Zeus occupies the theological centre of the Orphic cosmogony. Following the counsel of Night he swallows the firstborn Phanes together with the whole of the first creation, so that all beings come to exist within him; the celebrated 'Hymn to Zeus' quoted already in the fifth-century Derveni commentary proclaims him beginning, middle and end, male and female, the one body in which sky, sea, earth and gods are contained. Having absorbed the cosmos, he generates it a second time and orders it anew. In the myth of divine succession he then unites, in the form of a serpent, with his own daughter Persephone in the underworld, begetting the child-god Dionysos-Zagreus whom he destines to universal kingship. The Orphic Zeus is thus both the sovereign who gathers all prior creation into a single divine unity and the father of the suffering god whose fate underlies the sect's doctrine of the soul.