- 7 weeks ago
Documentary, True Monsters Gods Vs. Demons S1 E3
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00:01Gods and monsters. They've been at war since the beginning of time.
00:05There's giants everywhere and Thor likes to smack them with his hammer.
00:08What's real about history's most savage warriors?
00:11The berserkers were absolute wild men in battle.
00:15And have archaeologists discover the birthplace of mythology's supreme ruler?
00:20Everything we found changes everything we thought we knew about the origins of Zeus.
00:25Plus, could the true myth behind Prometheus solve an ancient medical mystery?
00:29It is possible that the story of Prometheus was looking forward to the point where we would be able to heal ourselves.
00:36We opened Pandora's box to let loose the surprising truth behind the most epic gods and monsters in history right now.
00:59No Norse gods to tolerate the battlefield than a giant slayer known as Thor.
01:14He harnessed the power of lightning and punished mankind's greatest threats.
01:31But could this hammer-wielding warrior have actually existed?
01:36And what about his legendary weapon?
01:44Clues can be found hidden in the Norse myths and perhaps buried in the ground itself.
01:50Everyone's favorite god is just a big, burly, huge guy with a temper to match.
01:57He's the most powerful of all the gods.
02:01He protects Asgard, where the gods live.
02:03And he protects Midgard, which is the earth.
02:06And he protects men.
02:08He provides the thunder and the rain, which gives nourishment to the crops.
02:13And so the workingmen really, really loved Thor.
02:18Thor is a working-class hero with a working-class weapon.
02:23His short-handled hammer, called Molnir, could level mountains and was so heavy only Thor could wield it.
02:30The owner means the crusher.
02:32And this hammer is amazingly powerful.
02:35When he throws this hammer, it returns to him.
02:38It always strikes his target.
02:40It never misses.
02:41And it destroys.
02:46You can imagine that the hammer was simply the combination of the right technology, even though it looks lower-tech,
02:52in the hands of the right kind of person, was far more devastating.
02:56If you're big and strong enough, when you hit someone on their shield, you'll break their arm.
03:05Since 1000 AD, hundreds of amulets in Molnir's shape have turned up across Northern Europe.
03:12These discoveries show how many people sought Thor's protection.
03:18The stories about Thor sound fantastical, but is it possible the giant killer actually existed?
03:25No one believed in the existence of Thor, more than the Germanic warriors known as the Vikings.
03:33And their history may shed light on the truth behind the legendary god.
03:43The Vikings developed a reputation as ruthless warriors, who set out to raid, pillage, and conquer the world.
03:51From the 8th to 11th century, they took to the seas in their longboats, terrorizing the British Isles, France, Italy, and Spain.
04:01But while the Vikings were fierce and capable warriors, they were more often explorers, craftsmen, traders, and farmers.
04:11Their quests beyond their borders were more about escaping one formidable enemy they couldn't conquer back home.
04:18The harsh Scandinavian weather.
04:22After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the climate has gotten much colder.
04:26You've gone out of this warming period into a sort of a mini ice age.
04:29And so, survival is very difficult.
04:33That really shaped their view on life, even after they had realized that they could get a lot of wealth by stealing it from other people.
04:39They're really living on the bare edge of survival most of the time.
04:44So their gods reflect that in a lot of ways.
04:46The extreme cold wiped out crops and constantly threatened famine.
04:52There was only one way for the Vikings to combat the unconquerable, with the help of their beloved god, Thor.
05:01Thor was known to fight giants.
05:04But for the Vikings, it wasn't giant men or beasts in the physical sense, but giant challenges that their brute force couldn't overcome.
05:15The Old Norse word for giant encompasses a huge number of sort of nature spirits, frost giants, fire giants, earthquakes.
05:24All those are giant things, things that are bad.
05:27Thor's mythological battles with giants symbolized the man versus nature conflict the Vikings encountered every day.
05:36You could hear this loud boom of thunder and the lightning flash.
05:43And so when you hear that, you should be really relaxed because it means Thor has been out protecting us.
05:50With a flick of his brawny arm, Thor used his hammer to harness the elements, including thunder and lightning.
06:01But what about that hammer?
06:03Did those amulets bearing its image tell us it was a real artifact?
06:08Is there more evidence to be on Earth that could prove there was a real Mjolnir?
06:14And what could it have been made of?
