Rhea

Rhea is a Titaness, sister and wife of Kronos, and mother of the first Olympians — Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, and Hestia. When Kronos devoured each newborn, it was Rhea who saved the infant Zeus, hiding him in a cave on Crete and giving her husband a swaddled stone to swallow in his place; so through her the Olympian order was born.

The Greeks early identified her with the Anatolian mother-goddess Cybele, the Magna Mater whose ecstatic rites Rome adopted. The emperor Julian devoted one of his hymns to this Mother of the Gods, reading her philosophically as the great fount of life and form that proceeds from the intelligible gods and pours generative power into the cosmos — the divine motherhood that mediates between the changeless principles and the world of becoming.

Epithets

• Meter Theon Μήτηρ Θεῶν — Mother of the Gods
• Magna Mater Lat. — the Great Mother (Roman)