Rhea

Also Known As: Rheia; identified with the Phrygian Cybele and the Roman Ops; titled Meter Theon, “Mother of the Gods”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A Titaness of motherhood and generation who commanded the fertile earth and the wild, lion-drawn forces of the mountains.
Role in Mythos: Mother of the first Olympians, she saved the infant Zeus from Cronus and so set the fall of the Titans in motion.
Relation to Humans: Mortals honored her as the Mother of the Gods with ecstatic mountain rites of drums and clashing cymbals. The stone she once handed Cronus stood for centuries at Delphi, where worshippers anointed it with oil each day.

The stone was the right weight for a newborn, and she had wrapped it in swaddling bands with the care of a mother dressing a living child. Rhea held it out to her husband in the dark. Cronus took the bundle, felt the heft of it against his palms, and swallowed it whole, wool and all, while somewhere across the sea on Crete a real infant was being carried up a mountainside toward a cave.

She was a Titaness, one of the twelve enormous children born to Gaia the earth and Uranus the sky in the first age of the world, before there were seasons or death or any of the tidy divisions that came later. She married her brother Cronus, who had lately taken a jagged sickle to their father, unmanned him, and seized the throne of heaven for himself. For a while the two of them ruled together over a young cosmos, and Rhea did what the mother goddess of that cosmos was made to do. She bore children, one after another, each of them a full deity at birth.

Cronus ate them. He had heard the warning from Gaia and Uranus themselves, that he was fated to be brought down by his own son exactly as he had brought down his own father, and he decided the simplest defense was to let none of them grow. So as each child came out of Rhea he took it and swallowed it down alive. Hestia went first, then Demeter, then Hera, then Hades, then Poseidon. She watched him eat five children.

The grief of it, Hesiod says, was without limit. When she was heavy with her sixth, she stopped waiting for the pattern to break itself and went to her parents for counsel, and Gaia and Uranus, who knew the shape of what was coming, sent her away by night to Lyctus on Crete. There she gave birth to Zeus in secret, and there she hid him deep in a cave on the mountain, in the black earth under thick woods. To Cronus she brought a great stone dressed in baby-linen, and he seized it and forced it down into his belly, never suspecting that his own overthrow was at that moment mewling in the dark a long way off.

Around the hidden child she set guardians. The Kouretes, young armored spirits, danced about the cave mouth and beat their spears against their bronze shields in a wild clashing racket, so that the cries of the baby could not carry down the mountain to his father’s ears. A she-goat, Amalthea, gave him her milk, and mountain nymphs fed him on honey and raised him where no god of the old order would think to look. He grew there, out of sight, gathering strength.

When Zeus came into his full power he came back for his brothers and sisters. By one account the cunning Oceanid Metis mixed a drug that Cronus drank, and the Titan heaved up everything he had swallowed. Out first came the stone, the very one Rhea had handed him, and after it, alive and grown, all five of the children he had eaten. Zeus set that stone up at Pytho beneath the folds of Parnassus, at Delphi, as a marvel and a sign for mortals to come. There it sat for the rest of antiquity, a rounded lump of rock that people oiled and wreathed, the omphalos, the navel of the world. What followed was the Titanomachy, ten years of war in which the freed Olympians and their monstrous allies tore the old rulers out of the sky, and Rhea’s quiet act of substitution proved to be the hinge the whole thing turned on.

After the rescue she recedes. Her outline blurs into older and larger figures, above all the Phrygian mountain mother Cybele, until Greek and Roman worshippers could no longer say with any confidence where one goddess ended and the other began. In her images she sits enthroned and matronly, wearing a crown shaped like the towered walls of a city, a scepter in her hand, and at her feet or drawing her chariot a pair of lions, the tamed embodiment of everything fierce in the wild country she governed. Her rites were loud, all tympanum and cymbal and torchlight on the high slopes. The Romans called her Ops and gave her Saturn for a husband and told the same story.

Her power was never really the thunder her son would wield. It was generation itself, the capacity to keep producing life out of an order built to consume it, and beneath that a patience and a cunning that let her outlast a husband stronger than she was. She could not fight Cronus and win, and she seems never to have tried. She worked instead by concealment and by a single well-timed lie, saving what mattered by hiding it and handing over a decoy in its place. Once Zeus was safe her active part in the drama was essentially finished, and the tradition let her dissolve into the greater Mother she had always half been. The infant she smuggled up a Cretan hillside grew up to rule everything.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Rhea in Greek mythology?

Rhea is a Titaness, one of the twelve children of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus. She married her brother Cronus and became the mother of the first generation of Olympian gods, which earned her the title Mother of the Gods.

How did Rhea save Zeus from Cronus?

Rhea saved the infant Zeus by hiding him in a cave on the island of Crete and giving Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow in his place. Cronus had been devouring each of his children at birth to prevent a prophecy that one of them would overthrow him, so Rhea’s substitution let Zeus grow up in secret and eventually depose his father.

Who were the children of Rhea?

Rhea and Cronus had six children: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Cronus swallowed the first five at birth, and Rhea hid only the youngest, Zeus, who later forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings alive.

Why is Rhea called the Mother of the Gods?

Rhea is called the Mother of the Gods because she gave birth to the six eldest Olympians, including Zeus. Her identity later merged with the Phrygian mountain goddess Cybele, and she was worshipped with ecstatic rites of drums and cymbals; the Romans identified her with the goddess Ops.

What happened to the stone Rhea gave to Cronus?

When Zeus forced Cronus to vomit up his swallowed children, the stone came up first, ahead of the five gods. Zeus set it up at Delphi beneath Mount Parnassus as a sacred object, the omphalos, which worshippers anointed with oil as a monument to his escape.