Domain: The inquiring intellect; the axis of heaven Symbol: The turning pole of the sky, the questioning mind, the northern pillar Roman Equivalent: Coeus
Overview
Coeus is the Titan of the inquiring intellect — his name was linked to the Greek for questioning and inquiry, and he stands for the mind that asks, the reaching curiosity that wants to know. Son of Gaia and Uranus, he is also called Polos, "the pole," and identified with the axis of heaven around which the stars appear to turn: the fixed northern pillar of the sky, the still point about which the whole revolving cosmos wheels. Intellect and axis meet in him — the mind as the pole around which knowledge turns, the questioning that gives the wheeling world a center.
He took his sister Phoebe, the Titaness of prophecy and bright lunar radiance, as his wife, and from the union of inquiry and oracular light came a line that runs straight to the heart of the Olympian order. Coeus himself acts little in the myths; he is more a principle than a person, one of the four Titan brothers who hold the pillars of the sky at their quarters. But through his daughters and their children his intellectual, oracular inheritance passes down into the age of the gods that overthrew him.
Key Myths
The northern pillar of heaven. In the old cosmology Coeus, with his brothers Hyperion, Iapetus, and Crius, held the sky apart from the earth at the four corners of the world; Coeus took the pillar of the north, the pole of heaven around which the constellations turn. He is the still axis of the wheeling sky — the fixed inquiring point about which all the moving lights revolve.
Father of Leto and Asteria. By Phoebe, Coeus fathered two daughters: Leto, who would bear Apollo and Artemis to Zeus, and Asteria, the goddess of falling stars and nocturnal prophecy. Through Leto his line becomes grandsire to two Olympians, and the oracular gift that ran through Phoebe passes by way of these daughters toward Apollo and the oracle at Delphi. The questioning Titan is thus the ancestor of the god of prophecy himself.
The fall of the questioners. Coeus fell with the other Titans in the war against Zeus and was bound in Tartarus below. A late tradition tells of him breaking free of his chains in a raging fury, driven mad, only to be hunted down again — a last convulsion of the old order. The inquiring mind, cast down, does not go quietly; but the age it belonged to is over, and its gifts survive only in the descendants who serve the new gods.