Before Olympus: A Mythopoetic Descent into the Prehistoric Roots of the Greek Gods

Announcing a new series for paid readers!

Toro (Bull), Leonora Carrington, 1959.

Listen via audio:

For much of the past few years, I’ve been tracing the Greek gods backwards—from their polished marble incarnations in the classical world and the songs of the epic poets, into the deeper strata of prehistory.

The Greek gods were not born on Olympus; their roots stretch back into the Bronze Age, with its temples that once crowned islands and coastlines from Crete to Cyprus, from the Levant to Anatolia; and deeper still into the Neolithic, where stone circles, cave altars, vegetation-gods, and the cyclical rhythms of grain, vine, and beehive shaped the earliest roots of their being.

Beneath the familiar Olympian figures lies a far older lineage: the animistic, elemental, star-spinning, earth-dwelling beings who shaped the earliest layers of human imagination in the prehistoric cultures of Old Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean.

By “Old Europe,” I mean the term coined by the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas to describe the network of Neolithic cultures that flourished across the Balkans and the lower Danube basin between roughly 6500 and 3500 BCE; cultures such as Vinča, Cucuteni–Trypillia, and Starčevo.

Gimbutas, along with several archaeologists I’ve spoken with in the field, believed that these societies were technologically inventive, socially complex, matristic, egalitarian, and spiritually sophisticated long before the rise of Bronze Age hierarchies. Their settlements, shrines, figurines, ceramics, textile traditions, and ancestor practices reveal an agrarian, animistic worldview in which the sacred was woven through daily life. Gimbutas’ framing of Old Europe is a way of recognising the deep Neolithic cultural stratum that underlies the later Aegean, Anatolian, and Mediterranean religious imagination—the soil from which many of the patterns later absorbed into Greek myth first emerged.

These gods were once bear mothers, mountain ladies, thunder beings, bull lords, snake women, ecstatic guardians of the forests and seas. They lived in caves and hearths, oak groves and storm clouds, and in the rites of puberty and grain. They belonged to the land long before they belonged to the heights of Olympus.

Over the next twelve weeks, I want to take you on a descent into the mycelial root systems of these old gods. Before Olympus is a mythopoetic journey into the deep prehistory of the major Greek deities. Beneath the classical stories lie older, stranger, wild beings whose origins stretch into the cave sanctuaries, mountain shrines, bull cults, forests, hearths, seasonal rites, and embodied mysteries that shaped the earliest layers of the Greek imagination—the root-system from which so many of the West’s later stories and ideas would grow.

This first instalment is free; the rest will be a paid series for those wanting to go deeper into the myths, archaeology, prehistory, and the roots of the Western religious imagination. The intention is to recover something of the wild, ecological, and embodied worldview that predate the Graeco-Roman worlds and first breathed life into the gods.

---

WHAT TO EXPECT EACH WEEK

Each instalment includes:

• A longform essay

• Optional audio

• My re-telling of the myths

• Archaeological and historical grounding

• The Homeric Hymn to each god

• Images of artefacts and site photographs from my fieldwork

My intention is to offer something that is both intellectually rigorous and spiritually nourishing—something that widens the imagination while grounding us more deeply in the ancient world.

A new instalment will be sent out every Sunday to paid readers. This series offers a gentle entry point into the paid community, where you’ll have access to 100+ essays and audio to explore myth, ritual, animism, and sacred ecology at your own pace.

---

Let’s begin by imagining the world that birthed the Olympians as we know them today: the world of Homer and Hesiod of Archaic Greece (c. 800-480 BCE). This was an age when stories still lived on the tongue rather than the page; when poet-singers travelled from feasts to sanctuaries carrying whole cosmologies in their memory; when communities were scattered across small city-states with competing traditions, each with its own local gods and ancestral rites. It was a world shaped by shifting alliances, rising aristocracies, and the early formation of the polis—a world hungry for order, genealogy, and narrative coherence.

