CRONUS married his sister Rhea, to whom the oak is sacred. But it was prophesied by Mother Earth, and by his dying father Uranus, that one of his own sons would dethrone him. Every year, therefore, he swallowed the children whom Rhea bore him: first Hestia, then Demeter and Hera, then Hades, then Poseidon.
b. Rhea was enraged. She bore Zeus, her third son, at dead of night on Mount Lycaeum in Arcadia, where no creature casts a shadow and, having bathed him in the River Neda, gave him to Mother Earth; by whom he was carried to Lyctos in Crete, and hidden in the cave of Dicte on the Aegean Hill. Mother Earth left him there to be nursed by the Ash- nymph Adrasteia and her sister Io, both daughters of Melisseus, and by the Goat-nymph Amaltheia. His food was honey, and he drank Amaltheia's milk, with Goat-Pan, his foster- brother. Zeus was grateful to these three nymphs for their kindness and, when he became Lord of the Universe, set Amaltheia's image among the stars, as Capricorn. He also borrowed one of her horns, which resembled a cow's, and gave it to the daughters of Melisseus; it became the famous Cornucopia, or horn of plenty, which is always filled with whatever food or drink its owner may desire. But some say that Zeus was suckled by a sow, and rode on her back, and that he lost his navel-string at Omphalion near Cnossus.
c. Around the infant Zeus's golden cradle, which was hung upon a tree (so that Cronus might find him neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor in the sea) stood the armed Curetes, Rhea's sons. They clashed their spears against their shields, and shouted to drown the noise of his wailing, lest Cronus might hear it from far off. For Rhea had wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes, which she gave to Cronus on Mount Thaumasium in Arcadia; he swallowed it, believing that he was swallowing the infant Zeus. Nevertheless, Cronus got wind of what had happened and pursued Zeus, who transformed himself into a serpent and his nurses into bears: hence the constellations of the Serpent and the Bears.
d. Zeus grew to manhood among the shepherds of Ida, occupying another cave; then sought out Metis the Titaness, who lived beside the Ocean stream. On her advice he visited his mother Rhea, and asked to be made Cronus's cup-bearer. Rhea readily assisted him in his task of vengeance; she provided the emetic potion, which Metis had told him to mix with Cronus's honeyed drink. Cronus, having drunk deep, vomited up first the stone, and then Zeus's elder brothers and sisters. They sprang out unhurt and, in gratitude, asked him to lead them in a war against the Titans, who chose the gigantic Atlas as their leader; for Cronus was now past his prime.
e. The war lasted ten years but, at last, Mother Earth prophesied victory to her grandson Zeus, if he took as allies those whom Cronus had confined in Tartarus; so he came secretly to Campe, the old jaileress of Tartarus, killed her, took her keys and, having released the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handed Ones, strengthened them with divine food and drink. The Cyclopes thereupon gave Zeus the thunderbolt as a weapon of offence; and Hades, a helmet of darkness; and Poseidon, a trident. After the three brothers had held a counsel of war, Hades entered unseen into Cronus's presence, to steal his weapons; and, while Poseidon threatened him with the trident and thus diverted his attention, Zeus struck him down with the thunderbolt. The three Hundred-handed Ones now took up rocks and pelted the remaining Titans, and a sudden shout from Goat-Pan put them to flight. The gods rushed in pursuit. Cronus, and all the defeated Titans, except Atlas, were banished to a British island in the farthest west (or, some say, confined in Tartarus), and guarded there by the Hundred-handed Ones; they never troubled Hellas again. Atlas, as their war-leader, was awarded an exemplary punishment, being ordered to carry the sky on his shoulders; but the Titanesses were spared, for the sake of Metis and Rhea.
f. Zeus himself set up at Delphi the stone which Cronus had disgorged. It is still there, constantly anointed with oil, and strands of unwoven wool are offered upon it.
g. Some say that Poseidon was neither eaten nor disgorged, but that Rhea gave Cronus a foal to eat in his stead, and hid him among the horse herds. And the Cretans, who are liars, relate that Zeus is born every year in the same cave with flashing fire and a stream of blood; and that every year he dies and is buried.
1. Rhea, paired with Cronus as Titaness of the seventh day, may be equated with Dione, or Diana, the Triple-goddess of the Dove and Oak cult. The bill-hook carried by Saturn, Cronus's Latin counterpart, was shaped like a crow's bill and apparently used in the seventh month of the sacred thirteen-month year to emasculate the oak by lopping off the mistletoe, just as a ritual sickle was used to reap the first ear of corn. This gave the signal for the sacred Zeus-king's sacrifice; and at Athens, Cronus, who shared a temple with Rhea, was worshipped as the Barley-god Sabazius, annually cut down in the cornfield and bewailed like Osiris or Lityerses or Maneros. But, by the times to which these myths refer, kings had been permitted to prolong their reigns to a Great Year of one hundred lunations, and offer annual boy victims in their stead; hence Cronus is pictured as eating his own sons to avoid dethronement. Porphyry (On Abstinence) records that the Cretan Curetes used to offer child sacrifices to Cronus in ancient times.
