le blé’ and also ‘un dieu des lieux souterrains.’ ‘Il habite les profondeurs sous la terre,’ he is also le dieu du ciel nocturne.
It may have been remarked that I declined to add to this interesting collection of plausible explanations of Cronos. A selection of such explanations I offer in tabular form: —
Cronos was God of
Time (?) – Max Müller
Sun – Sayce
Midnight sky – Kuhn
Under-world }
Midnight sky} – Tiele
Harvest }
Harvest – Preller
Storm – Schwartz
Star-swallowing sky – Canon Taylor
Sun scorching spring – Hartung
Cronos was by Race
Late Greek (?) – Max Müller
Semitic – Böttiger
Accadian (?) – Sayce
Etymology of Cronos
Χρονος=Time (?) – Max Müller
Krāna (Sanskrit) – Kuhn
Karnos (Horned) – Brown κραινω – Preller
The pleased reader will also observe that the phallus of Ouranos is the sun (Tiele), that Cronos is the sun (Sayce), that Cronos mutilating Ouranos is the sun (Hartung), just as the sun is the mutilated part of Ouranos (Tiele); Or is, according to others, the stone which Cronos swallowed, and which acted as an emetic.
Now, I have offered no explanation at all of who Cronos was, what he was god of, from what race he was borrowed, from what language his name was derived. The fact is that I do not know the truth about these important debated questions. Therefore, after speaking so kindly of our method, and rejecting the method of Mr. Max Müller, Professor Tiele now writes thus (and this Mr. Max Müller does cite, as we have seen): —
‘Mr. Lang and M. Gaidoz are not entirely wrong in claiming me as an ally. But I must protest, in the name of mythological science, and of the exactness as necessary to her as to any of the other sciences, against a method which only glides over questions of the first importance’ (name, origin, province, race of Cronos), ‘and which to most questions can only reply, with a smile, C’est chercher raison où il n’y en a pas.’
Now, what important questions was I gliding over? In what questions did I not expect to find reason? Why in this savage fatras about Cronos swallowing his children, about blood-drops becoming bees (Mr. Max Müller says ‘Melian nymphs’), and bees being stars, and all the rest of a prehistoric Märchen worked over again and again by the later fancy of Greek poets and by Greek voyagers who recognised Cronos in Moloch. In all this I certainly saw no ‘reason,’ but I have given in tabular form the general, if inharmonious, conclusions of more exact and conscientious scholars, ‘their variegated hypotheses,’ as Mannhardt says in the case of Demeter. My error, rebuked by Professor Tiele, is the lack of that ‘scientific exactitude’ exhibited by the explanations arranged in my tabular form.
I would reply that I am not engaged in a study of the Cult of Cronos, but of the revolting element in his Myth: his swallowing of his children, taking a stone emetic by mistake, and disgorging the swallowed children alive; the stone being on view at Delphi long after the Christian era. Now, such stories of divine feats of swallowing and disgorging are very common, I show, in savage myth and popular Märchen. The bushmen have Kwai Hemm, who swallows the sacred Mantis insect. He is killed, and all the creatures whom he has swallowed return to light. Such stories occur among Australians, Kaffirs, Red Men, in Guiana, in Greenland, and so on. In some cases, among savages. Night (conceived as a person), or one star which obscures another star, is said to ‘swallow’ it. Therefore, I say, ‘natural phenomena, explained on savage principles, might give the data of the swallowing myth, of Cronos’ 47– that is, the myth of Cronos may be, probably is, originally a nature-myth. ‘On this principle Cronos would be (ad hoc) the Night.’ Professor Tiele does not allude to this effort at interpretation. But I come round to something like the view of Kuhn. Cronos (ad hoc) is the midnight [sky], which Professor Tiele also regards as one of his several aspects. It is not impossible, I think, that if the swallowing myth was originally a nature-myth, it was suggested by Night. But the question I tried to answer was, ‘Why did the Greeks, of all people, tell such a disgusting story?’ And I replied, with Professor Tiele’s approval, that they inherited it from an age to which such follies were natural, an age when the ancestors of the Greeks were on (or under) the Maori stage of culture. Now, the Maoris, a noble race, with poems of great beauty and speculative power, were cannibals, like Cronos. To my mind, ‘scientific exactitude’ is rather shown in confessing ignorance than in adding to the list of guesses.
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