This world rose from the long shadow of the Bronze Age collapse, one of the most profound cultural ruptures in ancient history. Around 1200 BCE, the great civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean fell in quick succession: the Mycenaean palaces burned, Minoan centres disappeared, the Hittite Empire disintegrated, the Levantine coast suffered waves of destruction, and the long-distance trade networks that had linked Egypt, Anatolia, Greece, and Western Asia for centuries suddenly vanished. Climate stress, internal unrest, population movements, and the breakdown of palace economies created a cascading failure across the region. Within a generation, the monumental temples, writing systems, and centralised religious structures of the Late Bronze Age had disappeared. What remained were scattered communities, household rites, local shrines, and intensely regional forms of the gods—the fragmented threads the poets would inherit.

In this period of political consolidation and expanding literacy, myth too began to consolidate. Diverse local deities were unified under shared names, genealogies were systematised, and cosmologies became narratives. The Olympians were not discovered, they were assembled.

Hawk, Ephesus, 7th-6th C. BCE

The uncanny thing about Greek mythology is how thoroughly it convinced us that it was the beginning of the story. We inherit the Olympians as if they erupted fully formed out of Homer’s poetry: Zeus hurling lightning, Artemis stalking the forests, Aphrodite rising from sea foam. They feel autocratic, permanent, and inevitable. And yet, they were not the first gods of Europe, nor the oldest pantheon in the Aegean, nor even the deepest layer of Greek religion. The Olympians arrived late. And they arrived replacing others.

What we call “Greek mythology” is the surface of a much older stratum of belief—one whose vastness we only began to recognise in the nineteenth century, when the Scottish archaeologist Daniel Wilson coined the term prehistory. Wilson’s simple but revolutionary idea was this: that the story of humanity stretches far beyond the written word. Until then, Western thought assumed that history began with text—scripture, tablets, chronicles. Civilisation was what could be read.

But Wilson insisted something startling: that the unwritten, the archaeological, the material (the bones, potsherds, ruins, and hearths) contained their own history. Prehistory opened an abyss beneath the familiar timeline of Western civilisation. Suddenly the Greeks were not the beginning but merely one of many chapters in an unimaginably older human story. The Olympians were no longer primal; they were latecomers standing on the bones of millennia of agrarian, animistic, syncretic traditions.

How that transformation happened—how Old European, Minoan, Mycenaean, Levantine, and Indo-European deities slowly fused into the pantheon we now call Olympian—is still debated. What follows is the reconstruction I find to be most plausible, based on archaeology, linguistics, comparative mythology, and the surviving Bronze and Iron Age evidence:

A CONCISE TIMELINE OF THE GODS BEFORE OLYMPUS

Neolithic Old Europe (c. 6500–3500 BCE)

Agrarian, animistic deities rooted in land and seasonality: grain mothers, mountain spirits, snake women, bird goddesses, bull symbols, ancestor cults. The sacred is local, ecological, and woven into daily life.

Early Bronze Age Aegean & Anatolia (c. 3000–2000 BCE)

Rise of Minoan and Anatolian cults: peak sanctuaries, cave shrines, libation rituals, ecstatic dances. Deities are still fluid and place-bound, and many later Greek gods stem from these powers.

Indo-European Arrivals (c. 2500–2000 BCE)

Steppe migrations bring the sky-father (Dyeus becomes Zeus), thunder gods, horse/chariot symbolism, heroic ethos. The fusion begins: sky gods combine with local agrarian deities.

Mycenaean & Minoan Syncretism (c. 1700–1200 BCE)

Linear B (earliest form of Greek) tablets name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Dionysus, Artemis, Demeter, Hermes, and Dionysus. But these gods still look very different: they are local, multiple, and shape-shifting. Proto-Olympian ideas emerge, but no fixed pantheon yet.

Bronze Age Collapse & Dark Age (c. 1200–800 BCE)

Political fragmentation leads to a mosaic of local cults. Each region has its own version of Artemis, Demeter, Poseidon, Aphrodite, etc. Myth is diverse, contradictory, and orally transmitted.

