The Twelve Gods of Olympus

The Twelve Gods of Olympus
APOLLO ARTEMIS APHRODITE ATHENA

APOLLO

Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto and brother of Artemis, is the god of the inner psychic light.

Poseidon concludes the list of the seven gods originating from Cronos. The five other gods of Olympus are the outcomes of unions between Zeus and goddesses belonging to the lines of descent of other Titan couples. As the children of Zeus, they are incarnations of the highest plane of mental consciousness in view of a development of other modalities of divine Consciousness. They correspond to a series of 'awakenings', or re-awakenings if we take into account the reality of past lives, which necessitate a certain level of prior maturity of consciousness. Apollo is the son of Zeus and Leto.

ARTEMIS

Artemis in a chariot drawn by hinds - Louvre Museum

Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, is the power of the overmind that watches over the growth of integrity, of the enlightened will.

Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo. She represents the feminine aspect of the force of light and truth that leads man towards the contact and union with the psychic, and which will then open the door to the world of spirit and allow the descent of the latter into the inferior planes, preparing the process of transformation. She can therefore never be truly separated from her brother. Hence their birth as twins, for there is no duality at the level of the psychic being and they only represent different aspects of a same unity. While Apollo is the illuminating power of the soul, Artemis is the force responsible for making integrity grow. She is the 'will of the soul' or 'the illuminated will'.

APHRODITE

Aphrodite on a swan - British Museum

Aphrodite is the power that watches over the evolution of love in man. In today's humanity, it operates mainly through the destruction of forms.

The origins ascribed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, differ depending on the author.
Oriented towards the practical implications of spiritual evolution, Homer presents Aphrodite as a symbol of love in evolution such as can be observed in the animal kingdom and experienced by man at different levels.
More theoretically minded, Hesiod describes Love at its highest level as it first appeared at the beginning of life at the moment of the castration of Ouranos, when limits were put to the infinite consciousness so that creation could appear.

But the symbolic meaning of the goddess continued to degrade over time, designating progressively denser planes of the vital till it reached that of carnal love, which is very distant from the meaning attributed by the initiates of ancient times.

In Homer's works, Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, herself daughter of the Titan Oceanos, 'the principle of the natural evolution of the currents of energy-consciousness'. Dione is also sometimes known as the daughter of Ouranos, making her a symbol of union at the highest level above even the forces of creation (the Titan Oceanos).
By the structuring characters of her name, Dione, (ΔΙ+Ν), represents 'evolution towards a conscious union'. If we consider the genitive of Zeus, (ΔΙος), she is therefore 'Zeus in evolution', which is to say the feminine aspect of the same energy. Her alliance with Zeus, 'consciousness turned towards intelligence', indicates 'an evolution towards union and Love through the progression of the widening of consciousness and discernment'.
In fact, even if we can already see as 'love' the movement of life aimed at the reproduction of species - pollination in plant species, the dispersal of semen in a watery environment in most species of fish, etc., followed by the first forms of amorous exchange in more highly evolved animals, which seem more similar to human love - Homer only takes such movements into consideration when the reflective mental consciousness proper to man enters the scene.