Oceanus
Oceanus (Greek , Okeanos) was believed to be the world-ocean in classical antiquity, which the ancient Romans and Greeks considered to be an enormous river encircling the world. Strictly speaking, Okeanos was the ocean-stream at the Equator in which floated the habitable hemisphere (oikoumene). In Greek mythology, this world-ocean was personified as a Titan, a son of Uranus and Gaia. In Hellenistic and Roman mosaics, this Titan was often depicted as having the upper body of a muscular man with a long beard and horns, and the lower torso of a serpent (cf. Typhon). On a fragmentary archaic vessel (British Museum 1971.11-1.1) of ca 580 BCE, among the gods arriving at the wedding of Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis, is a fish-tailed Oceanus, with a fish in one hand and a serpent in the other, gifts of bounty and prophecy. In Roman mosaics he might carry a steering-oar and cradle a ship.
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Oceanus
(n.)
The god of the great outer sea, or the river which was believed to flow around the whole earth.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), edited by Noah Porter.
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Oceanus
[Greek] The personification of the vast ocean. As geography became more precise, Oceanus began to refer to the water outside of the Pillars of Heracles, or the Atlantic Ocean. He was the eldest of the Titans and a son of Uranus and Gaia. He was the father of all rivers by his sister Tethys. The couple also had the Oceanids which personified springs and smaller bodies of waters, like lakes and ponds.
Oceanus
Oceanus okeanos (Greek) Probably "swift-flowing"; according to Hesiod one of the titans, children of Ouranos and Gaia (heaven and earth), who by his marriage with the titan Tethys became father of all rivers and waters. In ancient exoteric geography he was himself a mighty river encircling the supposedly flat disk of the earth; the notion of a vast reservoir of stationary water is derivative and does not pertain to the original meaning.
The original idea of Oceanus parallels that contained in the Hindu Puranas concerning the various oceans and islands which surround the earth. Oceanus at first was the ocean of space, which the Hebrews called the waters of space, surrounding all celestial bodies. The reference is likewise to the invisible realms and spheres which mystical thought often grouped under the idea of an environing as well as interpenetrating system of fluid spheres or worlds, the meaning behind the oceans and islands of the Puranas. Ancient Greek mythology states that on the banks of Oceanus are the abodes of the dead, making clear that the reference is not to physical geography but to secret teaching dealing with both the Overworld and the Underworld, with the invisible spheres, planes, and realms of the universe.
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