2. In Crete a kid was early substituted for a human victim; in Thrace, a bull-calf; among the Aeolian worshippers of Poseidon, a foal; but in backward districts of Arcadia boys were still sacrificially eaten even in the Christian era. It is not clear whether the Elean ritual was cannibalistic, or whether, Cronus being a Crow-Titan, sacred crows fed on the slaughtered victim.
3. Amaltheia's name, 'tender', shows her to have been a maiden-goddess; Io was an orgiastic nymph-goddess; Adrasteia means 'the inescapable One', the oracular Crone of autumn. Together they formed the usual Moon-triad. The later Greeks identified Adrasteia with the pastoral goddess Nemesis, of the rain-making ash-tree, who had become a goddess of vengeance. Io was pictured at Argos as a white cow in heat - some Cretan coins from Praesus show Zeus suckled by her - but Amaltheia, who lived on 'Goat Hill', was always a she-goat; and Melisseus ('honey-man'), Adrasteia and Io's reputed father, is really their mother - Melissa, the goddess as Queen-bee, who annually killed her male consort. Diodorus Siculus and Callimachus (Hymn to Zeus) both make bees feed the infant Zeus. But his foster-mother is sometimes also pictured as a sow, because that was one of the Crone- goddesses's emblems; and on Cydonian coins she is a bitch, like the one that suckled Neleus. The she-bears are Artemis's beasts - the Curetes attended her holocausts - and Zeus as serpent is Zeus Ctesius, protector of store-houses, because snakes got rid of mice.
4. The Curetes were the sacred king's armed companions, whose weapon-dashing was intended to drive off evil spirits during ritual performances. Their name, understood by the later Greeks as 'young men who have shaved their hair', probably meant 'devotees of Ker, or Car', a widespread title of the Triple-goddess. Heracles won his cornucopia from the Achelous bull, and the enormous size of the Cretan wild-goat's horns have led mythographers unacquainted with Crete to give Amaltheia an anomalous cow's horn.
5. Invading Hellenes seem to have offered friendship to the pre-Hellenic people of the Titan-cult, but gradually detached their subject-allies from them, and overrun the Peloponnese. Zeus's victory in alliance with the Hundred-handed Ones over the Titans of Thessaly is said by Thallus, the first-century historian, quoted by Tatian in his Address to the Greeks, to have taken place ‘322 years before the siege of Troy': that is to say 1505 BC, a plausible date for an extension of Hellenic power in Thessaly. The bestowal of sovereignty on Zeus recalls a similar event in the Babylonian Creation Epic, when Marduk was empowered to fight Tiamat by his elders Lahmu and Lahamu.
6. The brotherhood of Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus recalls that of the Vedic male trinity - Mitra, Varuna, and Indra - who appear in a Hittite treaty dated to about 1380 BC - but in this myth they seem to represent three successive Hellenic invasions, commonly known as Ionian, Aeolian, and Achaean. The pre-Hellenic worshippers of the Mother- goddess assimilated the Ionians, who became children of Io; tamed the Aeolians; but were overwhelmed by the Achaeans. Early Hellenic chieftains who became sacred kings of the oak and ash cults, took the titles 'Zeus' and 'Poseidon', and were obliged to die at the end of their set reigns. Both these trees tend to attract lightning, and therefore figure in popular rain- making and fire-making ceremonies throughout Europe.
7. The victory of the Achaeans ended the tradition of royal sacrifices. They ranked Zeus and Poseidon as immortals; picturing both as armed with the thunderbolt - a flint double-axe, once wielded by Rhea, and in the Minoan and Mycenaean religions withheld from male use. Later, Poseidon's thunderbolt was converted into a three-pronged fish- spear, his chief devotees having turned seafarers; whereas Zeus retained his as a symbol of supreme sovereignty. Poseidon's name, which was sometimes spelt Potidan, may have been borrowed from that of his goddess-mother, after whom the city Potidaea was called: 'the water-goddess of Ida' - Ida meaning any wooded mountain. That the Hundred-handed Ones guarded the Titans in the Far West may mean that the Pelasgians, among whose remnants were the Centaurs of Magnesia - centaur is perhaps cognate with the Latin centuria, 'a war-band of one hundred' - did not abandon their Titan cult, and continued to believe in a Far Western Paradise, and in Atlas's support of the firmament.
8. Rhea's name is probably a variant of Era, 'earth'; her chief bird was the dove, her chief beast the mountain-lion. Demeter's name means 'Barley-mother'; Hestia is the goddess of the domestic hearth. The stone at Delphi, used in rain-making ceremonies, seems to have been a large meteorite.
9. Dicte and Mount Lycaeum were ancient seats of Zeus worship. A fire sacrifice was probably offered on Mount Lycaeum, when no creature cast a shadow - that is to say, at noon on midsummer day; but Pausanias adds that though in Ethiopia while the sun is in Cancer men do not throw shadows, this is invariably the case on Mount Lycaeum. He may be quibbling: nobody who trespassed in this precinct was allowed to live (Aratus: Phenomena), and it was well known that the dead cast no shadows (Plutarch: Greek Questions). The cave of Psychro, usually regarded as the Dictacan Cave, is wrongly sited to be the real one, which has not yet been discovered. Omphalion ('little navel') suggests the site of an oracle.
10. Pan's sudden shout which terrified the Titans became proverbial and has given the word 'panic' to the English language.
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