THE MYTH OF CRONUS.
In a Maori pah, when a little boy behaves rudely to his parents,
he is sometimes warned that he is ‘as bad as cruel Tutenganahau.’
If he asks who Tutenganahau was, he is told the following story:—
‘In the beginning, the Heaven, Rangi, and the Earth, Papa,
were the father and mother of all things. “In these days
the Heaven lay upon the Earth, and all was darkness. They had
never been separated.” Heaven and Earth had children, who
grew up and lived in this thick night, and they were unhappy because
they could not see. Between the bodies of their parents they were
imprisoned, and there was no light. The names of the children
were Tumatuenga, Tane Mahuta, Tutenganahau, and some others. So
they all consulted as to what should be done with their parents, Rangi
and Papa. “Shall we slay them, or shall we separate them?”
“Go to,” said Tumatuenga, “let us slay them.”
“No,” cried Tane Mahuta, “let us rather separate them.
Let one go upwards, and become a stranger to us; let the other remain
below, and be a parent to us.” Only Tawhiri Matea (the wind)
had pity on his own father and mother. Then the fruit-gods, and
the war-god, and the sea-god (for all the children of Papa and Rangi
were gods) tried to rend their parents asunder. Last rose the
forest-god, cruel Tutenganahau. He severed the sinews which united
Heaven and Earth, Rangi and Papa. Then he pushed hard with his
head and feet. Then wailed Heaven and exclaimed Earth, “Wherefore
this murder? Why this great sin? Why destroy us? Why
separate us?” But Tane pushed and pushed: Rangi was driven
far away into the air. “They became visible, who had hitherto been concealed between the hollows of their parents’ breasts.” Only the storm-god differed from his brethren:
he arose and followed his father, Rangi, and abode with him in the open
spaces of the sky.’
This is the Maori story of the severing of the wedded Heaven and
Earth. The cutting of them asunder was the work of Tutenganahau
and his brethren, and the conduct of Tutenganahau is still held up as
an example of filial impiety.
The story is preserved in sacred hymns of very
great antiquity, and many of the myths are common to the other peoples of
the Pacific.
Now let us turn from New Zealand to Athens, as she was in the days
of Pericles. Socrates is sitting in the porch of the King Archon,
when Euthyphro comes up and enters into conversation with the philosopher.
After some talk, Euthyphro says, ‘You will think me mad when I
tell you whom I am prosecuting and pursuing!’ ‘Why,
has the fugitive wings?’ asks Socrates. ‘Nay, he is
not very volatile at his time of life!’ ‘Who is he?’
‘My father.’ ‘Good heavens! you don’t
mean that. What is he accused of?’ ‘Murder,
Socrates.’ Then Euthyphro explains the case, which quaintly
illustrates Greek civilisation. Euthyphro’s father had an
agricultural labourer at Naxos. One day this man, in a drunken
passion, killed a slave. Euthyphro’s father seized the labourer,
bound him, threw him into a ditch, ‘and then sent to Athens to
ask a diviner what should be done with him.’ Before the
answer of the diviner arrived, the labourer literally ‘died in
a ditch’ of hunger and cold. For this offence, Euthyphro
was prosecuting his own father. Socrates shows that he disapproves,
and Euthyphro thus defends the piety of his own conduct: ‘The
impious, whoever he may be, ought not to go unpunished. For do
not men regard Zeus as the best and most righteous of gods? Yet
even they admit that Zeus bound his own father Cronus, because he wickedly
devoured his sons; and that Cronus, too, had punished his own father,
Uranus, for a similar reason, in a nameless manner. And yet when
I proceed against my father, people are angry with me.
This is their inconsistent way of talking, when the gods are concerned,
and when I am concerned.’
Here Socrates breaks in. He ‘cannot away with these stories
about the gods,’ and so he has just been accused of impiety, the
charge for which he died. Socrates cannot believe that a god,
Cronus, mutilated his father Uranus, but Euthyphro believes the whole
affair: ‘I can tell you many other things about the gods which
would quite amaze you.’
