Typhoeus was born and raised in the pit of Tartarus. The spirit of the pit—the primordial god Tartarus—was his dad. His mom was Mother Earth. I guess that explains why Typhoeus was both big and evil. His parents must have been so proud.
Typhoeus had a lovely wife named Echidna down in the pit. Okay, she wasn’t really lovely. She was a hideously foul she-monster, but they must have gotten along, because they had lots of kids together. In fact, just about every horrible monster you can think of was a child of Typhoeus and Echidna.
Despite this, one day Typhoeus got restless and decided to leave his comfy home in the pit of eternal damnation.
“Honey,” he told Echidna, “I’m going upstairs to destroy the gods and take over the universe. I’ll try to be back by dinner.”
“This is your mother’s idea, isn’t it?” Echidna complained. “She’s always telling you what to do! You should stay at home. The Hydra needs his father. The Sphinx needs her dad!”
Typhoeus shuddered. It was true that Mother Earth was always goading him to destroy the gods. Gaea hated the gods ever since they defeated the Titans. But this trip was Typhoeus’s idea. He needed a vacation from his monstrous kids and his she-monster wife. Taking over the universe sounded like just the ticket.
“I’ll be back,” he promised. “If I’m late, don’t wait up.”
So the storm giant Typhoeus broke into the upper world and began destroying everything in his path. It was pathetically easy. He ripped up a mountain and smashed a city. He summoned a hurricane and drowned an entire island.
“Is this all you’ve got?” Typhoeus yelled toward Mount Olympus, far in the distance. “Where are the gods?”
The gods, in fact, were assembling for war…until they saw the size of Typhoeus, how he raged across the earth, flattening nations, blowtorching forests, turning the oceans into poison with his serpent-headed fingers.
“Uh…” Poseidon gulped. “That guy is huge.”
“Massive,” said Athena, for once agreeing with the sea god. “I do not like these odds.”
“Guys!” Zeus protested. “There are twelve of us, and only one of him! We defeated the Titans. We can do this!”
Actually, Zeus was shaking in his sandals. He wanted to run too, but he was the king of the gods, so he had to set a good example.
“Come on,” he said, hoisting his best lightning bolt. “Charge!”
The gods jumped on their flying chariots and followed him into battle. They yelled, “Charge,” but they were so nervous, it sounded more like “charge?”
When Typhoeus saw them coming, he experienced something he’d never felt before…joy. The gods were ridiculously tiny! They would be so easy to destroy that it made him giddy. He could already imagine himself taking over Zeus’s throne on Mount Olympus and ruling the universe, though he’d probably have to get a bigger throne.
“DIE, IMMORTALS!” he bellowed, which wasn’t a logical challenge, since technically immortals can’t die; but I guess Typhoeus was planning to blast them into tiny piles of dust and sprinkle them into the abyss, which is pretty close to being dead.
Anyway, the storm giant spewed poison and belched fire and rose to his full height, so his head scraped the sky. Clouds of darkness swirled around him. The ground melted, and the seas boiled around his reptilian feet.
The gods changed their war cry to: “RUN!” “HELP!” And: “MOMMY!”
Everybody except Zeus turned and fled.
It wasn’t their finest moment. Some stories say they turned into animals to hide from the giant’s wrath. One story even claims they hid in Egypt. While they were there, in the forms of animals, they gave rise to all those Egyptian myths about animal-headed gods.
I’m not sure what the Egyptians would say about that, seeing as their myths are thousands of years older than the Greek ones, but that’s the Greek story.
Whatever the case, Zeus was left alone to face Typhoeus.
The god of the sky screamed after the fleeing Olympians: “Are you serious? Get back here, you wimps!”
But his voice was drowned out by the laughter of Typhoeus. “Poor little Zeus, all alone! You’d better flee too, tiny god, before I smash you like an ant!”
Zeus had changed into an ant once to woo one of his girlfriends, so he had a fondness for ants. Typhoeus couldn’t go around insulting ants like that! Anger gave him courage.
