You know how Zeus is just constantly going around and fucking all kinds of women? It’s kind of a big factor of Zeus’s character. I mean, as king of the gods on Olympus, he pretty much had free reign to run around and screw whoever (except for his wife Hera always got jealous).

But if you look at this for a second from an archetypal perspective. Imagine Zeus as the central organizing archetype of the self, the ego. Then you have all these other gods, each of whom is good at their own area of specialty, although they are all more or less under his command. To have a healthy psyche, all the gods have to work together to keep everything in balance.

The way I understand this whole thing about Zeus always being this big sex machine is that as the central organizing principle within the psyche, he controls libido. Freud explained libido as sexual energy. Jung modified that to mean psychic energy, which could be channeled towards sex, or towards anything. Anyway, so Zeus is the keeper of libido - he controls where the energy gets directed. Think about it, he has the thunderbolts. He throws them at people to destroy them. That’s usually what the thunderbolts do. It’s like a super-huge blast of psychic energy which stops everything dead.

But all the sex, that’s the other side of the thunderbolts. He goes to these other regions of the psyche, the complexes which are represented by these different archetypal goddesses and women, and he distributes to them a portion of the central creative fire of the self, the libido, the psychic energy. And then from their union a new god, goddess or creature is born. And then a new complex is spun from there which interacts with all the others.