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.