06:17I think that Thor's hammer was certainly a meteoric hammer.
06:20If you can imagine a heaven metal that falls from the sky and this molten mass you find in a smoking crater.
06:26And you can pick this up and you can forge weapons that not only are sharper and more powerful, but they can also be magnetized.
06:32Think of the magic of that.
06:38These magnetic properties would have been considered magical.
06:41And if there was an electrical spark that was given off at some point, that could grow into magical powers and lightning and thunderbolts very easily.
06:52I mean, human beings do tend to aggrandize stories.
06:57One thing is for sure.
06:59In the late Bronze Age, nickel iron meteorites did fall in the region where Thor and other great mythologies were born.
07:07I think all of these great weapons that we hear, legendary weapons, were meteoric iron.
07:11Arthur's sword Excalibur was certainly a meteoric iron.
07:14It's a whole story about that.
07:16It's really easy to see how telling stories about something that really happened starts to get this layer of mythology.
07:24And, oh, yes, he had this huge hammer.
07:26You know how bad that hammer was?
07:28Lightning came out of it.
07:29That's how great that hammer was.
07:31In the end, the hammer grew to be a standalone symbol of power and played a significant role not just to the Vikings,
07:42but to a very different and more modern group of warriors, the Nazis.
07:49The swastika is meant to mimic the motion of Mornir when it's being thrown.
07:54Adolf Hitler adopted it as a symbol of strength for the Third Reich.
07:59Though in the end, Thor and Hitler couldn't be more different.
08:03Thor was the one who looked after the ordinary people.
08:06They're everything.
08:07But they worship him.
08:08Thor was the one who protected them.
08:11But there is a villain in Norse mythology born of a monster who did have evil intentions.
08:17He sparked an Armageddon.
08:20And Thor's hammer plays a part in his story, too.
08:24One day, Thor wakes up and his hammer's missing.
08:37And so he starts asking around, and Loki says that he'll go and take a look for it.
08:41So he sort of goes off and he runs into a giant.
08:44And he says to the giant, you know, have you seen Thor's hammer?
08:47And the giant says, not only have I seen it, but I stole it and I've hidden it.
08:51And I'm not going to give it back until I get to marry Freya, one of the goddesses.
08:56They decided we need to get this hammer back.
08:59So Loki suggested to Thor, how about you put on the wedding dress and we'll tell the giants that you're Freya.
09:07Think of this big guy.
09:09Muscular is this god.
09:11And Loki has convinced him to dress up as a woman and go and pretend to marry this guy.
09:18Loki says this is traditionally the time where the groom gives the bride a gift.
09:23And so the giant, he pulls out the hammer, Mjolnir, and he lays it on the bride's lap.
09:28Well, Thor doesn't need any more of an opening than that.
09:31Thor reaches down and grabs the hammer, pulls the veil off,
09:35and the giants realize that it's Thor standing there in their hall.
09:39And then he proceeds to kill all the giants.
09:43Contrary to popular belief and their portrayal in modern movies,
09:47Loki and Thor are unrelated, though they consider themselves blood brothers.
09:53Loki is actually the son of the very giants Thor does battle with,
09:58and a central figure in the Norse pantheon.
10:02Norse mythology, the whole thing falls apart without Loki.
10:05Without Loki, you have no tension.
10:08Everybody's just kind of happy and drunk.
10:11Loki is the guy who goes in, starts trouble, like deliberately,
10:16sets out to start trouble.
10:18He just kind of wants to see the world burn.
10:21When it comes to Loki, there's no proof he was based on an actual historical figure.
10:29But he embodies something very real to the Norse people and some of us today.
10:35The idea you have to fight evil with evil.
10:39He's a fire god. He's malevolent.
10:42But also, you need him.
10:44You need his intelligence, you need his power, just like fire.
10:47You know, fire is feared, and fire is absolutely necessary.
10:50You can't survive without it, but it destroys you at the same time.
10:54And that's where Loki's personality comes from.
10:59As the mythology around Loki develops, he turns much more sinister.
11:04He mates with several giants and produces the chaos monsters.
11:09These offspring include a ravenous wolf and an enormous serpent.
11:14Loki is the father of Fenrir, the mythical wolf.
11:18And that wolf will eventually come back and consume the sun and the moon.
