Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

The Second Order

Ouranos the sky covered his mother Gaia the earth everywhere. He covered Gaia in both senses: he covered her as the sky still covers the earth to this day and he covered her as a stallion covers a mare. When he did so, something remarkable happened. Time began.

Something else began too – what shall we call it? Personality? Drama? Individuality? Character, with all its flaws and failings, fashions and passions, schemes and dreams. Meaning began, you might say. The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky. I will leave such speculation to those better qualified, but it was nevertheless a great moment. In the creation of and conjoining with Ouranos, her son and now her husband, Gaia unwound the ribbon of life that runs all the way to human history and our own very selves, yours and mine.

Right from the start, the union of Ouranos and Gaia was gratifyingly productive. Twelve robust, healthy children came first – six male, six female. The males were OCEANUS, COEUS, CRIUS, HYPERION, IAPETUS and KRONOS. The females, THEIA, THEMIS, MNEMOSYNE, PHOEBE, TETHYS and RHEA. These twelve were destined to become the Second Order of divine beings, earning themselves a legendary name.

And somewhere, as Time crept into being the clock began, the clock of cosmic history that still ticks today. Perhaps one of these newborns was responsible, we can look into that later.

Not content with these twelve strong beautiful brothers and sisters, Ouranos and Gaia gave the world yet more progeny – two distinctive, but distinctly not beautiful, sets of triplets. The three CYCLOPES came first, one-eyed giants who gave their father sky a whole new range of expressions and modulations. The eldest cyclops was called BRONTES, thunder,fn1 next came STEROPES, the lightning, and then ARGES, brightness. Ouranos could fill the heavens with flashes of lightning and crashing thunder. He gloried in the noise and spectacle. But the second set of triplets Gaia bore sent even greater shudders through him and all who saw them.

Perhaps it is kindest to say that they were a mutational experiment never to be repeated, a genetic dead end. For these newborns – the HECATONCHIRESfn2 – each had fifty heads and a hundred hands and were as hideous, fierce, violent and powerful as anything that had yet been released into being. Their names were COTTUS the furious, GYGES the long-limbed and AEGAEON the sea goat, sometimes also called BRIAREOS the vigorous one. Gaia loved them. Ouranos was revolted by them. Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.

Filled with disgust, he cursed them: ‘For offending my eyes, you shall never see light again!’ As he roared these furious words, he pushed them and the Cyclopes back into Gaia’s womb.

Gaia’s Revenge

We have good cause to wonder here what ‘he pushed them into Gaia’s womb’ really means. Some people have taken it to indicate that he buried the Hecatonchires in the earth. Divine identity at this early time was fluid, how much a god was a person and how much an attribute is hard to determine. There were no capital letters then. Gaia the Earth Mother was the same as gaia, the earth itself, just as ouranos, the sky, and Ouranos the Sky Father were one and the same.

What is certain is that in reacting like this to the three Hecatonchires, his own children, and in treating his wife with such abominable cruelty, Ouranos was committing the first crime. An elemental crime that would not go unpunished.

Gaia’s agony was unbearable and inside her, alongside the trio of writhing, flailing three-hundred-handed clawing and a hundred-and-fifty-headed butting Hecatonchires, there sprang up a hatred, a most terrible and implacable hatred against Ouranos, the son she had borne and the husband with whom she had given birth to a new generation. And, like ivy twisting round a tree, there grew a plan of revenge.

The piercing pain of the Hecatonchires still gnawing at her, Gaia visited Othrys, a great mountain that looks down over what we now call the central Greek region of Phthiotis. From its peak you can see the plain of Magnesia reaching down to the blue waters of the western Aegean as they curl round the Malian Gulf and embrace the sporadic scattering of islands called the Sporades. But Gaia was consumed with too much pain and too much fury to enjoy one of the world’s most charming views. On the summit of Mount Othrys she set to work fashioning a most unusual and terrible artefact from its rock. For nine days and nights she laboured until she had produced an object which she then hid in the cleft of the mountain.

Next she took herself off to visit her twelve beautiful, strong children.

‘Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?’ she asked each in turn. ‘You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.’

Perhaps we imagine that Gaia – Mother Earth – is soft, warm, bountiful and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueller, harsher and more terrifying than even the wildest sea.

