Before Apollo Spoke: Themis and the Earliest Voice of Delphi

Themis was a Titaness, daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and her name is also the ordinary Greek word for divine law, the settled order of custom and right conduct that both gods and mortals were expected to observe. Hesiod's Theogony makes her Zeus's second wife, after Metis, and credits their union with the Horai, goddesses of the seasons and of justly ordered time, and the Moirai, the three Fates who determine the span of a mortal life. Themis is regularly shown seated beside Zeus on Olympus in later literature, less a ruling consort than a personification of the lawful order his rule was supposed to embody, and she is repeatedly the deity who convenes assemblies of gods or announces their decisions, a function tied directly to what her name means. Ancient tradition also gave her an early and important role at Delphi: before Apollo took possession of the oracular shrine, Themis was said to have held it herself, inheriting it from her mother Gaia and, in some versions, handing it on peaceably to Apollo or to her sister Phoebe before Apollo's own succession, making her one of the few Titans credited with founding rather than merely predating a major religious institution. a rare instance of an orderly transfer of sacred authority in a mythology otherwise dominated by conquest.