Custom and Myth
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 Märchen, 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 où 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.’ 34 The other children also emerged, all alive and well. Zeus fixed the stone at Delphi, where, long after the Christian era, Pausanias saw it. 35 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.
* * * * *This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-block of the orthodox Greek, the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian controversialists. Found among Bushmen or Australians the narrative might seem rather wild, but it astonishes us still more when it occurs in the holy legends of Greece. Our explanation of its presence there is simple enough. Like the erratic blocks in a modern plain, like the flint-heads in a meadow, the story is a relic of a very distant past. The glacial age left the boulders on the plain, the savage tribes of long ago left the arrowheads, the period of savage fancy left the story of Cronus and the rites of the fetich-stone. Similar rites are still notoriously practised in the South Sea Islands, in Siberia, in India and Africa and Melanesia, by savages. And by savages similar tales are still told.
* * * * *We cannot go much lower than the Bushmen, and among Bushman divine myths is room for the ‘swallowing trick’ attributed to Cronus by Hesiod. The chief divine character in Bushman myth is the Mantis insect. His adopted daughter is the child of Kwai Hemm, a supernatural character, ‘the all-devourer.’ The Mantis gets his adopted daughter to call the swallower to his aid; but Kwai Hemm swallows the Mantis, the god-insect. As Zeus made his own wife change herself into an insect, for the convenience of swallowing her, there is not much difference between Bushman and early Greek mythology. Kwai Hemm is killed by a stratagem, and all the animals whom he has got outside of, in a long and voracious career, troop forth from him alive and well, like the swallowed gods from the maw of Cronus. 36 Now, story for story, the Bushman version is much less offensive than that of Hesiod. But the Bushman story is just the sort of story we expect from Bushmen, whereas the Hesiodic story is not at all the kind of tale we look for from Greeks. The explanation is, that the Greeks had advanced out of a savage state of mind and society, but had retained their old myths, myths evolved in the savage stage, and in harmony with that condition of fancy. Among the Kaffirs 37 we find the same ‘swallow-myth.’ The Igongqongqo swallows all and sundry; a woman cuts the swallower with a knife, and ‘people came out, and cattle, and dogs.’ In Australia, a god is swallowed. As in the myth preserved by Aristophanes in the ‘Birds,’ the Australians believe that birds were the original gods, and the eagle, especially, is a great creative power. The Moon was a mischievous being, who walked about the world, doing what evil he could. One day he swallowed the eagle-god. The wives of the eagle came up, and the Moon asked them where he might find a well. They pointed out a well, and, as he drank, they hit the Moon with a stone tomahawk, and out flew the eagle. 38 This is oddly like Grimm’s tale of ‘The Wolf and the Kids.’ The wolf swallowed the kids, their mother cut a hole in the wolf, let out the kids, stuffed the wolf with stones, and sewed him up again. The wolf went to the well to drink, the weight of the stones pulled him in, and he was drowned. Similar stories are common among the Red Indians, and Mr. Im Thurn has found them in Guiana. How savages all over the world got the idea that men and beasts could be swallowed and disgorged alive, and why they fashioned the idea into a divine myth, it is hard to say. Mr. Tylor, in ‘Primitive Culture,’ 39 adds many examples of the narrative. The Basutos have it; it occurs some five times in Callaway’s ‘Zulu Nursery Tales.’ In Greenland the Eskimo have a shape of the incident, and we have all heard of the escape of Jonah.
It has been suggested that night, covering up the world, gave the first idea of the swallowing myth. Now in some of the stories the night is obviously conceived of as a big beast which swallows all things. The notion that night is an animal is entirely in harmony with savage metaphysics. In the opinion of the savage speculator, all things are men and animals. ‘Ils se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animées,’ says one of the old Jesuit missionaries in Canada. 40 ‘The wind was formerly a person; he became a bird,’ say the Bushmen.
