Custom and Myth. Lang Andrew
‘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 (Κρόνος). 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 Κρονίων or Κρονίδης 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 Κρονίδης as equivalent to Ancient of Days) ceased to be understood, … people asked themselves the question, Why is Ζεύς called Κρονίδης? And the natural and almost inevitable answer was, Because he is the son, the offspring of a more ancient god, Κρόνος. 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 Κρόνος in the Veda.’ To expect Greek in the Veda would certainly be sanguine. ‘When this myth of Κρόνος had once been started, it would roll on irresistibly. If Ζεύς had once a father called Κρόνος, Κρόνος must have a wife.’ It is added, as confirmation, that ‘the name of Κρονίδης belongs originally to Zeus only, and not to his later’ (in Hesiod elder) ‘brothers, Poseidon and Hades.’47
Mr. Müller says, in his famous essay on ‘Comparative Mythology’48: ‘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 Uranus 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 Κρόνος, to account for the patronymic (as they deemed it) Κρονίδης, son of Κρόνος. 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 Κρόνος, 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 Κρόνος from the same root as the Sanskrit Krāna.49 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 Myth50 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.’51 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.52 According to Preller, Κρόνος is connected with κραίνω, to fulfil, to bring to completion. The harvest month, the month of ripening and fulfilment, was called κρονίων in some parts of Greece, and the jolly harvest-feast, with its memory of Saturn’s golden days, was named κρόνια. 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 κραίνω: —
οὐδ’ ἄρα πώ οἱ ἐπεκραίαινε Κρονίων,
and in Sophocles (‘Tr.’ 126): —
ὁ πάντα κραίνων βασιλεὺς Κρονίδας.
Preller illustrates the mutilation of Uranus by the Maori tale of Tutenganahau. The child-swallowing he connects with Punic and Phœnician influence, and Semitic sacrifices of men and children. Porphyry53 speaks of human sacrifices to Cronus in Rhodes, and the Greeks recognised Cronus in the Carthaginian god to whom children were offered up.
Hartung54 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.55 According to Prof. Sayce, again,56 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
ii. 127.