_Uranos_ (_Varuna_ in Sanskrit) is heaven, or rather space--_Kronos_, time, and _Gæa_, earth. _Uranos_ as well as _Kronos_ and _Pontos_ were offsprings of the Earth. So far we have to deal with the same mystical elements which engendered all the Asiatic cosmogonies. But Uranos and Gæa are set down as male and female, and are endowed with powerful children--the Titans and Titanides, the Hekatoncheires (or Kentimanos, hundred-handed, powerful giants with fifty heads), and the Kyklopes, who were very clever, and invented many useful arts. The most important gods were Okeanos, Japetós, and Kronos. The human character of Greek mythology begins even before the birth of Zeus. Uranos was afraid of his own children, and had them confined in eternal darkness in Tartaros; their mother, Gæa, had pity on them, and armed the youngest, Kronos, with a sickle, with which he attacked Uranos, and deprived him of his creative power. 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. In this cruel image we see represented the revolving movements of time, in which the present is everlastingly the prey of the past, engendering the future. The sixth son of Kronos, Zeus (creative ether), was saved by his mother’s cunning, for she gave the inhuman god a stone instead of her child; Metis, however (Maya, Matter), afterwards the wife of Zeus; rescues the children that Kronos had swallowed, and he is obliged to give them back again in an eternal circle. These children of Kronos are years, months, weeks, days and hours. We have here an instance of the manner in which phenomena were turned by the Hellenes into living beings. Kronos was an old man with a long flowing beard, and held a sickle or scythe in his hands, with which he cut down everything. And as symbol of eternity a serpent lay by his side.