***
We have here a typical example of the way in which mythology puzzled the
early philosophers of Greece. Socrates was anxious to be pious, and to
respect the most ancient traditions of the gods. Yet at the very outset
of sacred history he was met by tales of gods who mutilated and bound
their own parents. Not only were such tales hateful to him, but they
were of positively evil example to people like Euthyphro. The problem
remained, how did the fathers of the Athenians ever come to tell such
myths?
***
Let us now examine the myth of Cronus, and the explanations which
have been given by scholars. Near the beginning of things, according
to Hesiod (whose cosmogony was accepted in Greece), Earth gave birth
to Heaven. Later, Heaven, Uranus, became the husband of Gæa,
Earth. Just as Rangi and Papa, in New Zealand, had many children,
so had Uranus and Gæa. As in New Zealand, some of these
children were gods of the various elements. Among them were Oceanus,
the deep, and Hyperion, the sun—as among the children of Earth
and Heaven, in New Zealand, were the Wind and the Sea. The youngest
child of the Greek Heaven and Earth was ‘Cronus of crooked counsel,
who ever hated his mighty sire.’ Now even as the children
of the Maori Heaven and Earth were ‘concealed between the hollows
of their parents’ breasts,’ so the Greek Heaven used to
‘hide his children from the light in the hollows of Earth.’
Both Earth and her children resented this, and, as in New Zealand, the
children conspired against Heaven, taking Earth, however, into their
counsels. Thereupon Earth produced iron, and bade her children
avenge their wrongs. Now
fear fell on all of them, except Cronus, who, like Tutenganahau, was all
for action. Cronus determined to end the embraces of Heaven and Earth.
But, while the Maori myth conceives of Heaven and Earth as of two beings
which have never been separated before, Hesiod makes Heaven amorously
approach his wife from a distance. Then Cronus stretched out his hand,
armed with a sickle of iron, or steel, and mutilated Uranus. Thus were
Heaven and Earth practically divorced. But as in the Maori myth one of
the children of Heaven clave to his sire, so, in Greek, Oceanus remained
faithful to his father.
This is the first portion of the Myth of Cronus. Can it be denied that
the story is well illustrated and explained by the New Zealand parallel,
the myth of the cruelty of Tutenganahau? By means of this comparison,
the meaning of the myth is made clear enough. Just as the New Zealanders
had conceived of Heaven and Earth as at one time united, to the prejudice
of their children, so the ancestors of the Greeks had believed in an
ancient union of Heaven and Earth. Both by Greeks and Maoris, Heaven and
Earth were thought of as living persons, with human parts and passions.
Their union was prejudicial to their children, and so the children
violently separated the parents. This conduct is regarded as impious,
and as an awful example to be avoided, in Maori pahs. In Naxos, on the
other hand, Euthyphro deemed that the conduct of Cronus deserved
imitation. If ever the Maoris had reached a high civilisation, they
would probably have been revolted, like Socrates, by the myth which
survived from their period of savagery. Mr. Tylor well says,
‘Just as the adzes of polished jade, and the cloaks of tied flax-fibre,
which these New Zealanders were using but yesterday, are older in their
place in history than the bronze battle-axes and linen mummy-cloths
of ancient Egypt, so the Maori poet’s shaping of nature into nature-myth
belongs to a stage of intellectual history which was passing away in
Greece five-and-twenty centuries ago. The myth-maker’s fancy
of Heaven and Earth as father and mother of all things naturally suggested
the legend that they in old days abode together, but have since been
torn asunder.’
***
That this view of Heaven and Earth is natural to early minds, Mr. Tylor
proves by the presence of the myth of the union and violent divorce of
the pair in China. Puang-ku is the Chinese Cronus, or Tutenganahau. In India, Dyaus and Prithivi, Heaven and Earth, were
once united, and were severed by Indra, their own child.
This, then, is our interpretation of the exploit of Cronus. It is an old
surviving nature-myth of the severance of Heaven and Earth, a myth found
in China, India, New Zealand, as well as in Greece. Of course it is not
pretended that Chinese and Maoris borrowed from Indians and Greeks, or
came originally of the same stock. Similar phenomena, presenting
themselves to be explained by human minds in a similar stage of fancy and
of ignorance, will account for the parallel myths.
