The first version of the creation is intensely masculine and crude. The primary forces generate their opposites.
Thus vacancy creates solidity, darkness creates light, the earth creates the sky and the sea, the first crime creates a goddess of love.
Further, these forces are conceived as having sexes, and they copulate the way human beings do, and the 'female elements give birth to newer forces,
and those forces have vague personalities.
Apart from childbearing, Gaea and her daughter Rhea have one important function.
In anger they help their sons dethrone their own husbands.
The relationship between the sexes is troubled, and the decisive factor in losing control of the world is mistreating one's children.
The forces of nature are rendered in terms of the human family, which makes the creation both understandable and dramatic.
The most notable feature of this myth, however, is the drive for power and dominance.
Uranus confines the mightiest of his offspring to Gaea's belly. Cronus castrates his father and the new generation of Titans takes over.
Then Cronus consolidates his power by imprisoning his non-Titan brothers and by swallowing his own children.
Zeus, his son, in turn dethrones him, and then must fight the Titans, the dragon, and the Giants to secure his own rule.
In one myth even Zeus is warned that a hypothetical son by Thetis may defeat him.
Power is the primary drive here. But this view of the world is not really pessimistic, for each generation of deities is an improvement over the last one.
The Olympian gods under Zeus are the most enlightened generation, and only the ablest survive.
It is thought that the Titans were the old gods of Greece, and that the gods of the Indo-European invaders superseded them, particularly Zeus.
Yet what is important about this story is that conflict is shown to be a cosmic principle.
By fighting alone does the world progress, since only in that way can the victors, gods or men, establish their supremacy.
And that supremacy is always subject to question in the end. Force determines who keeps power.
Nevertheless, this view of the world in terms of conflict gave Greek civilization an extremely dramatic character.
It is precisely drama that is lacking in the early, Pelasgian account of the creation.
There a female deity is all-important, perhaps reflecting a matriarchal society.
Eurynome is playful in creating her wind-mate Ophion, and she is vicious in disposing of him when he claims to be the Creator.
She can live without a masculine god, being self-sufficient. In this myth things seem to happen accidentally, from Eurynome's birth to the creation of man.
There is no unifying principle at work here beyond that of feminine playfulness and pique.
Given the two stories of the creation, it is easy to see why the one told by Hesiod achieved dominance, for it stemmed from a race of fighters.
