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