The second part of the myth of Cronus was, like the first, a stumbling-block
to the orthodox in Greece. Of the second part we offer no explanation
beyond the fact that the incidents in the myth are almost universally
found among savages, and that, therefore, in Greece they are probably
survivals from savagery. The sequel of the myth appears to account
for nothing, as the first part accounts for the severance of Heaven
and Earth. In the sequel a world-wide Märchen, or
tale, seems to have been attached to Cronus, or attracted into the cycle
of which he is centre, without any particular reason, beyond the law
which makes detached myths crystallise round any celebrated name.
To look further is, perhaps, chercher raison où il n’y en a pas.
The conclusion of the story of Cronus runs thus:—He wedded
his sister, Rhea, and begat children—Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon,
and, lastly, Zeus. ‘And mighty Cronus swallowed down each
of them, each that came to their mother’s knees from her holy
womb, with this intent, that none other of the proud children of Uranus
should hold kingly sway among the Immortals.’ Cronus showed
a ruling father’s usual jealousy of his heirs. It was a
case of Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich. But Cronus (acting in
a way natural in a story perhaps first invented by cannibals) swallowed
his children instead of merely imprisoning them. Heaven and Earth
had warned him to beware of his heirs, and he could think of no safer
plan than that which he adopted. When Rhea was about to become
the mother of Zeus, she fled to Crete. Here Zeus was born, and
when Cronus (in pursuit of his usual policy) asked for the baby, he
was presented with a stone wrapped up in swaddling bands. After
swallowing the stone, Cronus was easy in his mind; but Zeus grew up,
administered a dose to his father, and compelled him to disgorge.
‘The stone came forth first, as he had swallowed it last.’
The other children also emerged, all alive
and well. Zeus fixed the stone at Delphi, where, long after the Christian era, Pausanias saw it.
It was not a large stone, Pausanias tells us, and the Delphians used
to anoint it with oil and wrap it up in wool on feast-days. All
Greek temples had their fetich-stones, and each stone had its legend.
This was the story of the Delphian stone, and of the fetichism which
survived the early years of Christianity. A very pretty story
it is. Savages more frequently smear their fetich-stones with
red paint than daub them with oil, but the latter, as we learn from
Theophrastus’s account of the ‘superstitious man,’
was the Greek ritual.
***
This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-block of the orthodox Greek,
the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian
controversialists. Found among Bushmen or Australians the narrative
might seem rather wild, but it astonishes us still more when it occurs in
the holy legends of Greece. Our explanation of its presence there is
simple enough. Like the erratic blocks in a modern plain, like the flint-heads in a meadow, the story is a relic of a very distant past. The
glacial age left the boulders on the plain, the savage tribes of long ago
left the arrowheads, the period of savage fancy left the story of Cronus
and the rites of the fetich-stone. Similar rites are still notoriously
practised in the South Sea Islands, in Siberia, in India and Africa and
Melanesia, by savages. And by savages similar tales are still told.
***
We cannot go much lower than the Bushmen, and among Bushman divine
myths is room for the ‘swallowing trick’ attributed to Cronus
by Hesiod. The chief divine character in Bushman myth is the Mantis
insect. His adopted daughter is the child of Kwai Hemm, a supernatural
character, ‘the all-devourer.’ The Mantis gets his
adopted daughter to call the swallower to his aid; but Kwai Hemm swallows
the Mantis, the god-insect. As Zeus made his own wife change herself
into an insect, for the convenience of swallowing her, there is not
much difference between Bushman and early Greek mythology. Kwai
Hemm is killed by a stratagem, and all the animals whom he has got outside
of, in a long and voracious career, troop forth from him alive and well,
like the swallowed gods from the maw of Cronus.
