Theogony Course
The Real Greek Creation Story
This is the oldest surviving account of how the Greeks understood the origins of the world, time, cosmos, and power.
Hidden between its lines are the seismic cultural shifts from Bronze Age tribes to early city states; Titans to Olympians; chaos to order.
Description
The Theogony is not allegory, a template for modern psychobabble, or a free-for-all for Hollywood pastiche. It’s the source map: a framework that crystallises how people thought, worshipped, argued, and built meaning from the world around them.
Hesiod shaped a mythic architecture, a conceptual framework, a working cosmology, and the grammar of Greek thought. These remain at the foundations of what it means to be Greek today.
This course walks through Hesiod’s epic poem in full, line by line, unpacking what his audience would have understood, his sources, and how he preserved and restructured Bronze Age memory.
We also trace how later periods—especially Roman, early Christian, and Renaissance readings—misread, reworked, or deliberately altered these materials, and how those distortions still shape modern retellings.
This course is not another retelling. It is a restoration.
What you’ll get:
Nearly 20 hours of video content, delivered in weekly 10–15 min segments
A line-by-line reading of the Theogony
Clear distinctions between original Greek material and later overlays
Archaeological, cultic, and historical context to anchor the text
Companion notes, discussions, and access to subscriber-only chat
A growing archive that supports the wider project of decolonising and de-romanticising Greek tradition.
This is for you if you have a serious interest in:
Archaic poetics, oral tradition, and myth transmission
The deeper structures of Greek spirituality, ritual, and memory
Debunking modern distortions—especially when they masquerade as scholarship
Seeing the real Greece, not the one filtered through Victorian and Hollywood lenses
Start at any point. Rewatch at your pace.
Sign up at any time and you will have full archive access to pick up the thread.
Subscribe for full access:
First cycle of lectures is freely available here: https://thyrathen.substack.com/t/hesiod-course
Join as a paid subscriber to unlock the full course
Your subscription supports independent research, deep teaching, and the preservation of cultural integrity.
Note to existing readers:
If you're following the Sunday essays and wondering how they relate; the same threads—cosmology, conceptual framework, meaning-making—run throughout. This is the mythic root system of the project! Thank you for being here!