“You’re going down, big boy!” Zeus yelled. He charged in for the kill.
He threw a lightning bolt that impacted Typhoeus’s chest like a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb. The storm giant staggered backward, but he didn’t fall.
Zeus blasted the giant again and again. The explosions fried the air, vaporized the water, and blistered the surface of the earth, but still Typhoeus kept coming.
The giant swiped at Zeus’s chariot and smacked it right out of the sky. As Zeus fell, Typhoeus snatched him up in a snake-fingered hand and began to squeeze.
Zeus changed his size, growing as large as he possibly could, which was still tiny compared to Typhoeus. Zeus struggled to free himself, but even the god’s massive strength was of no use against the giant.
“Let me go!” Zeus bellowed.
“Sure,” Typhoeus growled, belching fire so close to Zeus’s face, it burned his beard off. “But I can’t have you making trouble, so I’ll need a security deposit.”
“A what?”
Typhoeus’s snaky fingers wrapped around Zeus’s arms and legs. The snake heads sank their poisonous fangs into his forearms and his calves and…
Okay. Prepare yourself. This is gross.
…they ripped out Zeus’s tendons.
What does that mean? Well, the tendons hold your muscles to your bones, right? At least that’s what my basketball coach told me. They’re extremely strong bands of connective tissue—like the body’s natural duct tape. And without duct tape nothing works.
Typhoeus yanked out the immortal sinews, glistening white slimy cords of godly connective tissue (I did warn you it was gross), and Zeus went as limp as a doll. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. He was completely helpless, and in so much pain, he couldn’t even see straight.
“There we go!” Typhoeus yelled. “Oh, and I’ll just take these lightning bolts. They’ll make excellent toothpicks.”
The giant grabbed the lightning bolts that were hanging off Zeus’s belt. Then he bent down and picked up the extra ones from the wrecked chariot that lay smoking on a nearby island. “That’s good! Now you’re free to go. You can enjoy watching me destroy Olympus and taking over the world. Then I’ll come back later and step on you.”
Typhoeus tossed Zeus aside like a clod of dirt. The lord of the universe landed in a crumpled heap on the side of a mountain and whimpered, “Ouch.”
Typhoeus stormed off, heading for Olympus, with Zeus’s lightning bolts and gross sinews safely tucked in his pouch (or man purse, or whatever the fashionable evil storm giants were wearing back then).
Well, gang, at this point things weren’t looking too good for the gods. Or for humans. Or for anything that lived on the face of the planet. Zeus was lying on a mountainside helpless and in agony, watching as Typhoeus marched off to destroy Olympus.
Zeus thought: Why did I want to be king? This bites.
Meanwhile the other gods were hiding, and Typhoeus raged across creation, almost unopposed. An army of Poseidon’s sea monsters and whales did try to stop him, but Typhoeus just kicked them out of the way and poisoned their waters. Some of the sky gods tried to fight him—the spirits of the stars, and Selene, the Titan of the moon. In fact, the Greeks believed that the scars and craters on the moon were left over from when Selene rode the moon chariot into battle.
Nothing helped. The seas kept boiling. Whole islands were destroyed. The sky turned into a red-and-black boiling mass. Every so often Typhoeus would stomp on the earth, open a huge crevice
, and reach inside to pull out some magma-like yolk from the inside of an egg. He’d throw fiery globs of lava all over the earth, setting fields on fire, melting cities, and writing burning graffiti on the sides of mountains like ZEUS SUX and TYPHOEUS WUZ HERE.
He would’ve made it to Mount Olympus, no problem, but fortunately a couple of gods decided to circle back and see what happened to Zeus.
They weren’t the bravest gods. They were just the sneakiest. One was Hermes the messenger, who could fly very fast and was good at staying off the radar. The other was a minor satyr god named Aegipan, who had furry legs and hooves like a goat, and generally looked like a regular satyr except that he was immortal.
Aegipan had managed to hide from Typhoeus by turning into a goat with the tail of a fish. (Why such a weird disguise? Maybe he panicked. I don’t know.) Anyway, he dived into the sea and escaped.
