Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  Hypnos, the personification of sleep. He would father Morpheus, who shaped and formed dreams.

  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 exceptions12: 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 toward 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.

  Kronos (Cronus) uses a scythe to mutilate his father, Ouranos (Uranus).

  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.13

  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.14

  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.15

  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.

  Botticelli’s Birth of Venus shows Aphrodite as she makes landfall in Cyprus.

  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.16 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 POSEI DON, 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 marvelous plan.

  Kronos devouring one of his sons.

  THE SWITCH

  In order to set this marvelous 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.17

  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 afterward, 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 gu
lp, 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.