Hyperion- Greek TitanTitan"The High One"

Birth and Celestial Children

Hyperion was one of the twelve Titans born to Gaia and Uranus. With his sister Theia, Titaness of sight and the gleaming sky, he fathered Helios the Sun, Selene the Moon, and Eos the Dawn — the three celestial lights. Homer sometimes calls the sun "Helios Hyperion," merging father and son into a single name. When Odysseus's men slaughter the sacred cattle on the island of Thrinacia, it is "Helios Hyperion" whose rage Zeus must answer — and Zeus struck the ship with a thunderbolt, drowning every man aboard.

The Pillar of the East

Some traditions place Hyperion as the Pillar of the East, one of four Titan brothers stationed at the corners of the cosmos to hold the sky apart from the earth. Hyperion's station was the east — the quarter where his son's chariot rose each dawn. Diodorus Siculus adds that Hyperion was the first to understand the movements of sun and moon, observing the cycles that his own children rode through the sky.

The Titanomachy and Tartarus

When Zeus led the Olympians against the Titans, Hyperion fought alongside his brothers through ten years of war. The Cyclopes forged thunderbolts for Zeus, and the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires hurled volleys of boulders that broke the Titan lines. Mountains were torn from their roots and flung like missiles. A heat so fierce rose from the fighting that the sea boiled, the forests burned, and even the broad sky and the streams of Ocean trembled. When the Titans fell, Hyperion was cast into Tartarus with his brothers — the father of all celestial light bound in chains of darkness deep beneath the earth.