The great gods who dwell on Mount Olympus, ruling the cosmos and the affairs of mortals. In the age before the Collapse, their presence was as certain as the sunrise. Now their voices are harder to hear — but their power remains.
Zeus — King of the gods. Lord of the sky, thunder, and divine law. His word is final authority among the immortals, and his wrath is legendary. Mortals swear their most binding oaths by his name.
Poseidon — God of the sea, earthquakes, and horses. Brother of Zeus. Patron of sailors and coastal cities, his temples line every harbor in the Mediterranean.
Hera — Queen of the gods, goddess of marriage, family, and women. Proud, protective, and fiercely loyal to the bonds of oath and kinship. Her favor is a blessing; her anger, a curse that spans generations.
Demeter — Goddess of the harvest, grain, and the fertility of the earth. When she mourns, the world grows cold. The Eleusinian Mysteries celebrate her bond with her daughter and the promise of renewal.
Aphrodite — Goddess of love, beauty, and desire. Born from the sea foam, older than Olympus itself by some accounts. Her influence is subtle and irresistible — wars have started at her whim.
Athena — Goddess of wisdom, strategic warfare, and craft. Zeus's favorite daughter, born from his brow fully armored. She favors the clever over the strong, and her patronage built the greatest cities of the old world.
Artemis — Goddess of the hunt, the wild, and the moon. Twin sister of Apollo. She roams the forests with her nymphs and protects the untamed places. Fierce, independent, and unforgiving of those who trespass in her domain.
Apollo — God of prophecy, music, healing, poetry, and the sun. His oracles speak the truth of what will be — though the truth is not always welcome. His sacred sites, including the grove at Kyparissos, remain among the last places where the divine voice can be clearly heard.
Ares — God of war — the brutal, bloody reality of it. Where Athena represents strategy and honor in battle, Ares embodies the violence itself. Feared more than loved, even among the gods.
Hermes — God of travelers, merchants, thieves, and communication. The messenger of the gods, fleet-footed and silver-tongued. He guides souls to the underworld and watches over those who walk between worlds — literally and figuratively.
Dionysus — God of wine, ecstasy, theater, and liberation. The twice-born, the loosener, the god who breaks boundaries. His mystery cults promise transformation through abandon. Worshipped by satyrs as their divine patron and liberator.
Hestia — Goddess of the hearth, home, and the sacred fire. The quietest of the Olympians, and perhaps the most essential. Every home that keeps a fire honors Hestia, and every communal meal is her sacrament.
Not all divine powers sit on Olympus. Some rule other domains; some walk paths the Olympians prefer to ignore.
Hades — Lord of the underworld and the dead. Brother of Zeus and Poseidon, but dwelling apart from Olympus in the realm below. His kingdom is not evil — it simply is — and all mortals come to him in time.
Hephaestus — God of the forge, fire, and craftsmanship. The great maker, whose works are coveted by gods and mortals alike. Though cast from Olympus and marked by his fall, his skill is unmatched — every divine weapon and wonder of legend was shaped by his hand.
Persephone — Queen of the underworld, goddess of spring. Daughter of Demeter, wife of Hades. She walks between worlds — six months in the light, six in the dark. The Eleusinian Mysteries honor her descent and return, the eternal cycle of death and rebirth.
Hecate — Goddess of magic, crossroads, and dark wisdom. She stands at the threshold between the known and the unknown. Those who seek arcane knowledge, hidden truths, or guidance at life's turning points call upon her. Her torchlight illuminates what others prefer to leave in shadow.
Pan — God of wild nature, shepherds, and untamed places. Half-goat, half-god, all mischief. His pipes echo through mountain passes and lonely groves. The panic that seizes travelers in wild places bears his name. Shepherds revere him; city-dwellers avoid his gaze.
Eris — Goddess of discord and strife. Sister of Ares, unwelcome at every feast — which, as the story of the golden apple reminds us, only makes things worse. Where there is conflict, Eris is near. Some call her malicious; others say she merely reveals the tensions that already exist.
The Phoenicians worship gods unknown to the Greeks — older in some ways, different in character, and deeply tied to the sea and the cycles of the natural world.
