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. {46a} 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. {46b}
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.' {48}
* * * * *
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 Gaea, Earth. Just
as Rangi and Papa, in New Zealand, had many children, so had Uranus and
Gaea. 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. {49a} 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. {49b}
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, {50a} '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. {50b} Puang-ku is the Chinese Cronus, or
Tutenganahau. In India, {50c} 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 Marchen, 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 ou 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.' {52a} The other children also emerged, all alive
and well. Zeus fixed the stone at Delphi, where, long after the
Christian era, Pausanias saw it. {52b} 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.
{54a} 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 {54b} 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. {54c} 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,' {55a}
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 animees,'
says one of the old Jesuit missionaries in Canada. {55b} 'The wind was
formerly a person; he became a bird,' say the Bushmen.
G' oo 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.' {56}
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 Muller has always a right to the first hearing
from English inquirers. Mr. Muller, 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 ([Greek]).
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
[Greek] or [Greek] was used in the sense of "connected with time,
representing time, existing through all time." Derivatives in -[Greek]
and -[Greek] took, in later times, the more exclusive meaning of
patronymics. . . . When this (the meaning of [Greek] as equivalent to
Ancient of Days) ceased to be understood, . . . people asked themselves
the question, Why is Zeus called [Greek]? And the natural and almost
inevitable answer was, Because he is the son, the offspring of a more
ancient god, Kronos. 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 Kronos in the Veda.' To expect
Greek in the Veda would certainly be sanguine. 'When this myth of Kronos
had once been started, it would roll on irresistibly. If Zeus had once a
father called Kronos, Kronos must have a wife.' It is added, as
confirmation, that 'the name of [Greek] belongs originally to Zeus only,
and not to his later' (in Hesiod elder) 'brothers, Poseidon and Hades.'
{58a}
Mr. Muller says, in his famous essay on 'Comparative Mythology' {58b}:
'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. Muller'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 [Greek],
to account for the patronymic (as they deemed it) [Greek], son of
[Greek]. But why did they tell such savage and revolting stories about
the god they had invented? Mr. Muller 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. Muller's hypothesis accounts
for the existence of a god called [Greek], 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.
Muller. In Cronus, Mr. Muller 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 -[Greek] and -[Greek].' Kuhn, on the other
hand, derives [Greek] from the same root as the Sanskrit Krana. {59}
Krana means, it appears, der fur 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. Muller'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' {60a} 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.' {60b} 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. {61a} According to Preller, Kronos is
connected with [Greek], to fulfil, to bring to completion. The harvest
month, the month of ripening and fulfilment, was called [Greek] in some
parts of Greece, and the jolly harvest-feast, with its memory of Saturn's
golden days, was named [Greek]. 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
[Greek]:--
[Greek]
and in Sophocles ('Tr.' 126)--
[Greek].
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 {61b}
speaks of human sacrifices to Cronus in Rhodes, and the Greeks recognised
Cronus in the Carthaginian god to whom children were offered up.
Hartung {61c} 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. {61d} According to Prof. Sayce, again, {62a} 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 Phoenician 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 Krana, which Tiele, {62b}
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 Phoenician. 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.