And talking of the marine world, the first of the children that Gaia tried to win to her side were Oceanus and his sister Tethys.fn3 But they were in the middle of negotiating a share of the oceans with Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea. All of this generation were stretching and flexing their muscles at this time, establishing their areas of expertise and control, nipping, growling and testing each other’s strength and dominance like puppies in a basket. Oceanus had conceived the idea of creating tides and currents, which were to run like a great salt river around the world. Tethys was about to have his baby – no sin in those early days of course: propagation would not have been possible without incestuous couplings. She was pregnant with NILUS, the Nile, and would go on to give birth to other rivers and to at least three thousand Oceanids or sea nymphs, attractive deities who moved as easily on dry land as in the waters of the sea. They already had two fully grown daughters: CLYMENE, who was the lover of Iapetus, and the clever and wise METIS, who is due to play a very important part in what is to come.fn4 The pair were happy and looking forward to life on the ocean wave, so neither saw any reason to help kill their father Ouranos.

Next Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable. She seemed a very shallow, silly and ignorant being, who knew nothing and appeared to understand less. This was deceptive, for each day that passed she got smarter and smarter, more and more well informed and more and more capable. Her name means ‘memory’ (giving us the word ‘mnemonic’). At the time of her mother’s visit, the world and the cosmos were very young, so Mnemosyne had had no opportunity to prime herself with knowledge or experience. As the years passed, her endless capacity for the storage of information and sensory experience would make her wiser than almost anyone. One day she would mother nine daughters, the MUSES, whom we shall meet later.

‘You want me to help you kill Ouranos? Surely the Sky Father cannot die?’

‘Dethrone or disable him, then … it is no more than he deserves.’

‘I will not help you.’

‘Why not?’

‘There is a reason and when I know it I will remember it and tell you.’

Exasperated, Gaia went next to Theia, who was also paired off in another sibling union, to her brother Hyperion. In due course she would give birth to HELIOS the sun, SELENE the moon and EOS the dawn, quite enough parenting to be getting on with, so they too showed no interest in Gaia’s plans to depose Ouranos.

Despairing at her pallid and unadventurous brood’s refusal to live up to what she imagined to be their divine destinies – not to mention repulsed by how loved up and domesticated they all appeared to be – Gaia next tried Phoebe, perhaps the most intelligent and insightful of the twelve. From the earliest age shining Phoebe had shown that she possessed the gift of prophecy.

‘Oh no, Mother Earth,’ she said, when she had heard Gaia’s plan. ‘I could take no part in such a plot. I see no good coming from it. Besides, I’m pregnant …’

‘Damn you,’ snapped Gaia. ‘Who by? Coeus, I bet.’

She was right, Phoebe’s brother Coeus was indeed her consort. Gaia stormed off with renewed fury to visit her remaining offspring. Surely one of them had the stomach for a fight?

She called on Themis, who would one day be regarded everywhere as the embodiment of justice and wise counsel,fn5 and Themis wisely counselled her mother to forget the unjust idea of usurping Ouranos. Gaia listened carefully to this wise counsel and – as we all do, whether mortal or immortal – ignored it, choosing instead to try the mettle of her son Crius, who consorted with her daughter by Pontus, EURYBIA.

‘Kill my father?’ Crius stared at his mother in disbelief. ‘B-but how … I mean … why? … I mean … oh.’

‘What’s in it for us, mother?’ asked Eurybia, who was known as ‘the flint-hearted’.

‘Oh, just the world and all that’s in it,’ said Gaia.

‘To share with you?’

‘To share with me.’

‘No!’ said Crius. ‘Leave, mother.’

‘It’s worth considering,’ said Eurybia.

‘It’s too dangerous,’ said Crius. ‘I forbid it.’

Gaia turned with a snarl and sought out her son Iapetus.

‘Iapetus, beloved boy. Destroy the monster Ouranos and rule with me!’

The Oceanid Clymene, who had borne Iapetus two sons and was pregnant with another, stepped forward. ‘What mother could ask such a thing? For a son to kill his own father would be the most terrible crime. All Cosmos would cry out.’

‘I must agree, mother,’ said Iapetus.

‘A curse on you and a curse on your children!’ spat Gaia.

A mother’s curse is a terrible thing. We shall see how the children of Iapetus and Clymene, ATLAS, EPIMETHEUS and PROMETHEUS, met their ends.

Rhea, the eleventh of Gaia’s children to be asked, said that she would have no part in the plan, but – throwing up her hands to stop a savage torrent of abuse from her mother – suggested that her brother Kronos, the last of these strong beautiful children, might very well like the idea of deposing his father. She, Rhea, had heard him many times cursing Ouranos and his power.

‘Really?’ cried Gaia. ‘You say so? Well, where is he?’

‘He’s probably mooching around down by the caves of Tartarus. He and Tartarus get on so well. They’re both dark. Moody. Mean. Magnificent. Cruel.’

