Kronos

“ For Rhea, subdued unto Kronos, bare shining children, even Hestia, and Demeter, and gold-shod Hera, and strong Hades, that pitiless heart, dwelling under ground, and the roaring Earth-Shaker, and Zeus the Many-Counselled, the Father of Gods and men, by whose thunder the broad earth is shaken. They also—great Kronos was used to swallow them down, as each came from the womb to his holy Mother’s knees, with intent that none other of the proud race of Ouranos should hold the lordship among the Everliving. ”

“ Kronos swallowing his children. Since God is intellectual, and all intellect returns into itself, this myth expresses in allegory the essence of God.
Myths may be regarded physically when they express the activities of the Gods in the world: e. g. people before now have regarded Kronos as Time, and calling the divisions of Time his sons say that the sons are swallowed by the father.
The psychic way is to regard the activities of the Soul itself: the Soul's acts of thought, though they [203] pass on to other objects, nevertheless remain inside their begetters. ”

“ Then Zeus arose and went up to the heavenly palace halls; there he found Kronos feasting, and quaffing honey-colored nectar, wine of the gods. Kronos asked him who he was, and Zeus answered: 'I am Prometheus, son of Iapetus thy brother, who [8] greets thee well by me.' Then Kronos bade him welcome, and they drank and caroused together. But when they had well drunk, Zeus put the herb of Earth into his father's cup, unmarked of him. ”

“ It is useless, Rhea, to torment Kronos.
Rhea.
I shall watch him, all day long. For I, too, am weary. Do not propose to me, with your restless energy, any fresh interests. Let me sit, with my cold hands folded in my lap, and look at Kronos, nodding, nodding. It is very kind of Circe, but we are too old for love; and of you, but we are too old for amusement. Let us rest, Hermes, rest and sleep; perhaps dream a little, dream of the far-away past.
[Circe and Persephone enter from the left.]
[Pg 33] Persephone [to Hermes] .
My mother requires so much activity of mind and body. ”

“ Kronos, having learned from his parents, Heaven and Earth, that he was fated to be deprived by one of his sons of the kingdom which he had taken from his father, devoured his children as fast as they were born. Rhea, when about to be delivered of Zeus, besought her parents to teach her how she might save him. Instructed by Earth, she concealed him in a cavern of Crete, and gave a stone in his stead to Kronos. This stone he afterward threw up, and with it the children whom he had devoured. When Zeus was grown up, he and the other children of Kronos made war on their father and the Titans. ”

“ Whoever has had resolution thrice in both worlds to stand firm, and to keep his soul pure from evil, has found the path of Zeus to the tower of Kronos, where the airs of the ocean breathe around the Isle of the Blessed, and where some from resplendent trees, others from the water glitter golden flowers, with garlandsofwhich they wreathe their wrists and brows in the righteous assemblies of Rhadamanthus, whom father Kronos has as his willing assistant. ”

“ In Homer, then, we find nothing beyond the simple fact that Zeus thrust his father Kronos together with the remaining Titans into Tartarus; an event to which he affords us a tolerable parallel in certain occurrences even under the presidency of Zeus himself. For the other gods make more than one rebellious attempt against Zeus, and are only put down, partly by his unparalleled strength, partly by the presence of his ally the Centimane Briareus. Kronos, like Laërtes or Pêleus, has become old, and has been supplanted by a force vastly superior to his own. ”

“ Nor that Kronos, with the knife of adamant, mutilated his father Ouranos, as you say, and threw the part into the sea; nor that Aphrodite sprang from the drops of blood which flowed from it; nor that Kronos associated with Rhea, and devoured his first-begotten son Pluto, because a certain saying of Prometheus led him to fear that a child born from him would wax stronger than himself, and spoil him of his kingdom ”

“ Then Dionysos fled and plunged beneath the salt sea-wave, and Thetis took him to her bosom, affrighted, for a mighty trembling had seized him at his foe’s rebuke. But with Lykurgos the gods that live at ease were wroth, and Kronos’ son made him blind, and he was not for long, because he was hated of all the immortal gods. So would neither I be fain to fight the blessed gods. But if thou art of men that eat the fruit of the field, come nigh, that anon thou mayest enter the toils of destruction. ”

