The Monstrefact Redux: The Hecatoncheires

In this classic episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the Hecatoncheires or hundred-handed warriors of Greek mythology…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lambin. This is the Monster Fact,
a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
focusing in non mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time,
and the gods, givers of good things, applauded when they
heard his word, and their spirit longed for war even
more than before. And they all, both male and female,

(00:33):
stirred up hated battle that day, the Titan gods and
all that were born of Cronos, together with those dread
mighty ones of overwhelming strength, whom Zeus brought up to
the light from Erebus beneath the earth, A hundred arms
sprang from the shoulders of all alike, and each had
fifty heads growing upon his shoulders, upon stout limbs. These

(00:53):
then stood against the Titans in grim strife, holding huge
rocks in their strong hands. These are the words of
Hesiod from his eighth century BCE text Theogony, here in
translation by Evelyn White, describing the one hundred handed warriors
the hecatonkyaries of Greek mythology. Naturally, the poet Hesiod compiled

(01:16):
various tellings and traditions in his poetry, and in doing so,
solidified a number of characters, relationships, and tales concerning the
Greek pantheon of deities. So what we read here is
effectively the most popular understanding of the Hecatonkers. They were
a very ancient race of multi headed and multi handed giants,

(01:36):
and they stood among the various children of the primordial
sky god Urunas. But Urunas hated these monstrosities from the
first and imprisoned them, locking them away out of sight. Eventually,
Urunas's offspring, Chronos, rises against his father, overthrows him, but
seemingly keeps these earlier unsightly offspring locked away. It is

(01:59):
not until Zeus, the child of Cronos, rises up with
his fellow Olympian gods, rebels against the Titans. They free
and recruit the Hecatonkyres, as well as their kin, the Cyclopses,
into their ensuing war for control of the cosmos. This
was the Titanomachi, and Hesiod describes their role in its battles,

(02:23):
naming the three most prominent of the one hundred handed
warriors in surviving traditions, and amongst the foremost Cotis and Bryarias,
and guys insatiate for war, raised fierce, fighting three hundred
rocks one upon another. They launched from their strong hands
and overshadowed the Titans with their missiles, and buried them

(02:46):
beneath the wide pathed earth, and bound them in bitter chains.
When they had conquered them by their strength, for all
their great spirit, as far beneath the earth to Tartarus.
The Hecatonkyres, according to Hesiod, are much more than allies
of the gods. In their war against the Titans, the
Hecatonqueries strike the final blow. They chain the Titans. They

(03:09):
become the wardens of the Titans, and are quite ironically
imprisoned once more in the process. Now it should be
noted that in some traditions the Hecatonkures may have fought
instead on the side of the Titans, and in some compilations,
such as Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the authors
go so far as to describe individuals, specifically Bryarius as

(03:32):
a Titan. So it gets a bit confusing at times.
And I suppose that's how I have always felt about
the Hecatonquary since I was a child and read about them,
and various books, somewhat confused because the morphologies of so
many other Greek monsters are just so well defined, there's
so many illustrations of them. As a child, you can

(03:53):
draw them, you can roughly sketch them yourself, and it's
a lot of fun. But the hecatonquerris always seem to
defy logic name feels more like a literary concept describing
a force of nature as opposed to a codified creature,
and indeed this is often how they are interpreted. They
are difficult to envision or to reproduce visually, and certainly

(04:14):
there are plenty of contemporary artists who have had a
lot of fun producing various surreal and just horrifying interpretations
of the hecatonqurese, but one is generally hard pressed to
find representations of these creatures in art history. Now I
invite correction on this front, because I would very much
love to see such images, to see like classical illustrations,
medieval illustrations and so forth, all of the hecatonqures. But

(04:38):
my searches have generally come up well empty handed. Perhaps
we've simply lost ancient Greek depictions of these creatures. I
can only assume that they were too far removed from
actual human physiology to interest many sculptors. You know, I mean,
if you're interested in capturing the reality of the human form,
even in the telling of stories and the presentation of

(04:59):
information about deities, then this might not be your first stop.
Perhaps they were creature's best left for depiction in the
ages of surrealism and cosmic horror to come. Indeed, outside
of their role in the struggle against the Titans, little
seems to have survived about the hecatonqures in general, aside
from some tangents concerning Bryarias. Again, the Hecatonquyres are perhaps

(05:23):
best interpreted as embodiments of natural forces. Given their hundred
hands and heads, they are like armies of men compiled
into a single grade entity, like a storm or earthquake,
with the power of an army. As such, turning to
the natural world of biology, our best example of hundred
headed entities are actually large groups working together, such as

(05:45):
humans or use social insects. Now, some of you out
there might be thinking to yourself, well, I know what
has one hundred appendages? Well, even centipedes, despite their name
which means one hundred footed never have exactly one hundred
e limbs. They may have as few as some like
twenty three leg bearing segments, or as many as I
think one hundred and ninety one, but there is always

(06:05):
an odd number of leg bearing segments, never the even
fifty segments that would produce a total of one hundred legs.
By the way, the first millipede with more than a
thousand legs wasn't discovered till twenty twenty one. Now, despite
this disappointment, scientists have fouled room to invoke the hecatonkres
in the naming of various organisms. Specifically, the name Bryarius

(06:30):
is invoked in the scientific name for various organisms, including,
but not limited to, the Caribbean reef octopus, the hairy
c cucumber, at least one species of sea star, the
qirky seafinger, coral, a sea slug, an extinct trilabite, and
a Central American moth. As for their mythic namesake, the hecatonkyres, well,

(06:51):
maybe we should heed the words ohesiate once more. Perhaps
we lack for older depictions of the creature because they
are not to be approached, They are not to be
looked upon, even Uruanas chose not to do so, and
he used to hide them all away in a secret
place of earth so soon as each was born, and

(07:11):
would not suffer them to come up into the light.
And Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing, but vast earth
groaned within. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster, Fact,
The Artifact, or Anamalia Stupendium each week. As always, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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