Poseidon is the power that reigns on the subconscious. By the upheavals it raises, it forces a progressive control of the vital.
Poseidon. Louvre Museum, Paris
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Poseidon, the second son of Cronos, is the god of the waters, but not of all waters, for he only rules over the seas, lakes and springs. Rivers, images of currents of energy, depend on the Titan Oceanos and are controlled by other gods.
See Family Tree 17
Deities linked to the watery worlds, for which the ancient Greeks used specific terms, are to be attentively differentiated.
Pontos, known as ‘the sea stream’ or ‘the sea of sterile floods’ in mythology, was brought to life by Gaia without the intervention of a male power, as was Ouranos. He belongs to the first divine generation and is a symbol of Life coexisting with Matter and Spirit, one and indivisible: hence the qualifier ‘of sterile floods’. He precedes the Titans, and therefore precedes human consciousness. His five children borne by his mother Gaia represent evolutionary stages of the development of the vital. The eldest is Nereus, “the old man of the sea”, who represents the very first stage of animal evolution with the appearance of the first cells.
Pontos is associated with the high seas, for he is linked to the ‘depths of life’ and its deities and monsters. As the subconscious is closely related to vital manifestations, Poseidon, brother of Zeus and master of the subconscious, is the ‘Ποντο-μεδων, the king of the sea’. The term Pelasgian or Pelasgus (πελαγος) is also associated to him, at least in Hesiod’s works, for it suggests a dimension of depth and danger.
The second term which we could erroneously attribute to the world of water is Oceanos. A Titanic deity of the second generation, Oceanos is a force of creation, a symbol of the currents of energy-consciousness which run through the entire universe as well as our bodies, present in both the macrocosm and the microcosm. To make the suggested images and the natural elements coincide, the initiates of ancient times assigned rivers and streams to his influence. His children are therefore too numerous to be calculated. In later periods of Greek history his name was associated to the ‘outer sea’, the Atlantic Ocean, but this word was never used in that sense in primitive mythology.
The third term used to designate the sea is Thalassa, Θαλασσα (Θαλαττα Thalatta in the Attic form), the root of which is thal, Θαλ, which signifies ‘pressing forward or growing’. It is linked to evolution, and therefore to the journey of the seeker. But Homer also speaks of ατρυγετοιο Θαλασσης when Zeus, upon triumphing over the Titans, banishes Cronos under the earth and the sterile sea, which is to say to a place in which the evolution of life comes to a standstill. We will therefore come across this term in the myths of the great epic voyages across the seas.
Finally, two other terms are used to describe the sea: ‘als’, which designates both salt and sea, seems to be associated with the essence of life, liberty (vital fire liberated from all sentimentality), and ‘nau’, which is used in the context of navigation and therefore in the context of the orientation and progress of the quest.
Poseidon is the second son of the Titan Cronos, following Hades and preceding Zeus. He belongs to the third generation of gods, that which rules over the world of forms. Let us remember that in the division of the world of consciousness between the three brothers, it is to him that was assigned the subconscious, the vast reservoir that registers the slightest phenomenon of the mind and vital and the slightest of sensations. And as the sea is both a symbolic expression of life and the place which preserves the memories of evolution, Poseidon is its master.
Poseidon is not the subconscious itself, but rather the power of the overmind which strives towards its transformation. Complementary to Demeter, his name could be understood as ̵