G’ oö ka! Kui (a very respectable Bushman, whose name seems a little hard to pronounce), once saw the wind-person at Haarfontein. Savages, then, are persuaded that night, sky, cloud, fire, and so forth, are only the schein, or sensuous appearance, of things that, in essence, are men or animals. A good example is the bringing of Night to Vanua Lava, by Qat, the ‘culture-hero’ of Melanesia. At first it was always day, and people tired of it. Qat heard that Night was at the Torres Islands, and he set forth to get some. Qong (Night) received Qat well, blackened his eyebrows, showed him Sleep, and sent him off with fowls to bring Dawn after the arrival of Night should make Dawn a necessary. Next day Qat’s brothers saw the sun crawl away west, and presently Night came creeping up from the sea. ‘What is this?’ cried the brothers. ‘It is Night,’ said Qat; ‘sit down, and when you feel something in your eyes, lie down and keep quiet.’ So they went to sleep. ‘When Night had lasted long enough, Qat took a piece of red obsidian, and cut the darkness, and the Dawn came out.’ 41
Night is more or less personal in this tale, and solid enough to be cut, so as to let the Dawn out. This savage conception of night, as the swallower and disgorger, might start the notion of other swallowing and disgorging beings. Again the Bushmen, and other savage peoples, account for certain celestial phenomena by saying that ‘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 (Κρονος). 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 Κρονιων or Κρονιδης 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 Κρονιδης as equivalent to Ancient of Days) ceased to be understood… people asked themselves the question, Why is Ζευς called Κρονιδης? And the natural and almost inevitable answer was, Because he is the son, the offspring of a more ancient god, Κρονος. 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 Κρονος in the Veda.’ To expect Greek in the Veda would certainly be sanguine. ‘When this myth of Κρονος had once been started, it would roll on irresistibly. If Ζευς had once a father called Κρονος, Κρονος must have a wife.’ It is added, as confirmation, that ‘the name of Κρονιδης belongs originally to Zeus only, and not to his later’ (in Hesiod elder) ‘brothers, Poseidon and Hades.’ 42
Mr. Müller says, in his famous essay on ‘Comparative Mythology’ 43: ‘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 Uranos 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 Κρονος, to account for the patronymic (as they deemed it) Κρονιδης, son of Κρονος. 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 Κρονος, 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 Κρονος from the same root as the Sanskrit Krāna. 44 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 Myth’ 45 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.’ 46 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. 47 According to Preller, Κρονος is connected with κραινω, to fulfil, to bring to completion. The harvest month, the month of ripening and fulfilment, was called κρονιων in some parts of Greece, and the jolly harvest-feast, with its memory of Saturn’s golden days, was named κρονια. 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 κραινω: —
ουδ αρα πω οι επεκραιαινε Κρονιων
and in Sophocles (‘Tr.’ 126) —
ο παντα κραινων βασιλευς Κρονιδας.
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. Porphyry 48 speaks of human sacrifices to Cronus in Rhodes, and the Greeks recognised Cronus in the Carthaginian god to whom children were offered up.
Hartung 49 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. 50 According to Prof. Sayce, again, 51 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 and reproduces the stars. The story of the sickle may be derived from the crescent moon, the ‘silver sickle,’ or from a crescent-shaped piece of meteoric iron – for, in this theory, the fetich-stone of Delphi is a piece of that substance.
* * * * *It will be observed that any one of these theories, if accepted, is much more ‘minute in detail’ than our humble suggestion. He who adopts any one of them, knows all about it. He knows that Cronus is a purely Greek god, or that he is connected with the Sanskrit Krāna, which Tiele, 52 unhappily, says is ‘a very dubious word.’ Or the mythologist may be quite confident that Cronus is neither Greek nor, in any sense, Sanskrit, but Phœnician. A not less adequate interpretation assigns him ultimately to Accadia. While the inquirer who can choose a system and stick to it knows the exact nationality of Cronus, he is also well acquainted with his character as a nature-god. He may be Time, or perhaps he is the Summer Heat, and a horned god; or he is the harvest-god, or the god of storm and darkness, or the midnight sky, – the choice is wide; or he is the lord of dark and light, and his children are the stars, the clouds, the summer months, the light-powers, or what you will. The mythologist has only to make his selection.
The system according to which we tried to interpret the myth is less ondoyant et divers. We do not even pretend to explain everything. We do not guess at the meaning and root of the word Cronus. We only find parallels to the myth among savages, whose mental condition is fertile in such legends. And we only infer that the myth of Cronus was originally evolved by persons also in the savage intellectual condition. The survival we explain as, in a previous essay, we explained the survival of the bull-roarer by the conservatism of the religious instinct.
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ‘SUN-FROG.’
‘Once upon a time there lived a king and a queen,’ says the old woman in Apuleius, beginning the tale of Cupid and Psyche with that ancient formula which has been dear to so many generations of children. In one shape or other the tale of Cupid and Psyche, of the woman who is forbidden to see or to name her husband, of the man with the vanished fairy bride, is known in most lands, ‘even among barbarians.’ According to the story the mystic prohibition is always broken: the hidden face is beheld; light is brought into the darkness; the forbidden name is uttered; the bride is touched with the tabooed metal, iron, and the union is ended. Sometimes the pair are re-united, after long searchings and wanderings; sometimes they are severed for ever. Such are the central situations in tales like that of Cupid and Psyche.
In the attempt to discover how the ideas on which this myth is based came into existence, we may choose one of two methods. We may confine our investigations to the Aryan peoples, among whom the story occurs both in the form of myth and of household tale. Again, we may look for the shapes of the legend which hide, like Peau d’Ane in disguise, among the rude kraals and wigwams, and in the strange and scanty garb of savages. If among savages we find both narratives like Cupid and Psyche, and also customs and laws out of which the myth might have arisen, we may provisionally conclude that similar customs once existed among the civilised races who possess the tale, and that from these sprang the early forms of the myth.