Now, story for story, the Bushman version is much less offensive
than that of Hesiod. But the Bushman story is just the sort of story we
expect from Bushmen, whereas the Hesiodic story is not at all the kind of
tale we look for from Greeks. The explanation is, that the Greeks had
advanced out of a savage state of mind and society, but had retained
their old myths, myths evolved in the savage stage, and in harmony with
that condition of fancy. Among the Kaffirs
we find the same ‘swallow-myth.’ The Igongqongqo swallows
all and sundry; a woman cuts the swallower with a knife, and ‘people
came out, and cattle, and dogs.’ In Australia, a god is
swallowed. As in the myth preserved by Aristophanes in the ‘Birds,’
the Australians believe that birds were the original gods, and the eagle,
especially, is a great creative power. The Moon was a mischievous
being, who walked about the world, doing what evil he could. One
day he swallowed the eagle-god. The wives of the eagle came up,
and the Moon asked them where he might find a well. They pointed
out a well, and, as he drank, they hit the Moon with a stone tomahawk, and out flew the eagle.
This is oddly like Grimm’s tale of ‘The Wolf and the Kids.’
The wolf swallowed the kids, their mother cut a hole in the wolf, let
out the kids, stuffed the wolf with stones, and sewed him up again.
The wolf went to the well to drink, the weight of the stones pulled
him in, and he was drowned. Similar stories are common among the
Red Indians, and Mr. Im Thurn has found them in Guiana. How savages
all over the world got the idea that men and beasts could be swallowed
and disgorged alive, and why they fashioned the idea into a divine myth, it is hard to say. Mr. Tylor, in ‘Primitive Culture,’
adds many
examples of the narrative. The Basutos have it; it occurs some
five times in Callaway’s ‘Zulu Nursery Tales.’
In Greenland the Eskimo have a shape of the incident, and we have all
heard of the escape of Jonah.
It has been suggested that night, covering up the world, gave the
first idea of the swallowing myth. Now in some of the stories
the night is obviously conceived of as a big beast which swallows all
things. The notion that night is an animal is entirely in harmony
with savage metaphysics. In the opinion of the savage speculator,
all things are men and animals. ‘Ils se persuadent que non
seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les
autres choses sont animées,’ says one of the old Jesuit missionaries in Canada.
‘The wind was formerly a person; he became a bird,’ say
the Bushmen.
G’ oö ka! Kui (a very respectable Bushman,
whose name seems a little hard to pronounce), once saw the wind-person
at Haarfontein. Savages, then, are persuaded that night, sky,
cloud, fire, and so forth, are only the schein, or sensuous appearance,
of things that, in essence, are men or animals. A good example
is the bringing of Night to Vanua Lava, by Qat, the ‘culture-hero’
of Melanesia. At first it was always day, and people tired of
it. Qat heard that Night was at the Torres Islands, and he set
forth to get some. Qong (Night) received Qat well, blackened his
eyebrows, showed him Sleep, and sent him off with fowls to bring Dawn
after the arrival of Night should make Dawn a necessary. Next
day Qat’s brothers saw the sun crawl away west, and presently
Night came creeping up from the sea. ‘What is this?’
cried the brothers. ‘It is Night,’ said Qat; ‘sit
down, and when you feel something in your eyes, lie down and keep quiet.’
So they went to sleep. ‘When Night had lasted long enough,
Qat took a piece of red obsidian, and cut the darkness, and the Dawn
came out.’
Night is more or less personal in this tale, and solid enough to
be cut, so as to let the Dawn out. This savage conception of night,
as the swallower and disgorger, might start the notion of other swallowing
and disgorging beings. Again the Bushmen, and other savage peoples,
account for certain celestial phenomena by saying that ‘a big
star has swallowed his daughter, and spit her out again.’
While natural phenomena, explained on savage principles, might give
the data of the swallow-myth, we must not conclude that all beings to
whom the story is attached are, therefore, the Night. On this
principle Cronus would be the Night, and so would the wolf in Grimm.
For our purposes it is enough that the feat of Cronus is a feat congenial
to the savage fancy and repugnant to the civilised Greeks who found
themselves in possession of the myth. Beyond this, and beyond
the inference that the Cronus myth was first evolved by people to whom
it seemed quite natural, that is, by savages, we do not pretend to go
in our interpretation.
***
To end our examination of the Myth of Cronus, we may compare the
solutions offered by scholars. As a rule, these solutions are based on
the philological analysis of the names in the story. It will be seen
that very various and absolutely inconsistent etymologies and meanings of
Cronus are suggested by philologists of the highest authority. These
contradictions are, unfortunately, rather the rule than the exception in
the etymological interpretation of myths.