The Aoidoi, Homeric Oral Singer-Poets (c. 800–600 BCE)

Bards perform long narrative poems at festivals. They select, streamline, and combine local myths, giving gods personalities and relationships. Their performances begin to stabilise the pantheon in cultural memory. Scribes later record these performances.

Hesiod & Early Greek Literacy (c. 700 BCE)

Hesiod’s Theogony offers the first written genealogy and cosmic order of the gods.
He systematises the divine family tree—a major step toward the later Olympian structure.

Homeric Hymns Written Down (c. 7th–5th century BCE)

The long festival hymns praising individual gods are composed orally and then gradually committed to writing. This fixes the gods into canonical forms: more anthropomorphic, more hierarchical, centred on Olympus.

If Wilson gave us the word prehistory, it was the poets who gave us the illusion that Greek myth was history’s dawn. When we say “Homer,” we usually imagine a single poet, but what we really mean is a long tradition of singer-poets—the aoidoi—whose voices were slowly woven together over centuries.

The bards themselves did not write down their songs; they performed them. It was early Greek scribes (like literate elites working in courts and sanctuaries) who gradually transcribed these oral performances between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE, turning fluid stories into fixed texts.

These were not hymns in the modern sense, but long narrative invocations performed at festivals to honour each god, stitching scattered local traditions into shared portraits. Imagine them: a group of bards gathered in darkened halls, voices shaped by generations of oral tradition, reciting the old songs of gods and heroes, while scribes wrote their invocations down like spells. For the first time in the Western imagination, these fluid, shifting, migrating divinities were being fixed into a written canon.

The Homeric Hymns were shaped over several centuries in this way, roughly between the 7th and 5th centuries BCE. Around the same time this early Homeric material was being stabilised, Hesiod, a poet from Boeotia, produced the earliest surviving genealogies and cosmology of the Greek gods, providing a textual framework that complemented the emerging Homeric tradition.

It was a historic moment: the moment when the Greek gods stopped being living presences moving through the land and became characters. When the porous, shape-shifting deities of oral tradition were pinned in place and arranged into a family, a hierarchy, and a cosmology. And the world of prehistory—the bear cults, the bull gods, the grain mothers, and the snake women—was gradually folded beneath the authority of Olympus.

This Hellenic Dead-Poets-Society did not invent the gods. But in writing their hymns, they consolidated them and made them legible, immortal, and “Greek.” In doing so, it allowed later centuries to mistake them for the beginning of the story.

The whole thing makes me think of the Biblical stories written down across a century. Again, oral myths made literate. In this case not by bards, but by scribes, priests, court historians, prophetic schools, and anonymous editors who shaped and reshaped the early Hebrew stories across many generations.

Where the Greek myths were sung by the travelling poet-singers whose craft was performance, memory, and improvisation, the biblical traditions were recorded by a very different class of specialists: temple scribes preserving laws and genealogies, court officials writing royal annals, priestly theologians shaping creation stories and ritual codes, prophetic circles collecting oracles and teachings, and later exilic and post-exilic editors gathering scattered oral and written traditions into coherent books.

Both worlds—the Greek and the Hebrew—began as oral rivers long before they met the containment of the written word. And just as the Homeric Hymns crystallised over a couple of centuries, so too did the biblical stories gradually take shape across the Iron Age, each layer reflecting a different political, ritual, and cosmological moment.

And then came empire. Contrary to popular imagination, Emperor Constantine did not decide what went into the Bible. The canon was already well on its way to solidification. But Constantine did something just as consequential: he gave imperial power to one strand of early Christianity. With the Edict of Milan in 313 CE and the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, he gathered a once-plural movement beneath the wing of Rome, elevating a single theological tradition while marginalising others.

It was a dramatic turning point—the shift from the many Christianities of the early centuries to a single, imperially sanctioned orthodoxy. Constantine shaped not the contents of the Bible but its afterlife, ensuring which stories survived and which interpretations would define the next thousand years of Western thought.

