How can greek gods be killed

Greek gods are as real as any other gods. The Greek gods told Aeneas to leave the battle with his family. While running away his wife was captured and killed by persueing soldiers. Both in a sense. Norse gods were not immortal in the way Greek gods were. They aged and could be killed, though they did not die naturally, or get disease. The ruler of the Greek gods is Zeus. Log in. Ancient Religions. Greek and Roman Mythologies. Zeus Jupiter. See Answer. Best Answer.

Yes, at least the ones that are not immortal. I correct some spelling mistakes xD. Study guides. Q: Can Greek gods be killed Write your answer Related questions. Which god was killed by Hercules? Where was Demeter killed? Who killed Hermes? Why were greek animals killed for the gods? When the greek gods needed someone killed who would they send? Who came first the titans or the gods? In ancient Greece animals were killed as what for the gods?

How did the Greek Gods die in the film Immortals? What greek god was killed when an eagle dropped a turtle on his head? How old was Greek god Hades? To give you an idea here are a few. Be aware, that in Greek mythology there are many version of one story and so, in some versions one god does die, in another the complete opposite may happen. This is just the nature of the Greek myths. I hope you enjoyed the article, thanks! Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Are Greek Gods Immortal? How Did the Titan Atlas Die? Can Demigods Die? Achilles — The great hero who was prophesied to die at Troy. He fought in the Trojan war and killed the Trojan commander Hector. His mother Thetis had dipped his body in the River Styx hoping to make her son immortal but she had held him by the heel and unfortunately kept it dry. He was killed by Paris with an arrow through his heel. Heracles — Heracles was able to overcome the 12 labours but in the end was killed by the Shirt of Nessus.

The shirt had been dipped in the blood of the centaur Nessum and unknown to Heracles, was given the gift by his wife. However, his father Zeus took pity on him and made him into an Olympian god. Minos — King Minos of Crete was the son of Zeus. He was a central figure in the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. When he died he went to Hades and became one of the Judges of the Dead.

There are in act many more demigods almost all of them died. So, yes, demigods can die. What is Tartarus? Who Is in the Pit of Tartarus? Cronus — Cronus was defeated by Zeus and as punishment kept in Tartarus.

In some other myths he is said to be murdered by Zeus. Titan Brothers — Cronus had 5 titan brothers and 4 are imprisoned in Tartarus. King Tantalus of Lydia — He stole Ambrosia, the food of the gods, so he was made to stand in a pool of water with a tree bearing fruit above his head. Whenever he reaches down the water recedes and when he reaches up the fruit is just out of reach.

King Salmoneus of Elis — Salmoneus would regularly claim he was the equal of Zeus and commanded his subject to call him by that name. He would mock Zeus at any opportunity. Ares' Greatest Misadventure In Book 5 Lines of Homer's Iliad , the Oceanid Dione recounts the story to Aphrodite of how a pair of really young giant boys once wrapped the war-god Ares in chains and packed him into a metal jar, nearly killing him.

Further details on that in the second-last section below. In this and every story in which a god is captured, his opponent is tremendously enormous, so I am assuming that the colossal size of the deity's captor is a major factor if not an outright requirement for the overpowering of the targeted divinity.

Only two exceptions to this come to mind. Hera's Tricky Golden Chair In one of these exceptions, when Hephaistos [Hephaestus], the artisan of the gods, was young, he used a somewhat steampunk mechanical device—a golden chair with hidden fetters—to trap his mother Hera, who had thrown him away when he was a baby.

Hera's other son Ares tried to release her from the trap but failed, whereupon none of the other gods could convince Hephaistos to extricate Hera from the device. Finally the wine-god Dionysos [Dionysus] tricked the artisan-god into getting drunk and brought him to Mt Olympos [Olympus] where Hera had been trapped, mother and son were conciliated to each other, and Hephaistos let Hera out of her inconvenient predicament.

