thus attributed human traits like emotions and appearance to them. For example Xenophanes, a pre-Socratic philosopher, remarked that if cows had hands they’d draw the gods to look like cows. They even went as far as to argue that works like the Iliad should be censored because they contained “lies” about the gods doing bad things and engaging in humanlike behavior. In this sense, it didn’t matter what you called the gods or how you depicted them because they were all just different interpretations or depictions of the same divine cosmic archetypes.

>>18286957
Also, I've seen people say stuff like “these philosophers weren’t representative of the average person, most people believed the gods were actually anthropomorphic and that beings like centaurs were literally real,” but honestly you could also make the same argument with Christianity. Most Christians weren't intellectuals like Gregory of Nyssa or Origen of Alexandria, they were rabid peasants who held insane and obviously superstitious beliefs like black cats being demons. Yeah, the church may have denounced witch burnings and declared that witches weren't real, but that didn't stop your average peasant from believing their neighbor was a witch because she looked at him funny for 0.5 seconds.

>>18286957
Yes but what I mean is, how can Zeus be Logos if he isn't a primordial God but instead was born from hismother Rhea the daughter of Gaia, the deified Earth and his father Kronos, son of the sky deity Ouranos?

The short answer is that genealogy in myth does not correspond to metaphysical priority in philosophy. When Zeus is said to be born from Kronos and Rhea, this belongs to the language of myth, which is concerned with narrating shifts in power, order, and cosmic structure rather than describing literal ontological origins. Philosophers from the classical period onward did not read these divine genealogies as historical facts about the nature of reality, but as symbolic stories expressing deeper truths.

In mythic terms, Kronos is often interpreted not simply as a personal creator god, but as a symbol of time, cyclical necessity, or destructive succession. Zeus overthrowing Kronos represents the triumph of rational order and stable kingship over blind, devouring force. This is not a younger being replacing an older one in a literal sense, but an image of intelligence and law mastering chaos and necessity within the cosmos.

The explicit identification of Zeus with Logos emerges most clearly in philosophical traditions such as Stoicism rather than in Homeric poetry. For the Stoics, Zeus is the rational law that permeates all things, the divine intelligence immanent in nature, and the source of providence and fate. Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus describes Zeus as the ordering reason of the universe, ungenerated and all-pervading. Under this framework, the traditional stories about the gods are understood as symbolic theology intended for popular understanding rather than literal metaphysical accounts.

Even within myth itself, Zeus is sometimes presented in a way that transcends linear time. In Orphic traditions, Zeus is described paradoxically as both the first and the last, suggesting that he ultimately contains the cosmos and precedes it in a metaphysical sense, even if narrative stories depict him as being born. This reflects an intuition that Zeus, as the highest ordering principle, cannot be confined to temporal succession.

>>18286945
Daniel Redfern

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