The Fall of the Titans by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1596–1598) ( Public Domain ) Much to the astonishment of archaeologists recently excavating the area, hidden amongst the thousands of animal remains on Zeus’s altar was the three-thousand-year-old skeleton of an adolescent boy believed to have been sacrificed in much the same way as his bestial counterparts. Dismissing such reports as ancient hyperbole, human sacrifice in ancient Greece has been mostly disregarded by academia. But were there more than animals queued up on Zeus’s altar? If the ancients are to be believed, Arcadians were known to gift human boys to the sky god as well. The animals-typically sheep and goat and to a lesser extent pigs and cattle-were lined up to offer their lives to the sky god. At the hallowed ground of his circular ash altar possibly tens of thousands of creatures were sacrificed in his honor.
In order to appease his ever-capricious appetite, blood lust was the order of the day and sacrifice, his exacting requirement.
#GLIMPSES ANCIENT RITUAL GREECE SERIAL#
Son of Kronos-infant-eating chief of the primordial Titans-Zeus was king of the Olympian pantheon, dictatorial god of sky and thunder and sanctioned serial rapist whose fierce role in Greek mythology is cardinal. Zeus, one of the earliest gods of the Greek pantheon, was the most brutal and blood-thirsty amongst them. In a land prone to drought, famine and a thousand injustices, carnivorous gods loomed large ravenously roaming the earth in search of sacrificial victims. A weather-god, Zeus was entreated during times of scarcity, not infrequent high above the clouds on Mount Lykaion. Indeed, Zeus’s birth atop Mount Lykaion may signify the very inception of Greek religion itself.
Purportedly Zeus’s birthplace, experts now believe that the altar may predate Zeus by over a thousand years originally paying homage to a chthonic, more primal god. Standing at nearly five thousand feet, with vistas of the entire Peloponnese peninsula beneath their feet, it is easy to understand the intimacy the ancients must have felt for the god of sky and thunder. In the Greek Peloponnese, high atop the summit on Arcadia’s Mount Lykaion (Wolf Mountain) lies an altar at one of the oldest and most revered of all primordial sanctuaries.
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