‘Oh god, don’t tell me you’re in love with Kronos …’

‘Put in a good word for me, mummy, please! He’s just so dreamy. Those black flashing eyes. The thunderous brows. The long silences.’

Gaia had always thought that her youngest’s long silences indicated nothing more than dullness of intellect, but she sensibly refrained from saying so. After assuring Rhea that she would of course recommend her warmly to Kronos, Gaia sped down, down, down to the caves of Tartarus to find him.

If you were to drop a bronze anvil from the heavens it would take nine days to reach the earth. If you were to drop that anvil from the earth it would take another nine days to reach Tartarus. In other words the earth is halfway between the sky and Tartarus. Or you might say Tartarus is as far from the ground as the ground is from the sky. A very deep, abysmal place then, but more than just a place. Remember Tartarus was a primordial being too, who was born out of Chaos at the same time as Gaia. So when she approached him, they greeted each other as family members will.

‘Gaia, you’ve put on weight.’

‘You look a mess, Tartarus.’

‘What the hell do you want down here?’

‘Shut up for once and I’ll tell you …’

These testy exchanges won’t stop them, at a future date, from mating and producing TYPHON – the worst and deadliest of all the monsters.fn6 But just now Gaia is in no mood for love or for trading insults.

‘Listen. My son Kronos – is he nearby?’

A resigned groan from her brother.

‘Almost certainly. I wish you’d tell him to leave me alone. He does nothing all day but hang around looking at me with his eyes drooping and his mouth open. I think he’s got some kind of man-crush on me. He copies my hairstyle and leans limply against trees and boulders looking miserable, melancholy and misunderstood. As if he’s waiting for someone to paint him or something. When he’s not gazing at me he’s staring down into that lava vent over there. In fact there he is now, look. Try and talk some sense into him.’

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.

‘Gaia!’ roared Ouranos as he approached. ‘Prepare yourself. Tonight we shall breed something better than hundred-handed mutants and one-eyed freaks …’

‘Come to me, glorious son, divine husband!’ called Gaia, with what Kronos thought a distastefully convincing show of eagerness.

The horrible sounds of a lustful deity slobbering, slapping and grunting suggested to him that his father was attempting some kind of foreplay.

In his alcove Kronos breathed in and out five times. Never for a second did he weigh the moral good of what he was about to do, his thoughts were only for tactics and timing. With a deep inhalation he raised the great sickle and stepped swiftly sideways from his hiding place.

Ouranos, who had been preparing to lie on top of Gaia, sprang to his feet with an angry snarl of surprise. Walking calmly forward, Kronos swung the scythe back and swept it down in a great arc. The blade, hissing through the air, sliced Ouranos’s genitals clean from his body.

All Cosmos could hear Ouranos’s maddened scream of pain, anguish and rage. Never in creation’s short history had there been a sound so loud or so dreadful. All living things heard it and were afraid.

Kronos leapt forward with an obscene cry of triumph, catching the dripping trophy in his hands before it could reach the ground.

Ouranos fell writhing in immortal agony and howled out these words:

‘Kronos, vilest of my brood and vilest in all creation. Worst of all beings, fouler than the ugly Cyclopes and the loathsome Hecatonchires, with these words I curse you. May your children destroy you as you destroyed me.’

Kronos looked down at Ouranos. His black eyes showed nothing, but his mouth curved into a dark smile.

‘You have no power to curse, daddy. Your power is in my hands.’

He juggled before his father’s eyes his grisly spoils of victory, burst and slimy with blood, oozing and slippery with seed. Laughing, he pulled back his arm and hurled the package of genitals far, far from sight. Across the plains of Greece they flew and out over the darkening sea. All three watched as Ouranos’s organs of generation vanished from sight across the waters.

Kronos was surprised, when he turned to look at her, that his mother had covered her mouth in what appeared to be horror. Tears were leaking from Gaia’s eyes.

He shrugged. As if she cared.

Erinyes, Gigantes and Meliae

Creation at this time, peopled as it was by primal deities whose whole energy and purpose seems to have been directed towards reproduction, was endowed with an astonishing fertility. The soil was blessed with such a fecund richness that one could almost believe that if you planted a pencil it would burst into flower. Where divine blood fell, life could not help but spring from the earth.

So no matter how murderous, cruel, rapacious and destructive the character of Ouranos, he had been the ruler of creation after all. For his son to have mutilated and emasculated him constituted a most terrible crime against Cosmos.

Perhaps what happened next is not so surprising.

Great pools of blood formed around the scene of Ouranos’s castration. From that blood, the blood which fell from the ruined groin of Ouranos, living beings emerged.

