Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  2. Indeed ouranos is the Greek word for “sky” to this very day.

  THE SECOND ORDER

  Ouranos the sky covered his mother Gaia the earth everywhere. He covered Gaia in both senses: he covered her as the sky still covers the earth to this day and he covered her as a stallion covers a mare. When he did so, something remarkable happened. Time began.

  Something else began too—what shall we call it? Personality? Drama? Individuality? Character, with all its flaws and failings, fashions and passions, schemes and dreams. Meaning began, you might say. The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky. I will leave such speculation to those better qualified, but it was nevertheless a great moment. In the creation of and conjoining with Ouranos, her son and now her husband, Gaia unwound the ribbon of life that runs all the way to human history and our own very selves, yours and mine.

  Right from the start, the union of Ouranos and Gaia was gratifyingly productive. Twelve robust, healthy children came first—six male, six female. The males were OCEANUS, COEUS, CRIUS, HYPERION, IAPETUS, and KRONOS. The females, THEIA, THEMIS, MNEMOSYNE, PHOEBE, TETHYS, and RHEA. These twelve were destined to become the Second Order of divine beings, earning themselves a legendary name. And somewhere, as Time crept into being, the clock began, the clock of cosmic history that still ticks today. Perhaps one of these newborns was responsible, we can look into that later.

  Not content with these twelve strong beautiful brothers and sisters, Ouranos and Gaia gave the world yet more progeny—two distinctive, but distinctly not beautiful, sets of triplets. The three CYCLOPES came first, one-eyed giants who gave their father sky a whole new range of expressions and modulations. The eldest cyclops was called BRONTES, thunder,3 next came STEROPES, the lightning, and then ARGES, brightness. Ouranos could fill the heavens with flashes of lightning and crashing thunder. He gloried in the noise and spectacle. But the second set of triplets Gaia bore sent even greater shudders through him and all who saw them.

  Perhaps it is kindest to say that they were a mutational experiment never to be repeated, a genetic dead end. For these newborns—the HECATONCHIRES4—each had fifty heads and a hundred hands and were as hideous, fierce, violent, and powerful as anything that had yet been released into being. Their names were COTTUS the furious, GYGES the long-limbed, and AEGAEON the sea goat, sometimes also called BRIAREOS the vigorous one. Gaia loved them. Ouranos was revolted by them. Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.

  Filled with disgust, he cursed them: “For offending my eyes, you shall never see light again!” As he roared these furious words, he pushed them and the Cyclopes back into Gaia’s womb.

  The Cyclopes had a single, orb-shaped eye in the middle of their forehead.

  GAIA’S REVENGE

  We have good cause to wonder here what “he pushed them into Gaia’s womb” really means. Some people have taken it to indicate that he buried the Hecatonchires and the Cyclopes in the earth. Divine identity at this early time was fluid, how much a god was a person and how much an attribute is hard to determine. There were no capital letters then. Gaia the Earth Mother was the same as gaia, the earth itself, just as ouranos, the sky, and Ouranos the Sky Father were one and the same.

  What is certain is that in reacting like this to the three Hecatonchires and the three Cyclopes, his own children, and in treating his wife with such abominable cruelty, Ouranos was committing the first crime. An elemental crime that would not go unpunished.

  Gaia’s agony was unbearable and inside her, alongside the Cyclopes and the trio of writhing, flailing three-hundred-handed clawing and a hundred-and-fifty-headed butting Hecatonchires, there sprang up a hatred, a most terrible and implacable hatred against Ouranos, the son she had borne and the husband with whom she had given birth to a new generation. And, like ivy twisting round a tree, there grew a plan of revenge.

  The piercing pain of the Hecatonchires still gnawing at her, Gaia visited Othrys, a great mountain that looks down over what we now call the central Greek region of Phthiotis. From its peak you can see the plain of Magnesia reaching down to the blue waters of the western Aegean as they curl round the Malian Gulf and embrace the sporadic scattering of islands called the Sporades. But Gaia was consumed with too much pain and too much fury to enjoy one of the world’s most charming views. On the summit of Mount Othrys she set to work fashioning a most unusual and terrible artifact from its rock. For nine days and nights she labored until she had produced an object which she then hid in the cleft of the mountain.

  Next she took herself off to visit her twelve beautiful, strong children.

  “Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?” she asked each in turn. “You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.”

  Perhaps we imagine that Gaia—Mother Earth—is soft, warm, bountiful, and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueler, harsher, and more terrifying than even the wildest sea.

  And talking of the marine world, the first of the children that Gaia tried to win to her side were Oceanus and his sister Tethys.5 But they were in the middle of negotiating a share of the oceans with Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea. All of this generation were stretching and flexing their muscles at this time, establishing their areas of expertise and control, nipping, growling, and testing each other’s strength and dominance like puppies in a basket. Oceanus had conceived the idea of creating tides and currents, which were to run like a great salt river around the world. Tethys was about to have his baby—no sin in those early days of course: Propagation would not have been possible without incestuous couplings. She was pregnant with NILUS, the Nile, and would go on to give birth to other rivers and to at least three thousand Oceanids or sea nymphs, attractive deities who moved as easily on dry land as in the waters of the sea. They already had two fully grown daughters: CLYMENE, who was the lover of IAPETUS, and the clever and wise METIS, who is due to play a very important part in what is to come.6 The pair were happy and looking forward to life on the ocean wave, so neither saw any reason to help kill their father Ouranos.