Now he was feeling bad about being a coward, so he hitched a ride with Hermes, and they flew around until they spotted Zeus lying in a heap.
“Ouch,” Hermes said when they landed. “What happened to you?”
Zeus wanted to chew them out for running away and leaving him to fight Typhoeus alone, but he was in too much pain, and he needed their help too badly.
He could barely speak, but he managed to tell them about the missing lightning bolts and the sinews that Typhoeus had ripped out of his arms and legs.
Aegipan looked like he wanted to throw up. “So we’re finished. Game over.”
“We can’t give up,” Zeus said. “I need my tendons and my bolts back. If I can get the drop on Typhoeus, hit him at point-blank range, I think I can take him out. But how to get back my weapons and my sinews….”
He stared at the panpipes hanging around Aegipan’s neck.
Bringing a musical instrument with you into battle might sound silly, but Aegipan always carried his pipes. He had a reputation for playing very well.
Suddenly, Zeus got a crazy idea. He remembered how he’d tricked Kronos into barfing up the other Olympians years ago, how he’d posed as a cupbearer and won the Titans’ praise by singing songs and dancing….
“When strength doesn’t work,” Zeus said, “trickery might.”
“I like trickery,” Hermes said.
Zeus told them his plan.
Fortunately, Hermes was a fast flyer. He picked up Aegipan and Rag Doll Zeus and zipped at top speed around Typhoeus’s path of destruction. The gods landed on the Greek mainland near the foot of Mount Olympus, right where the storm giant would have to walk.
Hermes deposited Zeus in a nearby cave, where the lord of the sky would have to wait like a useless sack of rocks while the plan either failed or succeeded.
Hermes hid out of sight in the nearest grove of trees, while Aegipan the satyr god made himself comfortable in a wide meadow, where he couldn’t possibly be missed, and started playing his panpipes.
Pretty soon the sky darkened. The ground shook. The air smelled like acid and poison, and the trees began to smolder. Aegipan kept playing his sweet melodies.
The dark form of Typhoeus appeared on the horizon, like King Kong, Godzilla, and one of those evil Transformer dudes all rolled into one. He bellowed his victory cry as he approached Mount Olympus. The whole earth shuddered.
Aegipan kept playing. His melodies were like sunlight in the morning and a cool stream trickling through the woods and the smell of your girlfriend’s freshly shampooed hair….
Sorry. I got distracted. What was I saying?
Right…the satyr god. His music evoked everything good and beautiful. When Typhoeus got close, he heard the sweet song floating in the air, and he stopped in utter confusion.
“That doesn’t sound like screaming,” the giant muttered to himself. “It’s not an explosion, either. What is that?”
Safe to say that they didn’t have a lot of music in Tartarus, and if they did, it was more along the lines of funeral dirges and death metal.
Typhoeus finally spotted the satyr god kicking back in the meadow, playing his pipes. Typhoeus could’ve stomped him flat, obviously, but Aegipan looked completely unconcerned.
Typhoeus was baffled. He knelt down to take a closer look at the satyr. For a few moments, the world was silent except for the burning wake of destruction behind the giant, and the sweet music of the panpipes.
The storm giant had never heard anything so beautiful. It certainly was better than his she-monster wife’s nagging voice and the crying of his monstrous children.
Without even meaning to, Typhoeus heaved a deep contented sigh, which was so powerful, it parted Aegipan’s hair and disturbed his song.
The satyr god finally looked up, but he didn’t seem scared.
(In fact, Aegipan was terrified, but he hid it well, possibly because he knew Hermes was standing by, ready for a quick extraction if things went bad.)
“Oh, hello,” said Aegipan. “I didn’t notice you.”
Typhoeus tilted his massive head. “I am as tall as the sky, shrouded in darkness, and I have been destroying the world. How did you not notice me?”
“I guess I was busy with my music.” Aegipan started playing again. Immediately Typhoeus felt his massive heart lift with joy that was almost better than when he contemplated destroying the gods.
“I like your music,” Typhoeus decided. “I may not kill you.”