The first to push themselves out of the sodden ground were the ERINYES, whom we call the Furies, ALECTO (remorseless), MEGAERA (jealous rage) and TISIPHONE (vengeance). Perhaps it was an unconscious instinct of Ouranos that caused such vengeful beings to rise up. Their eternal duty, from the moment of their chthonic – or out-of-the-ground – birth, would be to punish the worst and most violent of crimes: relentlessly to chase the perpetrators and to rest only when the guilty had paid the full and dreadful price. Armed with cruel metallic scourges, the Furies flayed the very flesh from the bones of the guilty. The Greeks with characteristic irony nicknamed these female avengers the EUMENIDES or ‘kindly ones’.

Next to rise from the soil were the GIGANTES. We have inherited ‘giant’, ‘giga’ and ‘gigantic’ from them, but while they were certainly possessed of prodigious strength, they were no greater in stature than their half-brothers and sisters.fn11

Finally, in that instant of pain and destruction were created also the MELIAE, graceful nymphs who were to become guardians of an ash tree whose bark exuded a sweet and healthful manna.fn12

As all these unexpected new beings emerged alive from the blood-soaked ground, Kronos stared at them in disgust and scattered them with a sweep of his scythe. Next he turned to Gaia.

‘I promised you, Earth Mother,’ he said, ‘that I would release you from your gnawing agony – hold still.’

With another sweep of the scythe he sliced open Gaia’s side. Out tumbled the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires. Kronos looked down at his parents, both of them now bloody, panting and snarling like angry wounded animals.

‘No more shall you cover Gaia,’ he said to his father. ‘I banish you to live out eternity beneath the ground, buried deeper even than Tartarus. May you sulk there in your fury, gelded and powerless.’

‘You have overreached yourself,’ hissed Ouranos. ‘There will be revenge. I curse your life, that it be ground out in slow remorseless perpetuity, its immortal eternity an insufferable burden without end. Your own children will destroy you as –’

‘As I destroyed you. Yes, I know. You said. We’ll see about that.’

‘You and your brothers and sisters, I curse you all, your straining ambition will destroy you.’

The ‘striving, straining one’, or TITAN, is the title we reserve for Kronos, his eleven siblings and (much of) their progeny. Ouranos meant it as an insult, but somehow the name has resounded through the ages with a ring of grandeur. No one, to this very day, would be insulted to be called a Titan.

Kronos met these curses with a sneer and, corralling his mutilated father and newly freed mutant brothers at the point of his sickle, he led them down to Tartarus. The Hecatonchires and Cyclopes he imprisoned in the caves, but his father he buried even deeper, as far from his natural domain of the heavens as he could contrive.fn13

Brooding, simmering and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race has yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium?

From the Foam

We return now to the great arc in the heavens traced by Ouranos’s severed gonads. Kronos had flung the Sky Father’s junk, if you recall, far across the sea.

We can watch it now. Near the Ionian island of Cythera it drops, splashes, bounces, rises up again and finally falls and half sinks beneath the waves. Great ropes of semen trail in its wake like ribbons from a kite. Where they strike the surface of the sea a furious frothing is set up. Soon all the waters bubble and boil. Something arises. From the horrors of patricidal castration and unnatural ambition it must be – surely – something unimaginably ugly, something terrible, something violent, something appalling, that promises only war, blood and anguish?

The whirlpool of blood and seminal fluid foments, fizzes and foams. Out of the spindrift of surf and seed emerges the crown of a head, then a brow and then a face. But what kind of face?

A face far more beautiful than creation has yet seen or will ever see again. Not just someone beautiful but Beauty itself rises fully formed from the foam. In Greek ‘from the foam’ can be rendered as something like APHRODITE, and this is the name of the one who now lifts herself from the spume and spray. She stands on a large scallop shell, a demure and gentle smile playing on her lips. Slowly she alights onto a beach on Cyprus. Where she steps flowers bloom and clouds of butterflies arise. Around her head birds fly in circles, singing in ecstasies of joy. Perfect Love and Beauty has made her landfall and the world will never be the same.

The Romans called her VENUS, and her birth and arrival on the sands of Cyprus on the scallop shell were never better portrayed than in Botticelli’s exquisite painting, which once seen is never forgotten.

We leave Aphrodite making her home on Cyprus and return to Kronos, who is on his way back from the dark caves of Tartarus.

Rhea

When he arrived on Mount Othrys, Kronos found his sister Rhea waiting for him. The sight of her darkly handsome brother, a huge sickle dripping blood in his hand, thrilled her to the point of internal explosion.