Dionysos Goes on a Cruise The other exception features Dionysos in his youth, wherein he is captured and bound in ropes by a band of Tyrrhenian pirates posing as operators of a passenger ship.

Dionysos, however, is merely toying with these corsairs, whom he terrorises by transforming parts of their vessel into ivy and snakes before changing all these men into dolphins.

The Most Dead God Limited Edition In Greek mythology there is only one instance of a full-fledged deity actually going through the full process of dying entirely as ordinary mortals do although, in a way, he comes back to life again. This story, about Zagreus, however, is told by the Orphics, a mystical cult whose mythology was some distance left-field of the mainstream Olympian narratives and which borrows heavily from adapted Egyptian and Asian material.

More on Zagreus in the last section below. Again there are two exceptions to this, which amount to not much at all after all. The Tomb of Zeus The first [exception] is a Cretan version of Zeus about whom it was said that he was actually a local prince who, like Adonis, had been gored to death by a wild boar.

Several places on Crete Island displayed his tomb one of which remains even down to the present day , but even in a time almost as far back as Homer and Hesiod, a famous poet and prophet named Epimenides, himself a Cretan, dismissed this story out of hand, decrying his fellow islanders as degenerate liars on account of this.

A few centuries after Epimenides, Callimachus agreed with the Cretan prophet by quoting him on this point in his Hymn to Zeus. In between the times of these two, Pherecydes of Syros had expressed his belief that the Cretan Zeus tomb actually belonged instead to a giant who had been Zeus' school-teacher during the god's childhood on the island, and who thus was very closely associated with the Olympian king.

The deity in question never himself makes a cameo in the story, which to me is clearly a metaphor for the subject-matter of the essay, On the Obsolescence of Oracles. The news of Pan's death is an allegory of the decline of certain aspects of popular Ancient Greek religion in Plutarch's time.

In some Orphic cosmogonies Khronos is the father of Khaos [Chaos] and thus the ultimate origin of all things. Even though Khronos , meaning "Time," from which we get English chronology , chronometer and chronicle , is a different word from Kronos , even in ancient times the two characters were confused and equated with each other. Plutarch mentions an allegorical interpretation that Kronos, who devours his own offspring, was a symbol of how the ravages of Time Khronos consumed posterity.

In the early 21st century AD, the most popular source for the idea that the Titan Kronos was chopped to pieces by his own children appears to be Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series of books, movies and other related entertainment forms.

Riordan does not seem to have invented this piece of neo-mythology, and from what I can tell it appears to have arisen from the conflation of the Titan with the Time-God. Here is where death is— time dissolved into that eternity from which beauty is endlessly borne— agony of Chronos dismembered; joy of Aphrodite depth-born.

There is a much older reference to the same mytheme, from , in Volume 1 of the London Society Magazine. According to its article "On the Grotesque in Things Sorrowful" p. Kronos had dismembered Ouranos, not by chopping him to pieces, but by castration.

As early as the 19th century, therefore, the stories seem to have gotten heaped into a jumble in which Kronos and Khronos were totally merged, and the emasculation of Ouranos by Kronos somehow became the hatcheting of K h ronos by his child ren instead.

There is, however, no ancient myth at all in which Kronos [the Titan father of Zeus] is chopped into pieces by anyone, whether by his own progeny or someone other. No such thing happens to the cosmic Time-God Khronos either, whether we equate him with the Titan or not. The worst thing that happened to Kronos the Titan is that he got imprisoned in Tartaros [Tartarus], the vast storm-pit at the lowest level of the Underworld.

But even while incarcerated therein he still received prayers and libations from his children on Mt Olympos, who, according to Iliad 14, were required to invoke his name and those of the other Titans in the Underworld in order to ratify their most sacred oaths. Kronos, whose prison sentence had lasted thousands of years, was at this point still alive, well, and bodily intact. He ultimately, therefore, cannot be used as an example of a deity that died, except in the sense that he had inhabited the land of death for aeons, lying inert beneath the dwelling of the human dead who were housed in the layer of the netherworld which sat on top of Tartaros.

