Hypnos- Greek GodDeity"Lord of All Gods and All Mortals"

Son of Nyx

Nyx bore Hypnos and his twin Thanatos before Titans or Olympians walked the earth. Night's other children brought doom and strife into the world. Hypnos brought rest. In the Iliad, Hera calls him "lord of all gods and all mortals." Sleep spares no one, not even Zeus.

In the Theogony, the twin brothers share a house at the edge of the world, near the bronze threshold where Night and Day pass each other in turn. They are never both inside at once. When Thanatos walks the world, Hypnos waits at home. When Hypnos goes abroad, Thanatos stays behind.

The Cave of Sleep

At the western edge of the world, in the land of the Cimmerians where the sun never penetrates, a deep cave opens in a hollow mountain. The river Lethe flows past the entrance, its waters murmuring over pebbles. The sound alone is enough to close any waking eye.

No cock crows to announce the dawn; no watchdog breaks the silence. No beast or bird disturbs the air. Only the murmur of Lethe fills the quiet, and mists of forgetfulness drift from the cave mouth. Poppies and sleep-inducing herbs grow thick around the entrance.

Within the cave, on a couch of ebony draped with dark covers, Hypnos reclines in permanent languor. Around him lie the Oneiroi, his dream-children, in forms as numerous as grains on the shore. There is no door to creak and no guardian to turn visitors away. It is a place of absolute stillness. In Statius's Thebaid, Hypnos holds a horn from which he pours slumber, and drowsy garlands hang throughout his court.

The Deception of Zeus

During the Trojan War, Hera wished to aid the Greeks while Zeus had forbidden the gods from entering the fight. She devised a plan: seduce Zeus and have Hypnos cast him into deep slumber so Poseidon could rally the Greek forces. When she approached Hypnos, the god hesitated. The last time he had put Zeus to sleep at her request, she had sent storms against Heracles. Zeus awoke in a fury and would have hurled Hypnos into the sea, but Sleep fled to his mother Nyx, whom even Zeus fears to offend. Only Night's protection saved him.

Hera offered him Pasithea, youngest of the Graces, whom he had long desired. He agreed, accompanied Hera to Mount Ida, and took the form of a bird called chalkis by the gods and kymindis by mortals. He perched in a tall pine tree. When Hera seduced Zeus, her beauty enhanced by Aphrodite's borrowed girdle, Hypnos cast sweet sleep upon him, then sped to Poseidon with the news. The sea god threw himself into battle. The tide turned for the Greeks.

Sleep and Death at Troy

When the Lycian king Sarpedon, a son of Zeus, fell to Patroclus's spear at Troy, Zeus watched from Ida and grieved. Fate demanded the death, and Hera had warned him not to interfere. He commanded Apollo to cleanse the body and anoint it with ambrosia, then entrusted it to Hypnos and Thanatos to bear swiftly home to Lycia for burial with full funeral honors. The twin brothers lifted the warrior's body and bore him through the sky.

The Euphronios krater, painted around 515 BCE, captures the moment: Hypnos and Thanatos as winged young men lifting Sarpedon from the battlefield under Hermes's guidance, their wings spread as they prepare to carry him home.

The Oneiroi

Hypnos fathered the Oneiroi with Pasithea. A thousand sons, each taking a different shape in the sleeping mind. Morpheus was the master among them: he could wear any person's face and speak with their voice. His brothers took other shapes: Phobetor wore the forms of beasts, Phantasos the landscapes of dream geography.

When the gods needed to tell Alcyone that her husband Ceyx had drowned, they sent Morpheus in the dead man's form. He appeared dripping with seawater and told her to stop praying for a man already lost. Alcyone woke screaming. She ran to the shore and leapt from a breakwater toward a body she saw washing in with the tide. The gods turned them both into halcyon birds before she hit the water.

Two gates stood between the world of dreams and the waking world. True dreams passed through a gate of polished horn; false ones through a gate of ivory. In the Odyssey, Penelope tells the stranger in her hall of a dream of the suitors' destruction. She does not trust it. She believes it came through ivory.

Invocations

At Troezen and Lacedaemon, the Greeks set statues of Hypnos beside Thanatos and poured libations to both brothers.

In Sophocles' Philoctetes, the chorus begs Sleep to visit a man whose wound will not close: "Sleep, that knows not pain nor grief, come to us with favoring breath." In Euripides' Orestes, Electra calls him "sweetest Sleep" and begs him to come to her brother, who has not rested since he killed their mother. At the sanctuaries of Asclepius, suppliants lay on stone floors through the night and waited for Hypnos to bring the dream that would heal.