His authority was established: none of his brother or sister Titans dared question him.fn14 His father was powerless and Gaia, who found she could take no joy in the violent overthrow she had set in motion, withdrew into her realm and into a more passive existence. She never lost her strength, authority or high status as Mother Earth and ancestress of all, but she no longer ventured forth to interact or conjoin. Kronos was the master now. After a great feast in which his achievement in unmanning and unseating Ouranos was roaringly and most unmusically sung, Kronos turned to the blushing, trembling Rhea and pulled her aside to make love to her.

Rhea’s joy was complete. She had played her part in helping the brother she adored achieve mastery of all creation. And now they were united. More than that, in the fullness of time she began to feel a child moving inside her. A baby girl, she felt sure. Her happiness was unclouded.

Kronos, on the other hand … His already dour disposition was darkened by something else. The words of his father Ouranos began to echo in his head:

Your own children will overthrow you as you overthrew me.

Over the coming weeks and months Kronos watched with sullen foreboding as Rhea’s belly filled and swelled.

Your own children … your own children …

When the day came for her confinement, Rhea laid herself down in an alcove in the mountain – the same recess in the rocks, in fact, where Gaia had concealed the scythe and Kronos had hidden. Here she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl whom she named HESTIA.

The name was hardly out of Rhea’s mouth before Kronos stepped forward, snatched the child from her arms and swallowed it whole. He turned and departed without so much as a hiccup, leaving Rhea white with shock.

The Children of Rhea

Kronos was now lord of earth, sea and sky, with the scythe the symbol of his authority. His sceptre. The earth he took from Gaia, the sky from Ouranos. With threats of violence he wrested dominion over the sea from Pontus and Thalassa and from his siblings Oceanus and Tethys. He trusted no one and ruled alone.

Still Kronos continued to take his pleasure with Rhea and still she consented, loving him hopelessly and trusting that the monstrous eating of their firstborn had been some sort of aberration.

It was not. Their next child, a boy she called HADES, was devoured in just the same manner. And then another baby girl, DEMETER. Next was POSEIDON, a second boy, and finally a third girl, HERA. All of them swallowed whole with as much ease as you and I might gulp down an oyster or a spoonful of jelly.

By the time Kronos consumed Hera, Rhea’s fifth pregnancy, her love for Kronos had turned to hate. That same night he seized her and made love to her again. She swore to herself that if she became pregnant he would never take her sixth child. But how could she prevent him? He was all powerful.

One morning she arose and felt the familiar nausea. She was pregnant. Her divine instincts told her that her sixth was to be a boy.

She left Othrys and took herself off in search of her mother and father. For all that she had contributed to their downfall she retained a daughter’s trust in their wisdom and good will. She knew too that their fury at her part in their ruin was as nothing to their undying hatred of Kronos.

For three days her calls to Gaia and Ouranos rang round the hills and caves of the world.

‘Earth Mother, Sky Father, hear your daughter and come to her aid! The son who cut you and cast you out has become the foulest of ogres, the most depraved and unnatural creature in all the world. Five of your grandchildren has he eaten. I have one more baby inside me, ready to come into the world. Teach me how to save him. Teach me, I beg, and I will raise him to revere you always.’

A deep and terrible rumbling was heard far below. The ground shook beneath Rhea’s feet. The voice of Ouranos came roaring into her ears, but within it she heard too the calmer tones of her mother.

Together the three of them hatched a marvellous plan.

The Switch

In order to set this marvellous plan in motion Rhea went to Crete to confer with a she-goat named AMALTHEA. Also living on the island were the Meliae, nymphs of the manna-bearing ash tree. If you remember, they had sprung from the soil soaked by Ouranos’s blood, along with the Furies and the Giants. After an encouraging conversation with Amalthea, Rhea conferred with these mild and sweet-natured nymphs. Satisfied that the things she needed to achieve on Crete could be achieved, she returned to Mount Othrys to prepare for her time.

Kronos had seen by now that his wife was expecting and he readied himself for the happy day when he could consume the sixth of his children. He was taking no chances. The prophecy of Ouranos still rang in his ears and the superstitious pangs of paranoia that ravage all despotic usurpers grew fiercer in this ur-Stalin each day.

Gaia had told Rhea about a certain stone – an object of perfect magnetite just the right size for their purposes, smooth and shaped like a bean – which could be found in the hills not far from Mount Othrys itself.fn15

In the mornings Kronos liked to stride from one end of Greece to the other visiting each of his Titan brothers and sisters, outwardly to consult with them, in truth to make sure that they were not plotting against him. At the time she knew he would be on the seashore, visiting Oceanus and Tethys, Rhea went to the place that Gaia had described, found the stone and took it home to Mount Othrys, where she swaddled it in linen. The plan was coming together.