“ Max Müller has always a right to the first hearing from English inquirers. Mr. Müller, naturally, examines first the name of the god whose legend he is investigating. He writes: ‘There is no such being as Kronos in Sanskrit. Kronos did not exist till long after Zeus in Greece. Zeus was called by the Greeks the son of Time (Κρονος) . ”

“ But, he says, we alone who know the compulsion of birth and the paths whereby man enters into the world and have been carefully instructed—we alone can pass through [221] and escape destruction. But water, he says, is destruction, and never, he says, did the world perish quicker than by water. But the water which rolls around the Proastii is, they say, Kronos. For such a power, he says, is of the colour of water and this power, that is Kronos, none of those who have been founded in generation can escape. ”

“ Zeus Kronīon meant originally no more than Zeus the eternal, the god of ages, the ancient of days; but -ιων becoming usual as a patronymic suffix, Kronion was supposed to mean the son of Kronos. Kronos, the father, was created in order to account for the existence of the name Kronion. If Hyperīon is called the son of Euryphaessa, the wide-shining, this requires no commentary; for even at present a poet might say that the sun is born of the wide-shining dawn. ”

“ Kronos and a few others escaped to the North, and there made head for a time, sheltered against Zeus's thunderbolts in caverns of the hills. But there came to the Olympians two mighty twin Shapes, Force and Might, followed by their sister, beauteous-ankled Victory (from whose shoulders waved great eagle's wings) —all children of Styx; and those two illustrious ones announced to Zeus that henceforth they were his servants, and that their sister, Victory, would ever follow them. ”

“ For the teeth of time which produce no effect on the air appear to devour whatever is composed of the element of earth. Mythologists, however, have generally omitted to remark that the stones which Kronos mistook for his children were not ordinary blocks of basalt or granite but rather so many statues of children endued, pro tempore, with life.—Ἔτι δέ, φησὶν, ἐπενόησε θεὸς Οὐρανὸς βαιτύλια, λίθοις ἐμψύχοις μηχανησάμενος.—Sanchon. ”

“ Who, then, can believe that those bodies, of which the variation according to matter is allied to corruption, are gods? But to those who say that Kronos is time, and Rhea the earth, and that she becomes pregnant by Kronos, and brings forth, whence she is regarded as the mother of all; and that he begets and devours his offspring; and that the mutilation is the intercourse of the male with the female, which cuts off the seed and casts it into the womb, and generates a human being, who has in himself the sexual desire, which is Aphrodité ”

“ This angered Gaea and she plotted against Uranus. She made a flint sickle and tried to get her children to attack Uranus. All were too afraid except, the youngest Titan, Kronos.
Gaea and Kronos set up an ambush for Uranus as he lay with Gaea at night. Kronos grabbed his father and castrated him with the stone sickle, throwing the severed genitals into the ocean. The fate of Uranus is not clear. He died, withdrew from the earth, or exiled himself to Italy. As he departed, he promised that Kronos and the Titans would be punished. ”

“ Zeus gave me an orb and sceptre to console me. I used to play cup and ball with them behind his throne.
Rhea [in a solicitous aside to Hermes] .
Oh! it is not true. Kronos' mind now wanders so strangely. He thinks that it is Zeus who has turned him out of Olympus.
Hermes [in the same tone] .
Do not distress him, Rhea, by contradiction and explanation. I will find modes [Pg 32] of amusing him a little every day, and, for the rest, let him doze in the sunshine. His mind is worn so smooth that it fails any longer to catch in ideas as they flit against it. They pass off, glide away. ”

“ As Hesiod had extended the Homeric series of gods by prefixing the dynasty of Uranos to that of Kronos, so the Orphic theog [p. 17] ony lengthened it still further. [35] First came Chronos, or Time, as a person, after him Æthêr and Chaos, out of whom Chronos produced the vast mundane egg. Hence emerged in process of time the first-born god Phanês, or Mêtis, or Hêrikapæos, a person of double sex, who first generated the Kosmos, or mundane system, and who carried within him the seed of the gods. He gave birth to Nyx, by whom he begat Uranos and Gæa; as well as to Hêlios and Selêne. ”

