Gaia approached her son.
The Sickle
Now, Kronos (or Cronus as he sometimes styled himself) was not quite the pained and vulnerable emo-like youth that Rhea’s and Tartarus’s descriptions may have led us to picture, for he was the strongest of an unimaginably strong race. He was darkly handsome, certainly; and yes, he was moody. Had Kronos the examples to go by, he would perhaps have identified with Hamlet at his most introspective, or Jaques at his most self-indulgently morbid. Konstantin from The Seagull with a suggestion of Morrissey. Yet there was something of a Macbeth in him too and more than a little Hannibal Lecter – as we shall see.
Kronos had been the first to discover that brooding silence is often taken to indicate strength, wisdom and command. The youngest of the twelve, he had always hated his father. The deep and piercing venom of envy and resentment was beginning to unravel his sanity, but he had managed to hide the intensity of his hatred from all but his adoring sister Rhea, who was the only member of his family with whom he felt comfortable enough to reveal his true self.
As they made their way up from Tartarus, Gaia poured more poison into his receptive ear.
‘Ouranos is cruel. He is insane. I fear for myself and for all of you, my beloved children. Come boy, come.’
She was leading him to Mount Othrys. You recall the strange and terrible artefact that I told you she had wrought and hidden in the cleft of the mountain before she went visiting each of her children? Gaia now took Kronos to that place and showed him what she had made.
‘Pick it up. Go on.’
Kronos’s black eyes glittered as they took in the shape and meaning of this most strange object.
It was a sickle. An enormous scythe whose great curved blade had been forged from adamantine, which means ‘untameable’. A massive aggregate of grey flint, granite, diamond and ophiolite, its half-moon blade had been refined to the sharpest edge. An edge that could cut through anything.
Kronos plucked it from its hiding place just as easily as you or I would pick up a pencil. After feeling the balance and heft of it in his hand, he swung it once, twice. The powerful swish as it whipped through the air made Gaia smile.
‘Kronos, my son,’ she said, ‘we must bide our time until Hemera and Aether dive into the waters of the west and Erebus and Nyx prepare to cast the dark –’
‘You mean we must wait until evening.’ Kronos was impatient and quite lacking in poetry or finer feeling.
‘Yes. Eventide. That is when your father will come to me, as he always does. He likes to –’
Kronos nodded curtly. He did not wish to know the details of his parents’ love-making.
‘Hide there, in that very cleft where I hid the sickle. When you hear him covering me, and he grows loud in his roars of passion and groans of lust – strike.’
Night and Day, Light and Dark
As Gaia predicted, Hemera and Aether were tired after twelve hours of playing and slowly Day and Light slipped down westwards into the sea. At the same time, Nyx slipped off her dark veil and she and Erebus threw it over the world like a shimmering black tablecloth.
As Kronos waited in the cleft, sickle in hand, all creation held its breath. I say ‘all creation’, for Ouranos and Gaia and their offspring were not the only beings to have reproduced. Others had multiplied and propagated too, with Erebus and Nyx the most productive by far. They had many children, some terrible, some admirable and some lovely. We have already seen how they gave birth to Hemera and Aether. But then Nyx, without Erebus’s help, gave birth to MOROS, or Doom, who was to become the most feared entity in creation. Doom comes to every creature, mortal or immortal, but is always hidden. Even the immortals feared Doom’s all-powerful, all-knowing control over the cosmos.
After Moros came a great rush of offspring, one after the other, like a monstrous airborne invasion. First came APATE, Deceit, whom the Romans called FRAUS (from whom we derive the words ‘fraud’, fraudulent’ and ‘fraudster’). She scuttled off to Crete where she bided her time. GERAS, Old Age, was born next; not necessarily so fearful a demon as we might think today. While Geras might take away suppleness, youth and agility, for the Greeks he more than made up for it by conferring dignity, wisdom and authority. SENECTUS is his Roman name, a word that shares the same root as ‘senior’, ‘senate’ and ‘senile’.
A pair of perfectly ghastly twins were next: OIZYS (MISERIA in Latin) the spirit of Misery, Depression and Anxiety, and her cruel brother MOMOS, the spiteful personification of Mockery, Scorn and Blame.fn7
Nyx and Erebus were just getting into their stride. Their next child, ERIS (DISCORDIA), Strife, lay behind all disagreements, divorces, scraps, skirmishes, fights, battles and wars. It was her malicious wedding present, the legendary Apple of Discord, that brought about the Trojan War, though that epic clash of arms was a long, long way in the future. Strife’s sister NEMESIS was the embodiment of Retribution, that remorseless strand of cosmic justice that punishes presumptuous, overreaching ambition – the vice that the Greeks called hubris. Nemesis has elements in common with the eastern idea of karma and we use her today to suggest the fateful retributive opposition the lofty and wicked will one day meet and which will bring them down. I suppose you could say Holmes was Moriarty’s Nemesis, Bond was Blofeld’s and Jerry was Tom’s.fn8
Erebus and Nyx also gave birth to CHARON, whose infamy would grow once he took up his duties as ferryman for the dead. HYPNOS, the personification of Sleep, was born to them too. They were also the progenitor of the ONEROI – thousands of beings charged with the making and bringing of dreams to the sleeping. Amongst the Oneroi whose names are known to us were PHOBETOR, god of nightmares, and PHANTASOS, responsible for the fantastic manner in which one thing turns into another in dreams. They worked under the supervision of Hypnos’s son MORPHEUS, whose name itself suggests the morphing, shifting shapes of the dream world.fn9 ‘Morphine’, ‘fantasy’, ‘hypnotic’, ‘oneiromancy’ (the interpretation of dreams) and many other verbal descendants of Greek sleep have survived into our language. Sleep’s brother THANATOS, Death himself, gives us the word ‘euthanasia’, ‘good death’. The Roman’s called him MORS, of mortals, mortuaries and mortification.
These new beings were frightening and loathsome in the extreme. They left on creation a terrible but necessary mark, for the world seems never to offer anything worthwhile without also providing a dreadful opposite.
There were, however, three lovely exceptions:fn10 three beautiful sisters, the HESPERIDES – nymphs of the west and daughters of the evening. They heralded the daily arrival of their mother and father, but with the soft gold of the gloaming rather than the dread black of night. Their time is what movie cameramen today call ‘magic hour’, when the light is at its most beguiling and beautiful.
These then were the offspring of Nyx and Erebus, who even now were shrouding the earth in the darkness of night as Gaia lay waiting for her husband for what she hoped would be the last time and Kronos lurked in the shadows of that recess in Mount Othrys, keeping a firm grip on his great scythe.
Ouranos Gelded
At last, Gaia and Kronos heard from the west the sound of a great stamping and shaking. The leaves on the trees shivered. Kronos, standing silently in his hiding place, did not tremble. He was ready.