“Thank you,” Aegipan said calmly, and went back to playing.
“When I destroy the gods, I will take over Mount Olympus. I will make you my court musician so you can perform for me.”
Aegipan just kept playing his soft happy song.
“I will need good music,” Typhoeus decided. “You can write a great ballad about me—a song of how I conquered the world!”
Aegipan stopped and suddenly looked sad. “Hmm…if only…no. No, it’s impossible.”
“What?” Typhoeus boomed.
It was really hard for Aegipan to remember the plan and stay calm with a massive storm giant looming over him, the hundreds of snake-head fingers dripping poison and glaring at him with red eyes.
Hermes is nearby, Aegipan reminded himself. I can do this.
“Well, I would love to write a song about you,” Aegipan said. “But such a majestic tune shouldn’t be played on panpipes. I would need a harp.”
“You can have any harp in the world,” Typhoeus promised.
“Very gracious, my lord,” Aegipan said, “but it would need strings made from some incredibly tough sinew…much stronger than cow or horse guts. Otherwise, the strings would burst when I tried to play a song about your power and majesty. No mortal instrument could withstand such a song!”
This made perfect sense to Typhoeus. Then he had a thought.
“I know just the thing!” Typhoeus set his pack on the ground and dug out Zeus’s tendons. “You may use these to make your harp.”
“Oh, that’s perfect!” Aegipan said, though he really wanted to scream, That’s disgusting! “As soon as you conquer the universe, I will make a harp worthy of your song.” Aegipan lifted his panpipes and played a few notes of a soft sleepy lullaby. “But that must be incredibly hard work, conquering the world, even for an incomparable being such as yourself.”
Aegipan played a little more, invoking a lazy afternoon, the cool shade of a tree by a brook, the gentle swinging of a comfortable hammock. Typhoeus’s eyes began to get heavy.
“Yes…tiring work,” Typhoeus agreed. “Nobody appreciates how I labor!” He sat down, shaking the mountains. “Destroying cities. Poisoning oceans. Fighting with the moon. It’s exhausting!”
“Yes, my lord,” Aegipan said. “If you’d like, I will play you some music while you rest for a moment, before your tiring climb to victory on Mount Olympus.”
“Hmm. Music.” Typhoeus’s eyelids drooped. “Perhaps just a short…Zzzzzz.”
His massive head sl
umped against his chest, and the storm giant began to snore. Aegipan played his sweetest lullaby to keep the giant dreaming happily.
Meanwhile, Hermes sneaked out and took the sinews, then stealthily dug around in Typhoeus’s man purse until he found Zeus’s lightning bolts. He nodded at Aegipan, like, Keep playing!, then flew off to Zeus’s cave.
It was messy work, sticking tendons back into the sky god’s arms and legs, using careful zaps from a lightning bolt to reattach everything. A couple of times Hermes put the tendons on backward. When Zeus tried to move his arm, he slapped himself in the back of the head.
“Sorry!” Hermes said. “I can fix that!”
Finally Zeus was back to normal. Being an immortal god, he healed fast; and once he held his lightning bolts again, anger surged through him, making him feel stronger than ever.
“Time for payback,” he grumbled.
“What can I do?” Hermes asked.
“Stay out of the way,” Zeus said.
“I can do that.”
Zeus marched from the cave and grew in size until he was almost half as tall as Typhoeus—which was huge for a god. As soon as Hermes plucked up Aegipan and flew him to safety, Zeus yelled, “WAKE UP!”
He slammed Typhoeus in the face with a thunderbolt, which was kind of like having a star go supernova right up your nostrils.
Typhoeus fell flat on the ground, but Zeus blasted him again. The giant staggered, trying to rise. He was still half asleep, dazed and confused and wondering what had happened to the nice satyr with the pretty music. Zeus was hitting him with lightning…but that was impossible, wasn’t it?
BLAM!
KA-BOOM!
The giant went into full retreat. Lightning crackled around him and blew the snakes right off his fingers, shredding his cloud of darkness and blinding him over and over.