Domain: The nourishing waters; mother of rivers, springs, and clouds Symbol: The winged brow, the flowing fountain, the sea-monster ketos, streams pouring from her Roman Equivalent: Tethys
Overview
Tethys is the Titaness of the fresh water that feeds the world — the mother-source of the rivers, the springs, the fountains, and the rain-clouds. Daughter of Gaia and Uranus, she is sister and wife to Oceanus, the world-encircling stream, and together they are the great fertile spring from which all waters descend. Where Oceanus is the single encircling river, Tethys is the maternal principle within it, the deep nurse who disperses that one water into the countless streams that nourish the earth. Her very name was linked by the Greeks to the words for nurse and grandmother — the old, feeding, generative water.
She keeps to the far west, at the world's edge, and is glimpsed only rarely in myth, more a presence than an actor — the quiet, encompassing mother of the waters rather than a striver in the affairs of gods. Yet nearly every river-god and water-nymph of Greece is her child, so that her reach runs through the whole watered world even where her name is never spoken.
Key Myths
Mother of the rivers and the Oceanids. By Oceanus, Tethys bore the three thousand river-gods and the three thousand Oceanid nymphs — the springs, streams, and clouds of the whole earth. Hers is a motherhood of almost unimaginable scale: every flowing and falling water a Greek knew was one of her innumerable children, so that she is less a single goddess than the maternal root of an entire order of being.
The foster-mother of Hera. In one tender tradition, when Zeus made war on the Titans, Rhea gave the infant Hera into the keeping of Tethys and Oceanus at the ends of the earth, and the old couple raised her far from the fighting. So even as the younger gods overthrew the elder, some of the Titans remained nurses and guardians to the very children who displaced them.
The banished stars. A late astronomical tale says that Tethys, out of loyalty to Hera, forbade the constellation of the Great Bear to bathe in her waters — which is why, seen from Greece, the Bear alone never sinks below the horizon to rest in the sea. It is a small myth that quietly restates her nature: the waters of the world are hers to grant or withhold.