In accordance with the method hitherto adopted, we shall prefer the second plan, and pursue our quest beyond the limits of the Aryan peoples.
The oldest literary shape of the tale of Psyche and her lover is found in the Rig Veda (x. 95). The characters of a singular and cynical dialogue in that poem are named Urvasi and Pururavas. The former is an Apsaras, a kind of fairy or sylph, the mistress (and a folle maîtresse, too) of Pururavas, a mortal man. 53 In the poem Urvasi remarks that when she dwelt among men she ‘ate once a day a small piece of butter, and therewith well satisfied went away.’ This slightly reminds one of the common idea that the living may not eat in the land of the dead, and of Persephone’s tasting the pomegranate in Hades.
Of the dialogue in the Rig Veda it may be said, in the words of Mr. Toots, that ‘the language is coarse and the meaning is obscure.’ We only gather that Urvasi, though she admits her sensual content in the society of Pururavas, is leaving him ‘like the first of the dawns’; that she ‘goes home again, hard to be caught, like the winds.’ She gives her lover some hope, however – that the gods promise immortality even to him, ‘the kinsman of Death’ as he is. ‘Let thine offspring worship the gods with an oblation; in Heaven shalt thou too have joy of the festival.’
In the Rig Veda, then, we dimly discern a parting between a mortal man and an immortal bride, and a promise of reconciliation.
The story, of which this Vedic poem is a partial dramatisation, is given in the Brahmana of the Yajur Veda. Mr. Max Müller has translated the passage. 54 According to the Brahmana, ‘Urvasi, a kind of fairy, fell in love with Pururavas, and when she met him she said: Embrace me three times a day, but never against my will, and let me never see you without your royal garments, for this is the manner of women.’ 55 The Gandharvas, a spiritual race, kinsmen of Urvasi, thought she had lingered too long among men. They therefore plotted some way of parting her from Pururavas. Her covenant with her lord declared that she was never to see him naked. If that compact were broken she would be compelled to leave him. To make Pururavas break this compact the Gandharvas stole a lamb from beside Urvasi’s bed: Pururavas sprang up to rescue the lamb, and, in a flash of lightning, Urvasi saw him naked, contrary to the manner of women. She vanished. He sought her long, and at last came to a lake where she and her fairy friends were playing in the shape of birds. Urvasi saw Pururavas, revealed herself to him, and, according to the Brahmana, part of the strange Vedic dialogue was now spoken. Urvasi promised to meet him on the last night of the year: a son was to be the result of the interview. Next day, her kinsfolk, the Gandharvas, offered Pururavas the wish of his heart. He wished to be one of them. They then initiated him into the mode of kindling a certain sacred fire, after which he became immortal and dwelt among the Gandharvas.
It is highly characteristic of the Indian mind that the story should be thus worked into connection with ritual. In the same way the Bhagavata Purana has a long, silly, and rather obscene narrative about the sacrifice offered by Pururavas, and the new kind of sacred fire. Much the same ritual tale is found in the Vishnu Purana (iv. 6, 19).
Before attempting to offer our own theory of the legend, we must examine the explanations presented by scholars. The philological method of dealing with myths is well known. The hypothesis is that the names in a myth are ‘stubborn things,’ and that, as the whole narrative has probably arisen from forgetfulness of the meaning of language, the secret of a myth must be sought in analysis of the proper names of the persons. On this principle Mr. Max Müller interprets the myth of Urvasi and Pururavas, their loves, separation, and reunion. Mr. Müller says that the story ‘expresses the identity of the morning dawn and the evening twilight.’ 56 To prove this, the names are analysed. It is Mr. Müller’s object to show that though, even in the Veda, Urvasi and Pururavas are names of persons, they were originally ‘appellations’; and that Urvasi meant ‘dawn,’ and Pururavas ‘sun.’ Mr. Müller’s opinion as to the etymological sense of the names would be thought decisive, naturally, by lay readers, if an opposite opinion were not held by that other great philologist and comparative mythologist, Adalbert Kuhn. Admitting that ‘the etymology of Urvasi is difficult,’ Mr. Müller derives it from ‘uru, wide (ευρυ), and a root as = to pervade.’ Now the dawn is ‘widely pervading,’ and has, in Sanskrit, the epithet urûkî, ‘far-going.’ Mr. Müller next assumes that ‘Eurykyde,’ ‘Eurynome,’ ‘Eurydike,’ and other heroic Greek female names, are ‘names of the dawn’; but this, it must be said, is merely an assumption of his school. The main point of the argument is that Urvasi means ‘far-going,’ and that ‘the far and wide splendour of dawn’ is often spoken of in the Veda. ‘However, the best proof that Urvasi was the dawn is the legend told of her and of her love to Pururavas, a story that is true only of the sun and the dawn’ (i. 407).