Themis

Also Known As: Greek Θέμις, “that which is laid down”; divine law, established custom
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Foreknowledge of what is fated, and the authority to summon or dismiss an assembly of gods or of men.
Role in Mythos: Titaness of divine law and custom, second holder of the Delphic oracle, and the counsellor who sits beside Zeus and tells him what the future has already decided.
Relation to Humans: She issued the first unwritten rules of piety, hospitality, good governance and lawful assembly to mortals, and answered them from the oracular seat when they came to ask. She warns and instructs rather than punishing, leaving enforcement to her daughter Dike and to other powers.

Before the laurel smoke and the bronze tripod, before Apollo ever set foot on the scree of Parnassus, the voice that came up out of the rock at Delphi belonged to a woman. She was the second to sit there. Earth held the seat first, and Earth handed it to her daughter, and that daughter was Themis.

Her name was not originally a name. In Greek, themis meant the settled thing, the way it has always been done: the unwritten rules of hospitality and sacrifice and assembly that nobody voted on and everybody knew. It was not nomos, the law that men write down and can therefore rewrite. Themis was older than that and less negotiable, and when the Greeks wanted a face for it, they gave it hers.

She belongs to the first generation, daughter of Ouranos and Gaia, sister to Rhea and Mnemosyne and Phoebe and Cronus, one of the twelve born from the union of sky and earth. Aeschylus went further and had her say she and Gaia were one being under many names, which is either a theological subtlety or a sign that the older cult never fully separated the goddess of law from the ground she stood on.

On Olympus she did the work nobody else could be trusted with. When Zeus wanted the gods assembled he did not shout for them; he told Themis, and she went out along the smooth stone colonnades Hephaestus had built and fetched them, every river god and every meadow nymph, until the hall was full. She presided over the division of the feast, which in a house of immortals with long memories is a more delicate job than it sounds. Once, when Hera came in white-faced and shaking from a quarrel with her husband, it was Themis who reached her a cup first and asked what had happened.

Zeus married her. In Hesiod she is his second wife, taken after Metis, and the children she bore him are the visible order of the world in two halves: the Horae, Eunomia and Dike and Eirene, Good Order and Justice and Peace, who mind the seasons and the works of mortal men; and the Moirai, Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, who measure the thread and cut it. Seasons and fates out of the same womb. The Greeks were not being sentimental about law.

Nobody ever gave her a monstrous body to carry, which leaves the sculptors and the vase painters as the only witnesses to how she looked, and they agree on a mature woman, fully clothed, unhurried. The best surviving image was found at Rhamnous in 1890 and stands now in Athens: two and a quarter metres of Pentelic marble carved around 300 BC by a local sculptor, Chairestratos, the figure in a sleeved chiton belted high under the bodice, a himation falling across the outstretched left forearm. On an Athenian cup of the fifth century she sits on the tripod itself, a shallow bowl in one hand, leaning slightly toward the king who has come to ask her a question.

The most famous of those questions came after the flood. Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha grounded their raft on Parnassus with the water still over everything else, and walked to her shrine to find the roof filmed with scum and the altars standing cold. They pressed their mouths to the wet stone and asked how the human race might be put back. The answer came out crooked, the way answers from that seat usually did: veil your heads, loosen your robes, throw your great mother’s bones behind you. Pyrrha refused outright, horrified at the thought of doing violence to her mother’s remains. It was Deucalion who worked out that the great mother was the earth and her bones were the stones in it, and the stones they threw over their shoulders lost their hardness, softened, took shape, and stood up as people.

Her foresight was never decorative. When Zeus and Poseidon were both circling the sea-nymph Thetis, it was Themis who stood up among the gods and told them what fate had already ruled: the son Thetis bore would be stronger than his father, and whichever of them fathered him would be handing over the sky. She proposed the remedy herself, that Thetis be married to a mortal, to Peleus, reckoned the most righteous man in Thessaly, and that she be left to watch her son die in a war. Zeus, who was rarely persuadable, was persuaded. The boy was Achilles. The war was Troy, and one strand of the tradition says Zeus laid the plan for that war with Themis beside him.

In Aeschylus she is the mother of Prometheus, and she is the reason he survives. She had told him early that the coming war between the Titans and the young gods would be settled not by strength but by cunning, and he carried the warning to his brothers and was laughed at for it. So he changed sides and took his mother with him. Years later, chained to the rock in the Caucasus with the wind coming off the ice, the only comfort he has is another of her prophecies: that a descendant of Io, famous with a bow, will come and cut him loose.

That is the shape of her power. She knows what is coming, she has the standing to say it out loud in front of Zeus, and she can convene or dissolve an assembly of gods or men at will. Twice the record shows her physically stopping a catastrophe. Once in the Dictaean cave, where Zeus raised his thunderbolt in a place no one was permitted to die, and she and the Fates stopped his arm. Once over Troy, when the gods broke into open brawling and she came down through the cloud and told them plainly that Zeus would tear up the hills and bury the lot of them. They listened. Her altars stood below the Acropolis at Athens, at Thebes beside a shrine of her own daughters and one of Zeus of the Marketplace, at Olympia on the fissure they called the Mouth next to the ash altar of Earth, at Tanagra, and among the oaks at Dodona.

She never fights.

That is also the limit of her. Themis declares; she does not collect. Punishment belongs to Dike, to the Erinyes, to Nemesis, and when the divine law is broken it is somebody else who comes for the offender. She held the greatest oracle in the Greek world and then gave it away, freely and without a struggle, to Phoebe, who passed it on to Apollo as a birthday gift, after which her voice at Delphi was a memory the priestess recited before getting down to business. The courthouse statue that carries her name is not quite her either. The scales and the sword belong to Roman Iustitia, and the blindfold arrived later still, in a woodcut published in 1494 for Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, where a fool ties it over the eyes of Justice so the lawyers can get on with their work. The Greeks never blindfolded her. The whole point of Themis was that she could see exactly what was coming, and said so anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Themis in Greek mythology?

Themis is a Titaness, one of the twelve children of the sky god Ouranos and the earth goddess Gaia, and the goddess of divine law and established custom. She became the second wife of Zeus and served as his counsellor, seated beside his throne. She is also a prophetic goddess who held the oracle at Delphi before Apollo received it.

What is Themis the goddess of?

Themis governs themis itself, the unwritten divine law: the rules of piety, hospitality, sacrifice, good governance and lawful assembly that were understood to have been laid down by the gods rather than voted on by people. This is distinct from nomos, the written law of human decree. She is also a goddess of prophecy and of assemblies, with the power to summon the gods or dissolve a council of men.

Is Themis the same as Lady Justice?

No. The modern blindfolded figure with scales and a sword is a composite that borrows Themis’s name but takes its equipment from the Roman goddess Iustitia and its blindfold from a much later source, a 1494 woodcut for Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools in which a fool ties the blindfold on. Greek art never depicted Themis blindfolded, because her defining quality was foresight.

Who are the children of Themis?

By Zeus, Themis bore two sets of three daughters. The Horae are Eunomia (Good Order), Dike (Justice) and Eirene (Peace), who oversee the seasons and the affairs of mortals. The Moirai, or Fates, are Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who spin, measure and cut the thread of a life. Aeschylus also names Themis as the mother of the Titan Prometheus.

Did Themis control the Oracle of Delphi?

Yes, for a time. The Delphic oracle belonged first to Gaia, who gave it to Themis, making her its second holder. Themis later passed it on willingly to the Titaness Phoebe, who gave it to Apollo, and Greek writers remembered that the art of issuing oracular responses was her discovery in the first place.