11:23He's also the father of the Midgard serpent, the largest beast of all time.
11:29The last of his children is a woman by the name of Hal.
11:33And she ends up being the overseer of the underworld.
11:36It's these horrific monsters that trigger the beginning of the end for Norse mythology.
11:41An Armageddon called Ragnarok.
11:46But first, the shocking truth about a tribe of unstoppable Norse warriors that were both mythical and real.
11:56The berserkers were absolute wild men in battle.
12:01They just could not be stuffed.
12:02And are berserkers still among us wreaking havoc today?
12:06Where are you going?
12:34Where are you going?
12:36Take it back, baby.
12:38Hey.
12:41What you gonna do?
12:43Huh?
13:04Stories about ordinary people who defy the laws of nature are popping up all over.
13:11Regular folks who tapped into a battle rage that made them immune to fear or pain.
13:25Are these bouts of superhuman strength simply a trick of the mind?
13:30Or do they have their roots in an elite group of Norse warriors called the berserkers?
13:40The berserkers were absolute wild men in battle.
13:44They wore great bear shirts.
13:46They just could not be stuffed.
13:48It's believed those bear shirts, Berserker and Old Norse, inspire the term for these hellacious warriors.
13:57By putting on the animal, you become the animal.
14:01So you shed everything that is human.
14:05You put it all aside and you become the bear.
14:09The berserkers were those troops that were sent out intentionally to go wild and to kill as many of the enemy as possible.
14:20It's thought that they may have even used hallucinogenic drugs to kind of work themselves up into a frenzy.
14:25And they would fight with great ferocity and they would become berserk.
14:30They don't feel when they're being stabbed or cut.
14:34It doesn't slow them down.
14:36They continue on in this berserker rage.
14:39Many times the other warriors would have to throw ropes or nets over them and calm them down before they started killing their own men.
14:50Were these berserkers real?
14:53Or were these ferocious warriors dedicated to the Norse god Odin just a story that became embellished over time?
15:01They're historic.
15:02They're not just part of myth.
15:05Historical accounts prove the berserkers were real.
15:10Numerous poems and the Viking sagas describe their existence as far back as the 9th century.
15:18During the Dark Ages, the berserkers became the most feared mercenaries in all of Northern Europe.
15:25They could not be touched in battle.
15:27Axes were thrown at them.
15:29Arrows were shot at them and they didn't seem to have any effect.
15:33Only one thing could stop the berserkers.
15:36One of their own kings.
15:38A Norseman named Eriker HÃ¥konarsson considered the berserkers so explosive that he outlawed them in 1015 AD.
15:47They slowly faded away and became the stuff of legend.
15:53Until today, people insist they're consumed by the same sort of rage known as berserker gang.
16:01Berserkers still live today.
16:03I've heard stories about our marines in Fallujah that called themselves berserkers and would fire themselves up in battle and could not be stopped.
16:12They finally had to be physically pulled off a machine gun because they were just enraged with battle frenzy.
16:18Some people believe the berserker spirit rages in all of us.
16:23And martial artists who want to tap into it before a fight are discussing it on internet forums.
16:30When we have to be stronger in moments of great stress, our body produces a great deal of adrenaline.
16:36We can perform feats of strength that we might not be able to ordinarily.
16:42And so it is not superhuman strength.
16:45It is human strength but amplified and magnified thanks to the endocrine system.
17:00Norse mythology includes an all-star lineup of heroic powerhouses.
17:21Among them, Thor the Thunder God.
17:25And Odin the Allfather, wisest of the gods.
17:29Their fate would come down to a final conflict known as Ragnarok.
17:34It means doom of the gods, end of the gods.
17:37And it's this moment that Odin's been worried about since day one.
17:41The Norse myths are very different.
17:43The gods are different from the Greek ones in the sense that they always know that they're going to die.
17:49That the world is going to come to an end.
17:52And that their reign is not eternal.
17:55Many religions describe some version of Armageddon.
18:00But what makes Ragnarok unique is that it may spring from a real apocalyptic event.
18:06The epic story reveals clues to the real life horrors behind it.
18:13Ragnarok is preceded by three successive years in which there is no summer.
18:18This is like climate change to the next a level.
18:22There's no hope.
18:23It is the end time.
18:25And the wolf eats the sun.
18:27And everybody is .