One afternoon not long afterwards, with Kronos near enough to hear her but far enough away to take some time to arrive, Rhea began to scream the screams of childbirth. Louder and louder came her agonized howls, tearing the fabric of the air until, after a sudden silence, they were replaced by the best impression she could give of a baby’s first gasping cries.

Sure enough, Kronos approached. His shadow fell over Rhea.

‘Give me the child,’ he said.

‘Dread lord and husband –’ Rhea cast him an imploring look. ‘Will you not let me keep this one? Look at him, so sweet, so innocent. So harmless.’

With a rough laugh Kronos snatched the tightly wrapped baby from Rhea’s cradling arms and bolted it down in one great gulp, swaddling linen and all. Down it went like the others, never touching the sides. Punching his breastbone once, then twice, Kronos gave a loud belch and left his tormented wife to her grief-stricken sobs.

The moment he had gone, the sobs turned to hysterical, barely suppressed chokes and screams. Chokes and screams of laughter.

Catching her breath and rising from her bed Rhea slipped down the mountainside and made her way to Crete, travelling as fast as anyone could in so heavily pregnant a state.

The Cretan Child

Rhea’s accouchement on Crete was easy enough. Tenderly assisted by the she-goat and the Meliae she prepared to give birth in the safety and comfort of a cave on Mount Ida. Soon she was delivered of a quite transcendently beautiful baby boy. She named him ZEUS.

Just as Gaia had recruited her youngest child Kronos in order to take revenge on her son and husband Ouranos, so Rhea vowed she would rear this, her youngest child, to destroy her husband and brother Kronos. The dreadful cycle of bloodlust, greed and killing that marked the birth pangs of the primordial world would continue into the next generation.

Rhea knew she must return to Mount Othrys before Kronos noticed her absence and suspected that something was wrong. As had been arranged, the goat Amalthea would suckle the baby with her rich and nutritious milk while the Meliae would feed him on the sweet and wholesome manna that wept its gum from their ash trees. In this way young Zeus could grow up on Crete strong and well nourished. Rhea would visit him as often as was possible, to tutor him in the arts of revenge.

Although this is the best-known version, there are many different accounts as to how Zeus escaped the attention of the great Kronos, god of earth, sky and seas. One records that a nymph named ADAMANTHEA suspended the infant Zeus by rope from a tree. Strung up between earth, sea and sky he remained in this way invisible to his father. It is a pleasingly Daliesque image – the baby who would become the mightiest of all beings gurgling, babbling and chuckling in mid-air, hanging between the elements over which he was destined to rule.

The Oath of Allegiance

While, unknown to his father, Zeus grew strong on goat’s milk and manna in Crete and learned to walk, talk and understand the world around him, Kronos summoned his Titan siblings to Mount Othrys to renew their pledges of loyalty and obedience.

‘This is our world now,’ he told them. ‘Fate has decreed that I must be childless, the better to rule. But you must do your duty. Breed! Fill the world with our Titan race. Bring them up to obey me in all things and I will grant you lands and provinces of your own. Now, bow before me.’

The Titans bowed low and Kronos gave a grunt of satisfaction that was the closest he ever came to an expression of happiness. The vengeful prophecy of his father had been averted; the eternal Age of the Titans could begin.

The Cretan Boy

Kronos may have grunted with satisfaction, but Moros, the figuration of Destiny and Doom, smiled – as he always does when the powerful exhibit confidence. On this occasion Moros smiled because he could see that Zeus was flourishing on Crete. He was growing into the strongest and most striking male in all creation – indeed his radiance had become almost painful to look upon.fn16 The goodness of goat’s milk and the nurturing potency of manna had given him strong bones, a clear complexion, sparkling eyes and glossy hair. He made the journey, to use the Greek terms, from pais (boy) and ephebos (teenager) to kouros (youth) and thence into a fine example of what we might call today a young adult. Even now the first downy outlines of what was to become a legendary and mighty example of the art of the beard were showing themselves on his chin and cheeks.fn17 He possessed the confidence, the unforced air of command, that marks out those destined to lead. He was quicker to laughter than anger, but when his ire was roused he could frighten every living creature within his orbit.

