“In the beginning, Eurynome, Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon, and therefore she divided the sea from sky dancing lonely upon its waves. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths
Eury means wide (or ranging, her people were nomads) and nome means rule. No surprise then, that Eurynome is a pre-Greek Neolithic mother god, distributer of land and crops who becomes Demeter Thesmos (Mother Lawgiver), the aspect of the mother god who gave the law (thesmos means law). An important three-day, women-only festival in ancient Greece, the only one a husband could not, by law, prevent his wife from attending was called the Thesmophoria – a tribute to Demeter. The mother god also carried the name, Eyrunome Artemis, mother of all creatures who doomed men to die, and whose history also extends back at least to Neolithic times. Eurynome crafts her own husband, Ophion, the great serpent titan, by rubbing the North wind between her hands like a rope, so she can rule Olympus with him at her side. She laid an egg in the heavens that mortals later called the moon or the world egg, and he coiled himself around it seven times. The egg cracked open and everything that is came tumbling out. In his arrogance, the serpent claimed authorship of the world. Eurynome laughed, bruised his head with her heel and cast him into the Underworld. All this before Zeus was even imagined.
Without the queen, the king titan was literally nothing. He didn’t even exist. This is the origin of the phrase: “she makes the king with her hands,” said while the queen wraps her hands around his erect phallus after emerging from the bath that makes Persephone (the black destroyer of the previous king) a virgin again (the maiden Kore). She was depicted as human from the waist up and fish from there down, perhaps a nod to her being queen of multiple realms, perhaps to the idea that she comes from the primordial waters, a symbol of the great unconscious.
Christian Gnostics told a similar story about Sophia (wisdom), and her consort Jehovah. She “infused him with her energy,” and gave him her ideas. Before that, apparently, he had none. “He too became too arrogant and had to be punished for forgetting his mother” (Walker 288). Later Christians turned Eurynome into a male demon called the Prince of Death.