Domain: Heavenly light; the watcher from above Symbol: The blazing brow, the eastern horizon, the pillar of the sky's light Roman Equivalent: Hyperion
Overview
Hyperion is the Titan of heavenly light — his name means "the one who goes above," or "the watcher from on high," and he is the light of the sky considered as a power in its own right, the father of the very luminaries that traverse it. Son of Gaia and Uranus, he took his sister Theia, goddess of the shining upper air, as his wife, and from that union of light and vision came the three great lights of the world: Helios the sun, Selene the moon, and Eos the dawn. Hyperion is thus not himself the sun but the elder principle of illumination from which the sun descends — the sky's brightness before it was ever divided into day, night, and dawn.
In the earliest ordering of the cosmos he is one of the four Titan brothers who set the pillars of the world in place, holding the sky apart from the earth at his quarter of the horizon — the eastern pillar, the place of rising light. He is a figure more of cosmic architecture than of story: the deep source of the light his children carry, standing behind them the way a dawn stands behind the day it opens.
Key Myths
Father of the luminaries. By Theia, Hyperion begot Helios, Selene, and Eos — sun, moon, and dawn — the three who divide all of time between them and drive their chariots in turn across the sky. Because his son Helios so completely embodies the sun, the older poets sometimes call the sun itself "Hyperion," the father's name worn by the child, as though the light and its source were one. His fatherhood is the reason the sky is ever lit at all.
Pillar of the east. In the setting-in-order of the world, Hyperion is remembered as the Titan of the eastern quarter, holding up the sky where light first breaks. He is the standing height from which the day begins — the watcher above, from whose station the sun, moon, and dawn are sent out.
The fall of the elder light. When Zeus overthrew the Titans, Hyperion fell with his brothers, and the reign of the older lights gave way to the Olympian order. Yet his line was not extinguished with him: Helios, Selene, and Eos went on driving their courses under the new gods, the light of the fallen Titan carried unbroken into the new age.