From the first he exhibited a blend of zest for life and strength of will that filled even his mother with awe, and some attested that Amalthea’s milk conferred extraordinary capabilities on the youth as he grew. To this day Cretan guides entertain visitors with tales of the young Zeus’s remarkable powers. They tell the story (as if it happened within their lifetimes) of how, as an infant playing with his beloved nanny-goat and unaware of his own strength, Zeus accidentally snapped off one of her horns.fn18 By virtue of his already prodigious divine powers, this broken horn instantly filled itself with the most delicious food – fresh bread, vegetables, fruit, cured meats and smoked fish – a supply that never gave out no matter how much was taken from it. Thus originated the celebrated Horn of Plenty, the CORNUCOPIA.

Zeus’s determined mother visited Crete whenever she felt able to slip away from the ever watchful Kronos.

‘Never forget what your father did. He ate your brothers and sisters. He tried to eat you. He is your enemy.’

Zeus would listen as Rhea described the unhappy condition of the world under Kronos.

‘He rules by fear. He has no sense of loyalty or trust. This is not the way, my Zeus.’

‘Doesn’t that make him strong?’

‘No! It makes him weak. The Titans are his family, his brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces. Already some are beginning to resent his monstrous tyranny. When your time comes you will exploit that resentment.’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘A true leader forges alliances. A true leader is admired and trusted.’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘A true leader is loved.’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘Ah, you laugh at me, but it is true.’

‘Yes, m—’

Rhea slapped her son.

‘Be serious. You are no fool, I can see that for myself. Adamanthea tells me that you are intelligent, but impetuous. That you spend too much time hunting wolves, teasing the sheep, climbing trees, seducing the ash-tree nymphs. It is time you were properly schooled. You are sixteen now and soon we must make our move.’

‘Yes, mother.’

The Oceanid and the Potion

Rhea asked her friend Metis, wise and beautiful daughter of Tethys and Oceanus, to prepare her son for what was to come.

‘He is clever, but wayward and rash. Teach him patience, craft and guile.’

Zeus was captivated by Metis from the start. He had never seen such beauty. The Titaness was a little smaller than most of her race, but endowed with a grace and gravity that made her shine. The step of a deer and the guile of a fox, the power of a lion, the softness of a dove, all allied to a presence and force of mind that sent the boy dizzy.

‘Lie down with me.’

‘No. We shall go for a walk. I have many things to say to you.’

‘Here. On the grass.’

Metis smiled and took his hand. ‘We have work to do, Zeus.’

‘But I love you.’

‘Then you will do as I say. When we love someone, we always want to please them do we not?’

‘Don’t you love me?’

Metis laughed, though in truth she was astounded by the halo of glamour and charisma that radiated from this bold and handsome youth. But her friend Rhea had asked her to undertake his education and Metis was never one to betray a trust.

For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others.

Her refusal to allow their relationship to take on a physical dimension only made Zeus love her more. Although she never told him so, Metis returned the love. As a result there existed a kind of crackle in the air whenever the two were close.

One day Zeus saw Metis standing over a large boulder and bashing its flat surface with a small round-ended stone.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘Crushing mustard seeds and crystals of salt.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘Today,’ said Metis, ‘is your seventeenth birthday. You are ready to go to Othrys and fulfil your destiny. Rhea will be here soon, but first I must finish a little preparation of my own devising.’

‘What’s in that jar?’

‘In here there is a mixture of poppy juice and copper sulphate, sweetened with a syrup of manna provided by the Meliae, our friends of the ash tree. I’ll put all the ingredients together and shake them up. Like so.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Look, here is your mother. She will explain.’

As Metis looked on, Rhea outlined the plan to Zeus. Mother and son gazed deep into each other’s eyes, took a deep breath and swore an oath, son to mother, mother to son. They were ready.

Rebirth of the Five

Midnight. The thick cloth that Erebus and Nyx threw across earth, sea and sky to mark the end of Hemera’s and Aether’s diurnal round blanketed the world. In a valley high up on Mount Othrys, the Lord of All paced alone, banging his chest, restless and miserable. Kronos had grown into the most foul-tempered and discontented Titan of all. Power over everything gave him no satisfaction. Since Rhea had – without explanation – banned him from the conjugal bed, sleep had been a stranger to him too. Denied its healing balm his mood and digestion, neither good at the best of times, had worsened. The last of the babies he had swallowed seemed to have provoked a sharp acid reflux that the previous five had not. Where was the joy in omnipotence when his stomach griped and his thoughts stumbled blindly in the thick fog of insomnia?

His heart lifted to a state approaching something like happiness, however, when he heard, unexpectedly, the sound of Rhea’s low sweet voice humming gently to herself as she came up the slope towards the mountaintop. Loveliest sister and dearest wife! It was quite natural that she had been a little upset by his consumption of their six children, but she surely understood that he had had no choice. She was a Titan, she knew about duty and destiny. He called out to her.