Ouranos, the character from whom originates the confused story about K h ronos being dismembered, himself did not die when his son Kronos chopped off a piece of him. It is he who was held down by his children and then dismembered. Of four of his sons, each one held down one of his four limbs, while a fifth son, Kronos, arose from the Earth beneath him in order to sever his reproductive organ from the rest of him. Far from killing Ouranos, instead this action produced yet more life, for the blood which spilled from this violence impregnated the Earth, which from it gave birth to the Furies and the ash-tree nymphs, as well as, in some versions, the Giants.

More famously yet, the severed genitalia, dumped by Kronos into the Sea, transformed there into the lascivious goddess Aphrodite. Apart from the case of Zagreus, the loss of this one body-part is the most grievous injury sustained by any deity in Greek mythology. A very similar thing happens to Agdistis, a being born to Zeus and Gaia in Phrygia. Because Agdistis was born with both male and female organs, the gods feared the entity and cut off the male organ.

Upon this emasculation, Agdistis was thenceforward the Phrygian goddess Kybele [Cybele]. An almond tree grew up out of Agdistis's discarded genitals. An almond from this tree then impregnated a local river-nymph, who gave birth to Attis, who, when he had grown up, was castrated and died.

He was worshipped after his death and seems to have resurrected in his eunuch form. Attis evidently had been born and died a mortal man, only becoming a god after death, somewhat like Asklepios [Asclepius] and Herakles [Hercules]. The mutilation of Ouranos and Agdistis represents a reduction of their power rather than their destruction. Ouranos loses his rule over the universe and becomes a deactivated part of the cosmos like the more inanimate primordial deities such as Erebos [Erebus] and Tartaros.

Meanwhile Agdistis now appears in a less threatening form to the other divinities. There is otherwise no level of damage inflicted upon Greek deities which comes close to being as severe as any kind of amputation. For several thousands of years the crucified Titan Prometheus has his liver torn out but it grows back almost every day, and he seems to be bodily intact once this torture ends.

In one battle against the super-strong mortal hero Herakles, Hades is wounded in the shoulder, Hera in her right breast, and Ares in the thigh. They are each badly hurt but after a visit to their doctor they are all good as new. Zeus has his head split open with an axe, a full-grown goddess bursts forth from his cloven skull, and he recovers just fine from that.

Later in life Zeus undergoes an apparently more surgical procedure. As part of the Giants' attack on the Olympians, the cosmic-sized, many-armed, hundred-headed monster Typhon coiled around Zeus, presumably like a python with its prey, and cut the sinews out of Zeus's hands and feet.

This apparently paralysed the king of the gods, whom Typhon then threw over his shoulders, carrying him across the Sea to his lair, a cave in Cilicia, Anatolia. Here Typhon deposited Zeus, hiding the god's extraced sinews in a bear-skin which he placed under the guard of a female, part-dragon creature named Delphyne.

Zeus's sons, the gods Hermes and Aigipan [Aegipan], managed to sneak past this sentinel and save their father by reconnecting him with his sinews.

After this, a furious battle ensued between Zeus and Typhon which ended with the latter's demise or imprisonment. At the onset of his attack Typhon had threatened to release the confined Titans from Tartaros, to distribute the goddesses—especially the virgins—as brides among the Titans, the Giants and himself, and to enslave the male deities. Because Heaven was too small to contain him, Typhon planned to tear it down and rebuild it, with himself as its overlord.

Zeus, for his part specifically, was slated to became the western pillar of the Sky, replacing the Titan Atlas in this mode of imprisonment. But once Typhon had Zeus in his mercy, for some reason never explained to us, he did not do anything to him worse than paralysing him. It seems that he could well have killed him, but perhaps Zeus was not so easily slain and Typhon just didn't now how to finish him off.

Maybe he intended to first display him in a triumph after fulfilling his promise of unearthing the anciently defeated Titans. A somewhat comical scenario had transpired some time not too far removed from Typhon's attack.