  Next Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable. She seemed a very shallow, silly, and ignorant being, who knew nothing and appeared to understand less. This was deceptive, for each day that passed she got smarter and smarter, more and more well informed and more and more capable. Her name means “memory” (giving us the word “mnemonic”). At the time of her mother’s visit, the world and the cosmos were very young, so Mnemosyne had had no opportunity to prime herself with knowledge or experience. As the years passed, her endless capacity for the storage of information and sensory experience would make her wiser than almost anyone. One day she would mother nine daughters, the MUSES, whom we shall meet later.

  “You want me to help you kill Ouranos? Surely the Sky Father cannot die?”

  “Dethrone or disable him, then . . . it is no more than he deserves.”

  “I will not help you.”

  “Why not?”

  “There is a reason and when I know it I will remember it and tell you.”

  Exasperated, Gaia went next to Theia, who was also paired off in another sibling union, to her brother Hyperion.

  In due course Theia would give birth to HELIOS the sun, SELENE the moon, and EOS the dawn, quite enough parenting to be getting on with, so they too showed no interest in Gaia’s plans to depose Ouranos.

  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,7 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.

  Themis, the Titan goddess who became the embodiment of law, justice, and order. She is shown here seated on the Delphic tripod, holding a cup in one hand and a sprig of laurel in the other.

  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.8 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.

  Zeus aims a thunderbolt at the winged and snake-legged monster, Typhon.

  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 artifact 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’ lovemaking.

  “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

  As Gaia predicted, Hemera and Aether were tired after twelve hours of playing and slowly Day and Light slipped down westward into the sea. At the same time, Nyx slipped off her dark veil and she and Erebus threw it over the world like a shimmering black tablecloth.

  As Kronos
waited in the cleft, sickle in hand, all creation held its breath. I say “all creation,” for Ouranos and Gaia and their offspring were not the only beings to have reproduced. Others had multiplied and propagated too, with Erebus and Nyx the most productive by far. They had many children, some terrible, some admirable, and some lovely. We have already seen how they gave birth to Hemera and Aether. But then Nyx, without Erebus’s help, gave birth to MOROS, or Doom, who was to become the most feared entity in creation. Doom comes to every creature, mortal or immortal, but is always hidden. Even the immortals feared Doom’s all-powerful, all-knowing control over the cosmos.

  After Moros came a great rush of offspring, one after the other, like a monstrous airborne invasion. First came APATE, Deceit, whom the Romans called FRAUS (from whom we derive the words “fraud,” “fraudulent,” and “fraudster”). She scuttled off to Crete where she bided her time. GERAS, Old Age, was born next; not necessarily so fearful a demon as we might think today. While Geras might take away suppleness, youth, and agility, for the Greeks he more than made up for it by conferring dignity, wisdom, and authority. SENECTUS is his Roman name, a word that shares the same root as “senior,” “senate,” and “senile.”

  A pair of perfectly ghastly twins were next: OIZYS (MISERIA in Latin), the spirit of Misery, Depression, and Anxiety, and her cruel brother MOMOS, the spiteful personification of Mockery, Scorn, and Blame.9

  Nyx and Erebus were just getting into their stride. Their next child, ERIS (DISCORDIA), Strife, lay behind all disagreements, divorces, scraps, skirmishes, fights, battles, and wars. It was her malicious wedding present, the legendary Apple of Discord, that brought about the Trojan War, though that epic clash of arms was a long, long way in the future. Strife’s sister NEMESIS was the embodiment of Retribution, that remorseless strand of cosmic justice that punishes presumptuous, overreaching ambition—the vice that the Greeks called hubris. Nemesis has elements in common with the eastern idea of karma, and we use her today to suggest the fateful retributive opposition the lofty and wicked will one day meet and which will bring them down. I suppose you could say Holmes was Moriarty’s Nemesis, Bond was Blofeld’s, and Jerry was Tom’s.10 Erebus and Nyx also gave birth to CHARON, whose infamy would grow once he took up his duties as ferryman for the dead. HYPNOS, the personification of Sleep, was born to them too. They were also the progenitor of the ONEROI—thousands of beings charged with the making and bringing of dreams to the sleeping. Amongst the Oneroi whose names are known to us were PHOBETOR, god of nightmares, and PHANTASOS, responsible for the fantastic manner in which one thing turns into another in dreams. They worked under the supervision of Hypnos’s son MORPHEUS, whose name itself suggests the morphing, shifting shapes of the dream world.11 “Morphine,” “fantasy,” “hypnotic,” “oneiromancy” (the interpretation of dreams), and many other verbal descendants of Greek sleep have survived into our language. Sleep’s brother THANATOS, Death himself, gives us the word “euthanasia,” “good death.” The Romans called him MORS, of mortals, mortuaries, and mortification.