***
The opinion of Mr. 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).
This is a very simple and very common form of mythological expression.
It meant originally, not that time was the origin or source of Zeus,
but Κρονιων or Κρονιδης
was used in the sense of “connected with time, representing time,
existing through all time.” Derivatives in -ιων
and -ιδης took, in later times, the more exclusive
meaning of patronymics. . . . When this (the meaning of Κρονιδης
as equivalent to Ancient of Days) ceased to be understood, . . . people
asked themselves the question, Why is Ζευς
called Κρονιδης? And
the natural and almost inevitable answer was, Because he is the son,
the offspring of a more ancient god, Κρονος.
This may be a very old myth in Greece; but the misunderstanding which
gave rise to it could have happened in Greece only. We cannot
expect, therefore, a god Κρονος
in the Veda.’ To expect Greek in the Veda would certainly
be sanguine. ‘When this myth of Κρονος
had once been started, it would roll on irresistibly. If Ζευς
had once a father called Κρονος,
Κρονος must have a wife.’
It is added, as confirmation, that ‘the name of Κρονιδης
belongs originally to Zeus only, and not to his later’ (in Hesiod elder) ‘brothers, Poseidon and Hades.’
Mr. Müller says, in his famous essay on ‘Comparative Mythology’: ‘How
can we imagine that a few generations before that time’ (the age
of Solon) ‘the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks
were adequately expressed by the story of Uranos maimed by Kronos,—of
Kronos eating his children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive
his whole progeny. Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America,
we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.’ We
have found a good deal of the sort in Africa and America, where it seems
not out of place.
One objection to Mr. Müller’s theory is, that it makes
the mystery no clearer. When Greeks were so advanced in Hellenism
that their own early language had become obsolete and obscure, they
invented the god Κρονος, to account
for the patronymic (as they deemed it) Κρονιδης,
son of Κρονος. But why did
they tell such savage and revolting stories about the god they had invented?
Mr. Müller only says the myth ‘would roll on irresistibly.’
But why did the rolling myth gather such very strange moss? That
is the problem; and, while Mr. Müller’s hypothesis accounts
for the existence of a god called Κρονος,
it does not even attempt to show how full-blown Greeks came to believe
such hideous stories about the god.
***
This theory, therefore, is of no practical service. The theory
of Adalbert Kuhn, one of the most famous of Sanskrit scholars, and author
of ‘Die Herabkunft des Feuers,’ is directly opposed to the
ideas of Mr. Müller. In Cronus, Mr. Müller recognises
a god who could only have come into being among Greeks, when the Greeks
had begun to forget the original meaning of ‘derivatives in -ιων
and -ιδης.’ Kuhn, on the other hand,
derives Κρονος from the same root
as the Sanskrit Krāna. Krāna means, it appears, der für sich schaffende,
he who creates for himself, and Cronus is compared to the Indian Pragapati,
about whom even more abominable stories are told than the myths which
circulate to the prejudice of Cronus. According to Kuhn, the ‘swallow-myth’
means that Cronus, the lord of light and dark powers, swallows the divinities
of light. But in place of Zeus (that is, according to Kuhn, of
the daylight sky) he swallows a stone, that is, the sun. When
he disgorges the stone (the sun), he also disgorges the gods of light
whom he had swallowed.
I confess that I cannot understand these distinctions between the
father and lord of light and dark (Cronus) and the beings he swallowed.
Nor do I find it easy to believe that myth-making man took all those
distinctions, or held those views of the Creator. However, the
chief thing to note is that Mr. Müller’s etymology and Kuhn’s
etymology of Cronus can hardly both be true, which, as their systems
both depend on etymological analysis, is somewhat discomfiting.