18:30There's going to be great wars around the world.
18:33Kin will fight kin.
18:34Bonds between friends will break down.
18:37The stars will fall out of the sky.
18:39Mountains are going to crumble.
18:40The earth is going to shake.
18:41Monsters are going to rise.
18:43The great wolf Fenrir will prowl around.
18:46And then the Midgard serpent is going to rise out of the oceans.
18:49It's the father of these monsters, Loki, who unleashes Ragnarok.
18:55It all starts when the other gods punish him for murdering the god of joy.
19:00Loki has been chained to a great rock.
19:03And a great serpent has been put over Loki.
19:07And this serpent drips venom down onto Loki's face.
19:13At Ragnarok, he finally breaks free.
19:16And he joins with the fire gods and also with the ice giants.
19:20They band together.
19:22They attack the world.
19:24One of my favorite parts of Ragnarok is the toenail boat.
19:27There's a giant boat named Nihilfar,
19:31which is made of the unclipped toenails of dead men.
19:35And the hosts of hell with Loki at their head are sailing in on the toenail boat.
19:43With Loki's band of giants and monsters on the march,
19:47Thor and Odin lead the charge against them.
19:50Their epic showdown splits the sky and pits each god against his fiercest rival.
19:57Thor goes against his greatest foe, which is the Midgard serpent.
20:01And he strikes the great serpent with his hammer and kills it.
20:05But as it's dying, it sprays Thor with venom.
20:10Thor steps back nine steps and dies.
20:16The all-father Odin goes to battle.
20:18And the great wolf finally devours the all-father and he dies.
20:23The earth is consumed by flames and everything is destroyed.
20:32So what happens is all the gods kill their nemesis, but they too are destroyed.
20:36And there's no gods left.
20:38But there are two humans who have hidden away.
20:40It's very Adam and Eve.
20:41And those two humans will then come and repopulate the world.
20:45So even though the world and life comes to an end,
20:48there's also a new beginning.
20:54Many cultures tell of an apocalypse.
20:58But Ragnarok stands out because it has some basis in reality.
21:05In 535 AD, severe cooling struck Northern Europe.
21:10So just like in the story in Ragnarok,
21:12a brutally harsh winter lasted for years.
21:16The cause of this actually in geological terms
21:19has to do with massive volcanoes going on.
21:22The sun is shut off and crops can't be grown and people die.
21:27Modern day Northern Europeans got a taste of something similar in 2010.
21:34When a volcano erupted in Iceland.
21:37Ash blotted out the sun and shut down air travel for over a week,
21:42stranding thousands of passengers.
21:45Some scholars speculate that the eruption back in 535 AD
21:49triggered a larger scale volcanic winter
21:52and sent the Vikings to their longboats.
21:55This is what set the Vikings out on their conquest
21:58because everything was frozen.
22:00And they had to go somewhere.
22:02So they went off invading other lands.
22:04The real Ragnarok that struck Scandinavia in the 6th century
22:08pushed the Norsemen beyond their known borders.
22:11And they eventually went as far as Newfoundland,
22:14where they built a settlement called Lansal Meadows.
22:18In this way, Ragnarok was both an end and a beginning.
22:24Today, the imprint of the Vikings and their gods
22:27can still be found the world over.
22:30The Norse gods are tied in with our days of the week.
22:33For Tuesday, it's Tyr.
22:36Wednesday is Woden's day.
22:38Woden is Diasa, it's Odin.
22:40Thursday is Thor's day.
22:42And Friday is Frere's day.
22:43So even in newly Christianized Anglo-Saxon England,
22:48they couldn't change the days of the week.
22:50That's what people were used to saying.
22:51There's no denying the Norse and the Vikings changed the world.
22:57And their mythology is what tells us both why
23:00and how they did it.
23:21Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
23:38And for the Greek monster Medusa,
23:41even that is an understatement.
23:43Medusa is a woman who has a head full of snakes.
23:48Instead of hair, she has snakes.
23:50With one gaze upon her form,
23:53we will instantly turn into stone.
23:56The real truth behind Medusa's hideous appearance
23:59resonates with us even today.
24:03But it's not something Zeus' son, Perseus,
24:06cares about when he's ordered to slay her
24:09and chop off her head for a valuable trophy.
24:20Perseus, raised as a normal kid.
