Essay

On the Notion of “Philogony”

A Genealogy of Love, Friendship, and Beauty

Photo by Richard Jaimes on Unsplash

Here begins the inauguration of a neologism — what I call “Philogony.”

To execute this, we will defer to the spirit of philology.

The term “philology” derives from the Ancient Greek words “philos” (φίλος), meaning “love,” and “logos” (λόγος), meaning “word,” “speech,” or “reason.”

For the Greeks, it generally referred to the care and love of learning and literature.

In the ancient Greek context, philology encompassed not only a love for words and learning but also included elements of what we might today call grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and even aspects of philosophy and cultural commentary.

The Philology of Philogony

The term theogony “Θεογονία” (Theogonia) is a compound word that derives from ancient Greek. It is a fusion of “theos,” which translates to “god,” and “gonia,” which derives from “gone,” meaning “birth,” “generation,” or “origin.”

Another ancient Greek word that is related to “gonia” and its affixed form of “gony” is “genesis,” (γένεσις) which literally means “becoming; coming-to-be; process.”