armed with a sickle of iron, or steel, and mutilated Uranus.  Thus were
Heaven and Earth practically divorced.  But as in the Maori myth one of
the children of Heaven clave to his sire, so, in Greek, Oceanus remained
faithful to his father. {49b}

This is the first portion of the Myth of Cronus.  Can it be denied that
the story is well illustrated and explained by the New Zealand parallel,
the myth of the cruelty of Tutenganahau?  By means of this comparison,
the meaning of the myth is made clear enough.  Just as the New Zealanders
had conceived of Heaven and Earth as at one time united, to the prejudice
of their children, so the ancestors of the Greeks had believed in an
ancient union of Heaven and Earth.  Both by Greeks and Maoris, Heaven and
Earth were thought of as living persons, with human parts and passions.
Their union was prejudicial to their children, and so the children
violently separated the parents.  This conduct is regarded as impious,
and as an awful example to be avoided, in Maori pahs.  In Naxos, on the
other hand, Euthyphro deemed that the conduct of Cronus deserved
imitation.  If ever the Maoris had reached a high civilisation, they
would probably have been revolted, like Socrates, by the myth which
survived from their period of savagery.  Mr. Tylor well says, {50a} 'Just
as the adzes of polished jade, and the cloaks of tied flax-fibre, which
these New Zealanders were using but yesterday, are older in their place
in history than the bronze battle-axes and linen mummy-cloths of ancient
Egypt, so the Maori poet's shaping of nature into nature-myth belongs to
a stage of intellectual history which was passing away in Greece five-and-
twenty centuries ago.  The myth-maker's fancy of Heaven and Earth as
father and mother of all things naturally suggested the legend that they
in old days abode together, but have since been torn asunder.'

* * * * *

That this view of Heaven and Earth is natural to early minds, Mr. Tylor
proves by the presence of the myth of the union and violent divorce of
the pair in China. {50b}  Puang-ku is the Chinese Cronus, or
Tutenganahau.  In India, {50c} Dyaus and Prithivi, Heaven and Earth, were
once united, and were severed by Indra, their own child.

This, then, is our interpretation of the exploit of Cronus.  It is an old
surviving nature-myth of the severance of Heaven and Earth, a myth found
in China, India, New Zealand, as well as in Greece.  Of course it is not
pretended that Chinese and Maoris borrowed from Indians and Greeks, or
came originally of the same stock.  Similar phenomena, presenting
themselves to be explained by human minds in a similar stage of fancy and
of ignorance, will account for the parallel myths.

The second part of the myth of Cronus was, like the first, a stumbling-
block to the orthodox in Greece.  Of the second part we offer no
explanation beyond the fact that the incidents in the myth are almost
universally found among savages, and that, therefore, in Greece they are
probably survivals from savagery.  The sequel of the myth appears to
account for nothing, as the first part accounts for the severance of
Heaven and Earth.  In the sequel a world-wide Marchen, or tale, seems to
have been attached to Cronus, or attracted into the cycle of which he is
centre, without any particular reason, beyond the law which makes
detached myths crystallise round any celebrated name.  To look further
is, perhaps, chercher raison ou il n'y en a pas.

The conclusion of the story of Cronus runs thus:--He wedded his sister,
Rhea, and begat children--Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and, lastly,
Zeus.  'And mighty Cronus swallowed down each of them, each that came to
their mother's knees from her holy womb, with this intent, that none
other of the proud children of Uranus should hold kingly sway among the
Immortals.'  Cronus showed a ruling father's usual jealousy of his heirs.
It was a case of Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich.  But Cronus (acting in
a way natural in a story perhaps first invented by cannibals) swallowed
his children instead of merely imprisoning them.  Heaven and Earth had
warned him to beware of his heirs, and he could think of no safer plan
than that which he adopted.  When Rhea was about to become the mother of
Zeus, she fled to Crete.  Here Zeus was born, and when Cronus (in pursuit
of his usual policy) asked for the baby, he was presented with a stone
wrapped up in swaddling bands.  After swallowing the stone, Cronus was
easy in his mind; but Zeus grew up, administered a dose to his father,
and compelled him to disgorge.  'The stone came forth first, as he had
swallowed it last.' {52a}   The other children also emerged, all alive
and well.  Zeus fixed the stone at Delphi, where, long after the
Christian era, Pausanias saw it. {52b}  It was not a large stone,
Pausanias tells us, and the Delphians used to anoint it with oil and wrap
it up in wool on feast-days.  All Greek temples had their fetich-stones,
and each stone had its legend.  This was the story of the Delphian stone,
and of the fetichism which survived the early years of Christianity.  A
very pretty story it is.  Savages more frequently smear their
fetich-stones with red paint than daub them with oil, but the latter, as
we learn from Theophrastus's account of the 'superstitious man,' was the
Greek ritual.

* * * * *

This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-block of the orthodox Greek,
the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian
controversialists.  Found among Bushmen or Australians the narrative
might seem rather wild, but it astonishes us still more when it occurs in
the holy legends of Greece.  Our explanation of its presence there is
simple enough.  Like the erratic blocks in a modern plain, like the flint-
heads in a meadow, the story is a relic of a very distant past.  The
glacial age left the boulders on the plain, the savage tribes of long ago
left the arrowheads, the period of savage fancy left the story of Cronus
and the rites of the fetich-stone.  Similar rites are still notoriously
practised in the South Sea Islands, in Siberia, in India and Africa and
Melanesia, by savages.  And by savages similar tales are still told.