24:30As he's getting older, he is told,
24:32you've got to go kill Medusa.
24:34Happens very often in these myths,
24:36a normal guy has to go slay the monster.
24:39To give Perseus a fighting chance,
24:41the goddess Athena gives Perseus a shield.
24:47It's a game changer that he uses to hunt Medusa
24:50and avoid her gaze.
24:52He uses that shield against Medusa
25:07to keep himself from being turned to stone
25:10and then chops her head off.
25:26But the cool thing about this story is,
25:28we have our twist ending.
25:30He uses it against Cetus,
25:32who's this giant monster,
25:34kind of like the kraken.
25:35And Perseus uses Medusa's head,
25:38takes one aspect of terror
25:40and turns it against the monster,
25:43turning into stone and saving Andromeda.
25:45Andromeda is a beauty who is chained to a rock
25:49as a sacrifice to Cetus.
25:51So Perseus becomes a hero and a king
25:55by taking out not one, but two monsters.
26:03But how did Medusa become a monster in the first place?
26:07The story of Medusa is that she was a priestess of Athena
26:13and she had beautiful hair.
26:17And Poseidon, the lord of the sea,
26:19was totally smitten.
26:21And he fell into a mad lust for her.
26:24And he came up out of the sea
26:26and pursued her into the innermost sanctum
26:28of the temple where he raped her
26:30while she clutched at the statue of Athena
26:33and begged for release.
26:36Athena was furious at Poseidon
26:38for violating her temple.
26:40But because goddesses and gods
26:42couldn't punish one another,
26:44she took out her anger on Medusa.
26:47Athena was so outraged that she cursed Medusa.
26:52And so Medusa is not an evil woman,
26:54but rather a woman scorned, you know,
26:56a woman who has been victimized twice.
26:59Medusa isn't real,
27:01but her backstory reveals disturbing truths
27:04about human behavior.
27:09Rape occurs frequently in Greek mythology
27:12and did in ancient Greece, too.
27:16It was a crime that often went unpunished or worse.
27:20It was acceptable to them.
27:22That was their culture.
27:23And there was very dark aspects to that culture.
27:26Victims of rape were frequently murdered
27:29or forced to marry their rapists,
27:32which led to many suicides.
27:35A dark culture, to be sure,
27:37but one not so far removed from our own.
27:41Women around the globe and in the United States
27:44are being blamed for being violently attacked sexually.
27:48Her punishment for having been the victim of a rape
27:51is she's turned into this horrific monster.
27:54I would argue that we do the same thing.
27:58You tend to look at her in a new light.
27:59It's hard to see her as a monster
28:00when you know what she's been through.
28:02Prometheus is the Greek god,
28:06who created man's most precious gift,
28:24and who created mankind itself.
28:28mankind itself.
28:31According to legend, he molds the first mortal from clay and water.
28:39He also bestows something real upon us that we can't live without.
28:45The most important innovation that we ever had in our history was the discovery of fire,
28:50our first great magic, because it kept away the wild beasts.
28:54Our ability to create fire and use fire is the basis of all civilization and technology.
28:58Without it, we would never have gotten anywhere.
29:01So he kick-started, he lit the match that ignited all human development and learning.
29:09But Zeus, the ruler of gods and men, doesn't consider mankind worthy of such a gift and hides it.
29:17Zeus didn't want to share fire with humans.
29:19He wanted to keep them small and cold and miserable.
29:22And Prometheus didn't like that.
29:25Most gods would have shrugged their shoulders and walked away.
29:29But Prometheus breaks into Olympus and steals back a piece of charcoal from mankind.
29:36And Zeus got angry.
29:39Zeus had him chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains.
29:43And every day, he would send his eagle to gnaw out his liver.
29:48But he's also immortal.
29:50So he's born again and has to suffer through it again.
29:54And isn't that the human condition?
30:00Now, why the liver?
30:01Because the Greeks conceived of the liver as the seat of emotion and life.
30:05And it was great pain.
30:08Some think Prometheus' suffering holds clues to a real medical mystery.
30:14We know the liver regenerates, a 20th century discovery that makes live donor transplants possible.
30:22But did the ancient Greeks know that thousands of years earlier?
30:26And if so, how?
30:28There was an obsession with divining the will of the gods by cutting open sacrificial animal and studying its liver.
