Typhon
Father of Monsters
TY-fon
The last child of Gaia and the only creature that ever came close to unseating Zeus, sire of nearly every monster that follows.
The Story
Gaia bore Typhon against the Olympians after they put down the Titans: a thing tall enough to scrape the stars, with a hundred serpent heads and a voice that ran through every sound a god or animal can make. He drove the whole pantheon into Egypt in animal disguise, and in one telling cut the sinews out of Zeus's hands and feet and hid them in a cave.
Zeus got his strength back, ran him down with thunderbolts, and dropped Mount Etna on him. He is still under it, the eruptions are his. Almost everything in this section of the atlas is descended from him.
Did You Know?
- His name is often linked to typhoon. The connection is probably wrong, the English word came through Arabic and Chinese, but it has been repeated so long it now works both ways.
- Etna erupted in 396 BC in a way that stopped a Carthaginian army from reaching Syracuse, which nobody at the time read as a coincidence.
- The gods fleeing into Egypt disguised as animals was a Greek explanation for why Egyptian gods have animal heads.