The parallel is striking.

In Greece, the myths of the gods were once fluid, local, changing with every storyteller, shrine, and hillside. In Israel, the sacred stories circulated for centuries in oral and fragmentary written forms. In both cases, the arrival of scribes turning oral tradition into scripture transformed living, shape-shifting myths into authoritative canons that reshaped culture.

But if we listen closely for the river under the river, as it were, the stories whisper of older beings beneath them—those who once ruled mountains, caves, hearths, forests, storms, and the underworld long before Zeus claimed the sky.

Prehistory is not silent. Its voices are simply buried beneath forms we are more accustomed to recognising; our task is to develop the literacy to read their earlier language.

When I use the word prehistory, I don’t mean the caricature we inherited from early anthropology: brutish cave-people, crude rituals, a fog of ignorance before the light of civilisation. That story was always a colonial projection—an image invented by nineteenth-century European scholars who cast their own imperial hierarchies backwards in time, imagining earlier peoples as crude, childlike, and “uncivilised” to justify the idea that history naturally progressed towards themselves.

Prehistory, as I mean it, refers to the vast span of human life in which cultures were highly sophisticated, symbolically complex, spiritually rich, and ecologically literate—whether or not their writing survives. These were societies who understood the land as a living presence, who navigated seasons with precision, who tracked migrations, constellations, and weather patterns with an intimacy our age barely remembers. Their art, burial rites, figurines, shrines, ceramics, weaving, architecture, ceremony, and mythic imagination show extraordinary intelligence—not primitive, but differently wise.

By prehistory, I don’t mean a world without writing. The Minoans and other Bronze Age and Neolithic cultures of the Aegean wrote extensively—in Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyphs, and Old European scripts—but because these systems remain undeciphered, their myths and ritual texts are effectively lost to us. Their religion survives not in written narratives but in artefacts, frescoes, ritual landscapes, and architectural forms. Their cosmology is “prehistoric” only in the sense that it is non-textual from our point of view, not because the societies themselves lacked literacy or sophistication.

In this context, prehistory refers not to the absence of writing, but to the absence of readable textual material. When the gods do not speak to us through scripts, we must listen instead through clay, stone, pigment, bone, ritual landscapes, and myth. Their world remains prehistoric because it is still speaking through matter and through story.

Prehistory is not the absence of culture. It is the vastness of culture before it was reduced to text. To recover these earlier layers is not to deny the beauty of Homer or Hesiod, it is simply to remember that they were not the beginning.

Female bird-headed dancer, Eleusis, 7th C. BCE

So why does it matters that the Olympians are not the oldest pantheon?

It matters because it changes the way we understand ourselves.

The Olympian world is aristocratic, ordered, hierarchical, and anthropocentric. But the earlier world—the one beneath it—is ecological, communal, embodied, animistic, and reciprocal.

When we assume the Olympians are the origin, we inherit:

• a sky-dominant worldview

• a masculine-dominant cosmogony

• a separation between human, land, and the sacred

• a politics based on hierarchy rather than mutual cooperation

But when we look beneath the Olympians, we find an older imagination rooted in land and cycles, a cosmology without kings, a world where every stone and spring is alive, and deities who were kin, not rulers.

Remembering that the Olympian pantheon is layered over earlier agrarian deities is not a mythological footnote—it is a profound act of cultural and spiritual recovery. It allows us to see the deep continuity between prehistory and our own longings today:
for belonging, for reciprocity, for a cosmology that is not distant and punitive but embodied, ecological, and alive.

We live at the edge of a very old story.

When we go far enough back, we discover that the gods were not metaphors.
They were the shapes the land and the stars took in the human imagination. They were the World Soul speaking; the earth dreaming through us.

The Olympians were radiant—but they were not eternal. They were inheritors. And so are we. To follow a god back to prehistory is to follow the thread of our own ecological memory, our own animistic inheritance, and our own forgotten conversation with the more-than-human world.

Beginning next Sunday: Week 1 — Artemis, Mother of Beasts