30:36And certainly, if people were injured, they would have been examining and studying and nursing them and all that stuff.
30:41They would have noticed if liver tissue regenerated.
30:44Hippocrates, the Greek physician who became known as the father of Western medicine, practiced around 500 BC and treated liver conditions.
30:55In the end, we can't be sure if the Greeks knew our livers regenerate.
30:59But in the field of medicine, they were truly ahead of their time.
31:04Just like Prometheus, whose very name means foresight.
31:09He is the most noble figure in Greek mythology, hands down, in my opinion, because he is the one who is looking out for the little guy.
31:21The legacy of Prometheus shows up in every hero we have.
31:25Not just heroes in combat, heroes in exploration, heroes in thought.
31:30Prometheus lives in all of us.
31:31It is our better nature to aspire to greatness.
31:36Prometheus created the first man from clay and water.
31:51But the first woman was forged high on Mount Olympus by Hephaestus, blacksmith to the gods.
31:57She's called Pandora.
31:59Zeus invited all the gods and all the goddesses in, and he asked them to give her a gift each.
32:06And they gave her matchless beauty and speech and elegance and gorgeous clothing and a musical voice.
32:13And then she was also given insatiable curiosity.
32:17Zeus gives Pandora to Prometheus's brother, Epimetheus, as a wife, along with a wedding present.
32:24Zeus gave her this clay jar, and he said to her, this is your wedding gift.
32:32I want you to keep it in a place so you can admire it all the time.
32:37Only you must promise me, never open it up.
32:41It's the perfect story of curiosity killed the cat.
32:44Regardless if you're a man or a woman, you're gonna open the box.
32:48What's in the box?
32:49What's in the box?
32:51She just lifted the lid up.
32:54And she heard this creepy, growling sound going,
32:57South and South and South!
32:59And so she opened it up and...
33:01Whoosh!
33:02Out flew every misery moaned to man.
33:07There was hunger, there was famine, there was strife, everything.
33:12Old, age, death.
33:14And so Pandora grabbed the lid, and there was only one tiny little creature left in there.
33:20And that was hope.
33:22To me, Pandora is the scariest story of them all.
33:25If Pandora had let that last one out, if she had opened that box and humankind no longer had hope,
33:31then as a species we'd be done for.
33:33The myth of Pandora not only seeks to explain the world's evils,
33:39it provides a window into the real wedding rituals of ancient Greeks.
33:44The woman was taken from her household.
33:48She would then be transferred to the household of the husband.
33:55And she would spend the rest of her life tending the hearth in that household.
34:01Wedding gifts, like the one Pandora received from Zeus, were customary.
34:06The type of jar she's holding would not have contained food,
34:10but it would have been likely made to contain makeup or something pretty pretty.
34:15And so the temptation is increased.
34:18It turns out temptation is a problem not just for the Greeks' first woman,
34:23but for Eve, the first woman of the Bible, too.
34:28She eats the forbidden fruit.
34:31We have stories in every culture that says,
34:33oh, you can have everything you want, but you can't have that.
34:37And whatever the that you can't have is, that's what we're going for.
34:41Because we have this insatiable curiosity.
34:44You need curiosity in the world.
34:47That's what makes us human.
34:49If I was in charge and I could recreate Pandora, I'd make her exactly as she was.
34:55She's perfect in her imperfection.
34:58On a remote mountaintop in southern Greece,
35:18archaeologists have been trying to solve a 3,000-year-old mystery
35:22about Greek mythology's most powerful god, Zeus.
35:29Could artifacts unearthed here prove this is where Zeus was born?
35:34Everything we found at Mount Lycaon changes everything we thought we knew
35:38about the origins of Zeus.
35:41To understand the significance of these finds,
35:45we have to go back to the beginning of Greek mythology,
35:49to the birth of Zeus.
35:52His father, a titan named Cronus, rules the universe,
35:56but lives in constant fear.
35:59He's told in a prophecy that he's going to be killed by his own children.
36:03And so what he does to avoid this prophecy is he eats all of his children.
36:11When Cronus' wife, Rhea, gives birth to Zeus,
36:14she has a plan to keep her last child safe by hiding him in a cave.
36:20She steals him away.
36:21She wraps up a rock and hands that to Cronus,
36:24who's apparently nearsighted.
36:25I was like, oh, this is our new baby.