“ From that moment Uranos was idle, could produce no new forms, and was neither worshipped by gods nor men. The fact which underlies this dramatic scene, in which gods are the actors, is a cosmical phenomenon. In time all things were created, and in time the creative force, as far as our earth was concerned, ceased with the creation of man, to be productive of new forms. Kronos had five children—Hestia, Demeter, Here, Pluton, and Poseidon, and these he devoured. ”

“ Under the reign of Xisuthrus there was a great flood. Kronos (i.e. Bel) appeared to Xisuthrus in a dream, and warned him that all men would be destroyed by a deluge on the 15th of the month Dæsios, and he commanded him to write down all the learning and science of men, and to hide it in the sun-city Siparis, and then to build a ship and to enter it along with his family and relatives and nearest friends, and to take into it with him food and drink, and beasts and winged fowl. When he was asked whither he was about to sail, he was bidden reply: To the gods, to pray them that men may prosper. ”

“ But ancient Kronos cried for aid to his Titan kindred, with a voice like the tempest's roar; and they came swiftly in their might; and the young gods could not stand before them, but fled out of heaven to the cloudy top of Mount Olympus, that great peak robed in eternal snows."
There they abode as in a citadel, and thence it is that Zeus and the family of Zeus are called "the Olympians" to this day.
The Titans occupied Mt. Othrys to the south, and the broad plains of Thessaly in between show even yet the shattered rocks and rent surface from the struggle which ensued. ”

“ On either side of these sat on golden thrones the mother and daughter, Hera beside Zeus and Rhea beside Kronos. As for the beauty of the gods, not even Hermes tried to describe it in his tale; he said that it transcended description, and must be comprehended by the eye of the mind; for in words it was hard to portray and impossible to convey to mortal ears. Never indeed will there be or appear an orator so gifted that he could describe such surpassing beauty as shines forth on the countenances of the gods. ”

“ O Achilles, thy might and thy evil work are beyond the measure of men; for gods themselves are ever helping thee. If indeed the son of Kronos hath delivered thee all the Trojans to destroy, at least drive them forth from me and do thy grim deeds on the plain, for filled with dead men is my pleasant bed, nor can I pour my stream to the great sea, being choked with dead, and thou slayest ruthlessly. ”

“ All the gods agreed that this was a very suitable sort of test. Hermes then summoned Caesar to appear before them, then Octavian, and thirdly Trajan, as being the greatest warriors. In the silence that followed, Kronos turned to Zeus and said that he was astonished to see that only martial Emperors were summoned to the competition, and not a single philosopher. “For my part,” he added, “I like philosophers just as well. ”

“ In the Greek Golden Age men lived like the gods under the rule of Kronos; they never suffered the ills of old age, nor lost their strength; they feasted continually, [Pg 110] and enjoyed peace and security. The whole world prospered. When this race passed away they became beneficent spirits who watched over mankind and distributed riches.
In the Silver Age mankind were inferior; children were reared up for a century, and died soon afterwards; sacrifice and worship was neglected. In the end Zeus, son of Kronos, destroyed the Silver Race. ”

“ Of that older set was Kronos, the father of Zeus, and the Titans, who are now cast down to Tartarus, the nethermost region of all. The world known to men was apportioned at the beginning of the present age to the three sons of Kronos, Zeus obtaining the upper world, including heaven, which is at the top of Mount Olympus in Thessaly; Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under-world, above Tartarus, to which men go after death. ”

“ The proud, jealous, and bitter Hêrê,—the goddess of the once-wealthy Mykênæ, the fax et focus of the Trojan war, and the ever-present protectress of Jasôn in the Argonautic expedition, [132] —occupies an indispensable station in the mythical world. As the daughter of Kronos and wife of Zeus, she fills a throne from whence he cannot dislodge her, and which gives her a right perpetually to grumble and to thwart him. ”

“ Now I wish to apply these conceptions, as I said, to the most obvious piece of Greek Epic poetry outside Homer, and illustrate anthropologically the main legend of the Theogony. You will remember the outlines of the story. The first possessor of the kingly office—βασιληίδα τιμήν—is Ouranos. He is afraid of his children, and ‘hides’ or imprisons them. At last his son Kronos conquers and mutilates him, and he passes out of sight. Kronos becomes king and is [Pg 84] equally afraid of his children; he ‘swallows’ them one after another; eventually Zeus conquers and ‘binds’ him. Zeus now reigns ”