Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
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.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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