The next etymological theory is the daring speculation of Mr. Brown. In ‘The Great Dionysiak Myth’
Mr. Brown writes: ‘I regard Kronos as the equivalent of Karnos,
Karnaios, Karnaivis, the Horned God; Assyrian, KaRNu; Hebrew, KeReN,
horn; Hellenic, KRoNos, or KaRNos.’ Mr. Brown seems to think
that Cronus is ‘the ripening power of harvest,’ and also
‘a wily savage god,’ in which opinion one quite agrees with
him. Why the name of Cronus should mean ‘horned,’
when he is never represented with horns, it is hard to say. But
among the various foreign gods in whom the Greeks recognised their own
Cronus, one Hea, ‘regarded by Berosos as Kronos,’ seems to have been ‘horn-wearing.’
Horns are lacking in
Seb and Il, if not in Baal Hamon, though Mr. Brown would like to behorn
them.
Let us now turn to Preller. According to Preller, Κρονος is
connected with κραινω, to fulfil, to bring
to completion. The harvest month, the month of ripening and fulfilment,
was called κρονιων in some
parts of Greece, and the jolly harvest-feast, with its memory of Saturn’s
golden days, was named κρονια.
The sickle of Cronus, the sickle of harvest-time, works in well with
this explanation, and we have a kind of pun in Homer which points in
the direction of Preller’s derivation from κραινω:—
ουδ αρα πω οι επεκραιαινε Κρονιων
and in Sophocles (‘Tr.’ 126)—
ο παντα κραινων βασιλευς Κρονιδας.
Preller illustrates the mutilation of Uranus by the Maori tale of
Tutenganahau. The child-swallowing he connects with Punic and Phoenician
influence, and Semitic sacrifices of men and children. Porphyry
speaks of human sacrifices to Cronus in Rhodes, and the Greeks recognised
Cronus in the Carthaginian god to whom children were offered up.
Hartung takes Cronus, when he mutilates Uranus, to be the fire of
the sun, scorching the sky of spring. This, again, is somewhat out of
accord with Schwartz's idea, that Cronus is the storm-god, the
cloud-swallowing deity, his sickle the rainbow, and the blood of Uranus
the lightning. According to Prof. Sayce, again,
the blood-drops of Uranus are rain-drops. Cronus is the sun-god,
piercing the dark cloud, which is just the reverse of Schwartz’s
idea. Prof. Sayce sees points in common between the legend of
Moloch, or of Baal under the name of Moloch, and the myth of Cronus.
But Moloch, he thinks, is not a god of Phœnician origin, but a
deity borrowed from ‘the primitive Accadian population of Babylonia.’
Mr. Isaac Taylor, again, explains Cronus as the sky which swallows and
reproduces the stars. The story of the sickle may be derived from
the crescent moon, the ‘silver sickle,’ or from a crescent-shaped
piece of meteoric iron—for, in this theory, the fetich-stone of
Delphi is a piece of that substance.
***
It will be observed that any one of these theories, if accepted,
is much more ‘minute in detail’ than our humble suggestion.
He who adopts any one of them, knows all about it. He knows that
Cronus is a purely Greek god, or that he is connected with the Sanskrit Krāna, which Tiele,
unhappily, says is ‘a very dubious word.’ Or the mythologist
may be quite confident that Cronus is neither Greek nor, in any sense,
Sanskrit, but Phœnician. A not less adequate interpretation
assigns him ultimately to Accadia. While the inquirer who can
choose a system and stick to it knows the exact nationality of Cronus,
he is also well acquainted with his character as a nature-god.
He may be Time, or perhaps he is the Summer Heat, and a horned god;
or he is the harvest-god, or the god of storm and darkness, or the midnight
sky,—the choice is wide; or he is the lord of dark and light,
and his children are the stars, the clouds, the summer months, the light-powers,
or what you will. The mythologist has only to make his selection.
The system according to which we tried to interpret the myth is less
ondoyant et divers. We do not even pretend to explain everything.
We do not guess at the meaning and root of the word Cronus. We
only find parallels to the myth among savages, whose mental condition
is fertile in such legends. And we only infer that the myth of
Cronus was originally evolved by persons also in the savage intellectual
condition. The survival we explain as, in a previous essay, we
explained the survival of the bull-roarer by the conservatism of the
religious instinct.
Footnotes
Uncharted Knowledge
Wisdom From Previous Realities
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