Drawing not only on the socio-religious consciousness of his time but also on many of the earlier cult-religions, Hesiod described the forces of the universe as cosmic divinities.

Dike executed the law of judgments and sentencing and, together with her mother Themis, she carried out the final decisions of Moirai.

[15] In Hesiod's Theogony, Themis is one of the twelve Titan children of Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (Sky).

[19] Hyginus, in his Fabulae, makes Themis the daughter of Aether and Terra (Earth),[20] and by Zeus the mother of the Horae.

[28] According to Ovid, it was Themis rather than Zeus who told Deucalion to throw the bones of "his Mother" over his shoulder to create a new race of humankind after the deluge.

[32] In his De astronomia, Hyginus lists Themis, in addition to the nymph Amalthea, as the foster-mother and nurse of the young Zeus.

[33] In a fragment of Pindar, Themis was brought from the springs of Oceanus by the Moirai (in this version not her daughters) to Olympus, where she became the first wife of Zeus (rather than the second), and by him the mother of the Horae.

[34] According to the lost Cypria by Stasinus of Cyprus, Themis and Zeus together plotted the start of the Trojan War.

[36] In the Orphic "Rhapsodic Theogony", or Rhapsodies, (first century BC/AD)[37] Nyx (Night) prophesied that Themis would remain a virgin until Rhea gave birth to a child of Cronus.

Aphrodite then gave birth to another love god, Anteros (meaning "counter-love"), and Eros grew whenever he was near him.

[39] When four Cretan men (Aegolius, Celeus, Cerberus and Laius) broke into the sacred cavern in Crete where Rhea had given birth to Zeus in order to steal some of the honey produced there by the sacred bees, Themis and her daughters the Fates convinced Zeus against killing them inside the holy cave, as they considered it impious for anyone to die in the cave, so instead he turned all four into different birds.

[48] Themis' temple in Dodona is tetrastyle pronaos in antis with a cella, an entrance on the northside and outside was a large altar.