The Titan of the Heavenly Light

Hyperion is one of the twelve Titans of the first generation, children of Uranos the Sky and Gaia the Earth, and among the least storied of them in his own right; his importance is above all as a father. His name was understood by the Greeks to mean something like the one who goes above or he who watches from on high, marking him as a lord of heavenly light.

With his sister and wife Theia, herself a Titaness of light and sight, he brought forth the three great luminaries of Greek myth: Helios the Sun, Selene the Moon, and Eos the Dawn. In this way the first personified light of the Titan generation gives rise to the actual lights of the sky worshipped by later Greeks. Hyperion has no developed cult or mythology of his own, Homer sometimes even uses Hyperion as another name for the Sun directly, and he belongs to the archaic scaffolding of the cosmos that the Theogony sets in order before the Olympians come to power.