Genealogy – the records of descent, the pedigrees of mortals and gods, of genos, race, kind and offspring – is one of the great feats of the human imagination: a vast collection of stories, both intimate and cosmic, that bind the living to the dead and to one another, the past to the present and the present to what is to come. It is a primal work of culture, a narrative cornucopia encompassing stories about the origins of heroes and kings; stories about nations, whose gnarly, almost metaphysical genealogical connections are bound up in the Latin root natus and its cognates; stories about ancestors told around campfires, in books and now in hyperspace.
The work of the imagination in metaphorical genealogies is obvious. In Hesiod and Homer, for instance, the gods of earth and sky produce the Titans, Cronus and his sister, Rhea, who gives birth to Zeus and other Olympian gods. Achilles is a great-grandson of Zeus through his grandfather Aeacus; through his mother, Thetis, he is a grandson of one of the gods of the sea. Hector is a great-grandson of Zeus through Electra, one of the Pleiades. And so on.
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