36:26He's like, great, I'm gonna eat him.
36:28When Zeus reaches maturity,
36:31he seeks to overthrow his father and fulfill the prophecy.
36:36But to do that, he needs his brothers and sisters.
36:40So he got a job at Cronus' cupbearer,
36:44delivering him nectar.
36:46And in this nectar, he slipped something to make Cronus vomit.
36:50So Cronus promptly vomited up all the major Greek gods.
36:56They all came tumbling out.
36:58War erupts across the universe.
37:02Zeus and his siblings versus Cronus' band of Titans.
37:06The Titanocamy, or the War of the Titans, was absolutely epic.
37:11It was huge in scale.
37:13After years of bloody warfare,
37:15Zeus and his siblings emerge victorious.
37:19Zeus chopped up Cronus.
37:21And all the Titans that had helped Cronus
37:23were also chopped into little pieces
37:25and thrown into Tartarus.
37:27Tartarus being the dungeon of the underworld.
37:29It's maximum security ward.
37:31Zeus becomes the father of gods and men.
37:34The ruler and preserver of the world.
37:37He controlled the clouds and the rain and the thunderbolts
37:40and the storms.
37:41It was very important to have a god of the sky
37:44who could control the storms and bring rain.
37:49Supernatural powers aside,
37:51Zeus often behaves like a human being.
37:54And so people have argued for centuries,
37:57was Zeus based on a real person?
38:00People on the island of Crete claim Zeus was born and raised
38:04in a cave on Mount Ida.
38:07People in an area of southern Greece called Arcadia
38:10insist Zeus was born here on Mount Lycaon.
38:14And now, archaeologists say they have the artifacts
38:17to prove the Mount Lycaon theory is true.
38:21So here we have an example of a bronze statuette of Zeus
38:24holding a silver lightning bolt.
38:26Dates to the late 6th or early 5th century BC.
38:29And we know from ancient texts that Zeus supposedly struck
38:32a number of people with lightning up there,
38:34so perhaps there's a connection there.
38:36The artifacts show that people began worshipping Zeus
38:39at Mount Lycaon hundreds of years earlier
38:41than previously thought.
38:44So Zeus was likely born here,
38:47though perhaps not in the flesh.
38:50Zeus, with all of his majesty and temperament,
38:54probably was, you know, crafted out of people's observance
38:58of supreme rulers of one kind or another.
39:01Kings and how they operated.
39:03And they're good, they're bad, and they're ugly.
39:05And Zeus has all those qualities.
39:08For the Greeks, Zeus was worth celebrating in a big way.
39:12That's what the Olympics were originally for.
39:15And Mount Lycaon may hold a hidden clue
39:18to their true beginning.
39:21The Olympics were a big deal to the Greeks.
39:23They would get together every four years beginning in 776
39:27in a spirit of peace, celebration, but also competition
39:31in honor of Zeus.
39:33While dating material at Mount Lycaon,
39:36archaeologists uncovered something shocking.
39:39Reason to believe the Olympics themselves may have started
39:42not in Olympia, but right here.
39:45There would have been thousands of people up here.
39:48The people were coming here from places far away as Egypt,
39:52modern Turkey, and all over the Greek mainland.
39:55Part of a hippodrome, the original starting blocks
39:58for racers, and old administrative buildings
40:01predate similar discoveries in Olympia,
40:04where people have long believed the games began.
40:08Those Olympics ran for over 1,000 years until 394 AD,
40:14when the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius II banned them
40:18and all other pagan festivals.
40:21And that was the beginning of the end for Zeus, too.
40:27The Greek gods were knocked off by Christianity
40:30when it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire.
40:33But the truth is, Zeus and the Olympians,
40:37Thor and the Asgardians, gods and monsters,
40:41never completely vanished.
40:43The thing about these stories, they're so true.
40:46They're so profoundly true.
40:48The stories that last, that survive,
40:50are stories that still speak to our deep human need
40:54and our understanding
40:56and what we need to be human beings and to survive.
41:07We're optimistic.
41:08The great stuff that we think we can do,
41:09the depths of our life,
41:10we can do it, it's true.
41:11We can do it, it's fair to the things.
41:12We can do it.
41:13We can do it and we can do it,
41:14we can do it.
41:15We can do it and eat.
41:16You
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