The son of Earth Mother Gaia and Tartarus the Fathomless Gulf, Typhon is one baaaad baddy. In comparison, Mike Tyson in his heyday was a cuddly kitten.

A smoky black color, he had a hundred dragon heads with flame-flashing eyes. He liked to spit molten rock, and his snake arms and legs were too numerous and writhy to check out. He scared the hell out of the Gods, who fled from Olympus and hid out in Egypt.

When Zeus could no longer take the ‘chick-chick-chicken’ jibes of Athena, he was forced to fight. And got his ass badly whipped. Typhon then took the badly battered God off to his cave to tear him to bits at leisure. He started by hacking out a few sinews so Zeus could not move. Typhon then took a few days off to go clubbing and left a monsteress called Delphyne to keep an eye on his prisoner.

“Call yourselves friends?” sneered Athena at the cowering Gods, who were all disguised as animals to avoid involvement. Eventually Pan and Hermes volunteered to go and check things out.

They found the cave and saw Typhon wasn’t in. So Pan let out one of his wild echoing panic-inducing cries. Delphyne panicked, ran up a wall and clung to a dark corner. Hermes rushed in and hurriedly popped Zeus’s sinews back into what he hoped were the right places, leaving the healing process to immortality — which is pretty foolproof and almost instantaneous.

After all the humiliation, Zeus was more than somewhat peeved. The return fight was on in almost no time. It would have been a sell-out if the Gods had bothered about such stupid things as money. Zeus trained hard, and various supporters of his plied Typhon with drink...

Wham! Bam! Bam! Slam! This was one of the ding-dongs of all time. No blows barred. Forget the Rocky films — this was a battle with real rocks. Not to mention torn-up trees and mountain-tops.

Zeus eventually decked Typhon with the whole of Mount Etna. It’s doubtful he will beat the count of ten. Which for a fight this big is measured in years. Ten thousand years to be exact. But Typhon still left a lot of trouble behind — his wife Echidna gave birth to the nastiest set of horror monsters ever to crawl across the pages of Greek Mythology...

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Article last revised on September 06, 2018 by Rowan Allen.
Editors: Peter J. Allen, Chas Saunders

References: Coming soon.

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