Baal Hadad — The great storm god. Lord of rain, thunder, and the fertility that storms bring to the land. The most powerful of the Phoenician gods, he wages an eternal struggle against the forces of chaos and the sea.
Astarte — Goddess of love, war, and the evening star. Fierce and beautiful, she embodies both desire and destruction. The Greeks sometimes compare her to Aphrodite, but Astarte carries a sword as readily as a mirror.
Melqart — Patron god of Tyre, protector of sailors and colonies. The Phoenicians carry his worship wherever their ships land. He dies and is reborn each year, a cycle celebrated with great ceremony in every Phoenician port.
Eshmun — God of healing and renewal. His sacred groves are places of recovery and rest. Phoenician physicians invoke his name, and his temples serve as sanctuaries for the sick.
Yam — The primordial sea. Not a kindly patron of sailors but the raw, chaotic power of the deep itself. Baal Hadad defeated Yam in the ancient stories, but the sea is never truly conquered. Fishermen and sailors know this in their bones — the deep takes what it wants.
Mot — Death. Not a robed figure or a gentle guide, but an open mouth, an endless hunger. In Phoenician myth, even Baal fell to Mot before being restored by Astarte's grief. Mot is not worshipped so much as acknowledged — a power that cannot be bargained with, only endured.
The gods of Egypt are ancient beyond reckoning. Their priests maintain traditions stretching back thousands of years, and their rituals are among the most precise and powerful in the known world.
Ra — The sun god, creator of all things. He sails his solar barque across the sky each day and through the underworld each night, battling the serpent of chaos. The cosmic order itself depends on his eternal journey.
Osiris — Lord of the afterlife, god of resurrection and the harvest. Murdered by his brother Set and restored by the devotion of Isis, he rules the realm of the dead with justice and compassion. His story is the promise that death is not the end.
Anubis — Guardian of the dead, god of mummification and funerary rites. He weighs the hearts of the deceased against the feather of Ma'at. His priests, the Ka-priests, perform sacred duties that ensure safe passage to the afterlife.
Thoth — God of wisdom, writing, and divine knowledge. Inventor of hieroglyphs, keeper of cosmic records, arbiter of disputes among the gods. The patron of scribes and scholars, and the closest thing the Egyptian pantheon has to a god of magic.
Horus — The sky god, son of Osiris and Isis. Avenger of his father, eternal opponent of Set. The living pharaoh is considered his earthly avatar. His eye — lost and restored in battle — is a powerful symbol of healing and protection.
Ma'at — Not merely a goddess but the principle of cosmic order itself — truth, justice, balance, harmony. Every Egyptian ritual, every law, every act of governance is meant to uphold Ma'at. When Ma'at is strong, the world is in balance. When she falters, chaos follows.
Set — God of the desert, storms, and chaos. Murderer of Osiris, eternal rival of Horus. Set is not worshipped openly by the pious, but he is respected as a necessary force — the chaos that tests order, the desert wind that scours the land clean. Some say his power waxes when the world is in turmoil.
The oldest religious tradition in the Mediterranean is also the most endangered. Ten generations after the eruption on Thera shattered their civilization, the remaining Minoans are scrapping to keep what's left of their culture alive. Much has been lost. What survives is fragmentary, fiercely guarded, and profoundly strange to outsiders.
Potnia — The Lady. The great goddess of the Minoans, depicted with serpents coiling up her bare arms and the authority of the earth itself in her gaze. She is healer and poisoner, mother and destroyer, the power beneath the soil and the wisdom in the snake's eye. Her rites are conducted by priestesses who trace their lineage to the old palace temples. The Greeks have no equivalent — Potnia is older than the Olympians, and her followers know it.
Asterion — The first minotaur, son of the sacred white bull. Among the minotaurs he is revered as something between an ancestor and a god — the divine progenitor of their kind and a symbol of their endurance. His worship is centered on Knossos, where the ruins of the great Labyrinth still stand as a monument to what the minotaurs once were and what they intend to remain.
The Birthplace of Zeus — Even the Greeks acknowledge that Zeus was born on Crete, hidden in the Dictaean Cave and raised by the Kouretes to protect him from his father Kronos. The Minoans claim this gives them a deeper, older bond with the king of the gods than any mainland Greek can match — a point of quiet pride in a people who have precious little left to be proud of.