Who is Poseidon?
What we know from myth, history, and inspiration
Poseidon is the Greek god of the ocean, conflated with the Roman god Neptune. While most Greek and Roman gods who got conflated with each other have some stark differences, Poseidon and Neptune are similar to the point of being indistinguishable, even though they have very different origins.
Poseidon did not begin as the Lord of the Ocean. He started out in some areas in pre-classical times as a chthonic god under the ground who was in charge of earthquakes, known as the Lord of Earth. He kept the title “Earth-Shaker” and “Holder of the Earth” (because the sea was thought to hold the floating earth) into his later era. However, as time went on and Mediterranean cultures because powerful seafarers, the underground god was repurposed to be an oceanic god. In other areas, he was a deity of river and lakes—fresh water—who was the consort of an earth goddess. Neptune, on the other hand, started out as an Italian-peninsula god of rivers, and was similarly repurposed.
In the tellings of classical myths, Poseidon was the fifth child of Cronos and Rhea, swallowed by his father and later vomited up by the intervention of his brother Zeus. He, Zeus, and Hades split the world rulership between them, and Poseidon chose the sea. He presented as a powerfully-built middle-aged man holding a trident, sometimes riding a chariot drawn by white horses, or half-horse creatures with fishtails. His palace was in the deepest part of the Mediterranean, called Aegai, and he ruled over the Nereids (salt-water nymphs) and mermen.
Poseidon was a deity of strong emotions, like the pounding waves of his ocean home. He was passionate in his joy and rage, and unashamed of that. Capricious and vengeful, he could also be very generous to those he loved. His wife was a Nereid name Amphitrite, who seemed to be a calm and permissive wife who never complained about her husband’s infidelities. She was the calm depths, while he was the wild surface of the sea. Their son was Triton, a merman sometimes shown with two fish-tails and sometimes with one. Poseidon also had affairs with numerous women (and sometimes men as well), and fathered many half-mortal children, including Minos and Theseus.
Minos, the king of Crete, was given a beautiful white bull by Poseidon, on the condition that he would sacrifice it to his patron deity when it was older and had sired many offspring. However, Minos decided to keep the bull for himself, after which the vengeful Poseidon caused his wife Pasiphae to fall in love with the bull. She paid Daedalus to secretly make her a rigid cow costume that she might safely mate with the sacred bull, and afterwards bore the Minotaur—half man and half bull. The Minotaur was locked up in the center of Minos’s labyrinth, and eventually slain by Theseus, another son of Poseidon.
Poseidon was prayed to, not only to keep the ocean from battering the land, but also for the safety for sailors and fishermen who had to brave the ocean in their boats and ships. Tuna were seen as his messengers, and their meat was offered ritually to him. As well as ruling the salt waters, he could also create fresh-water springs by striking his trident on the shore. Horses were his sacred animal, as people believed that they saw white horses in the crashing waves, and he was honored as their creator. (The words for “spring” and “horse” are very similar in the ancient Greek tongue.) In one myth, he turns into a stallion and mates with Demeter who was temporarily in the form of a mare, and their child is a talking horse named Arion. In Crete—which had fewer horses—and sometimes in Ionia, he was associated with bulls, and called “the bull from the sea”.
At one point, Poseidon and Athena had a contest to see which would be the patron of Athens; Poseidon struck the ground and gave them a spring, but the people of Athens considered Athena’s gift of the olive tree to be more valuable, and the sea god lost the city. In retaliation, he sent a great flood to sweep over Athens and smash much of it. Ionia and Corinth were his special cities, where he was the main divine patron.
During the Trojan War, Poseidon was on the side of the Greeks, but he turned on Odysseus when the adventurer killed his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus. He harassed Odysseus for decades, preventing him from getting home until he tired of the game.
The King of the Sea knows deep feelings, and he is very good at revealing yours to you—your own inner tides and swells and whirlpools. This can be very useful if you’re someone who is cut off from your emotions and doesn’t know how to interpret them. If you can get to the ocean, make him an offering of wine poured into the waves; if you’re too far inland for that, a donation to a horse rescue will work.
Artwork by Spinnradler.
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