‘Rhea?’

‘Kronos! Awake at this hour?’

‘I have been awake for more days and nights than I can count. Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me. Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.’ Macbeth, another murderer deprived of sleep and plagued by dark prophesies, was to say the same thing, but not for many years yet.

‘Oh tush, my love. Cannot the wit and craft of a Titaness surpass those silly sleep demons? There is nothing Hypnos and Morpheus can do to soothe your aching body, to calm your racing mind, to ease your wounded spirit, that I cannot match with something sweet and warm of my own.’

‘Your sweet warm lips! Your sweet warm thighs! Your sweet warm –’

‘Those in time, impatient lord! But first, I have brought you a present. A lovely boy to be your cupbearer.’

From the recess stepped Zeus, a radiant smile lighting up his handsome face. He bowed and proffered Kronos a jewelled goblet which the Titan snatched greedily.

‘Pretty, very pretty. I might try him later,’ he said casting an admiring eye over Zeus and drinking down the contents of the goblet in one greedy draft. ‘But Rhea, it is you that I love.’

It was too dark for him to see that Rhea had hoisted one eyebrow into an arch of contemptuous incredulity.

‘You love me?’ she hissed. ‘You? Love? Me? You, who ate all but one of my darling children? You dare talk to me of love?’

Kronos gave an unhappy hiccup. He was undergoing the strangest sensations. He frowned and tried to focus. What was Rhea saying? It could not be that she no longer loved him. His mind was even more foggy and his stomach even more turbulent than usual. What was wrong with him? Oh, and there was something else she had said. Something that made no sense at all.

‘What do you mean,’ he asked in a voice thick with confusion and nausea, ‘by saying that I ate “all but one” of your children? I ate all of them. I distinctly remember.’

A strong young voice cracked through the night air like a whip. ‘Not quite all, father!’

Kronos, the nausea rising in an alarming surge, turned in shock to see the young cupbearer step from the shadows.

‘Who … who … whooooooooo!’ Kronos’s question turned into a sudden uprush of uncontrollable vomiting. From his gut, in one heaving spasm, erupted a large stone. The linen in which it was once wrapped had long since been dissolved by stomach acid. Kronos gazed at it stupidly, his eyes swimming and his face white. But before he could understand what he was seeing he was assailed by that horrible and unmistakable feeling that tells a vomiter there is more to come. Far more.

Zeus leapt fleetly forward, picked up the regurgitated boulder and hurled it far, far away, much as Kronos had once flung Ouranos’s genitals far, far away from the exact same spot. We will find out later where it landed and what happened.

Inside Kronos the compound of salt, mustard and ipecacuanha continued to do its emetic work.fn19 One by one he spewed up the five children he had swallowed. First out was Hera.fn20 Then came Poseidon, Demeter, Hades and finally Hestia, before the tormented Titan collapsed in a paroxysm of exhausted panting.

If you recall, Metis’s potion also included a quantity of poppy juice. This immediately began to take somniferous effect. Letting out one last great rumbling groan, Kronos rolled over and fell into a deep, deep sleep.

With a cry of exultation Zeus bent over his snoring father to grasp the great sickle and administer the coup de grâce. He would sever Kronos’s head in one blow and raise it up in triumph before the world, creating a victorious tableau that would never be forgotten and that artists would depict until the end of time. But the scythe, forged by Gaia for Kronos, could not be used against him. Powerful as Zeus was, he was unable even to pick it up. He tried once, but it felt as if it was fixed to the ground.

‘Gaia gave it to him and only Gaia can take it away from him,’ said Rhea. ‘Let it be.’

‘But I must kill him,’ said Zeus. ‘We must be revenged.’

‘His mother Earth protects him. Do not anger her. You will need her in the time to come. You will have your revenge.’

Zeus gave up his attempts to move the scythe. It was vexing that he could not behead his hated father as he lay there snoring like a pig, but his mother was right. It could wait. There was too much to celebrate.

In the starlight over Mount Othrys he and his five liberated siblings laughed and stamped and hooted and howled with delight. Their mother laughed too, clapping her hands with joy to see her radiant sons and daughters so well and so happy, out in the world at last and ready to claim their inheritance. Each of the five rescued ones took it in turn to embrace Zeus, their youngest but now eldest brother, their saviour and their leader. They swore allegiance to him for ever. Together they would overthrow Kronos and his whole ugly race and establish a new order …

They would not, despite their parentage, call themselves ‘Titans’. They would be gods. And not just gods, but the gods.