Last time I told the story of Gaia, the great grandmammy of
the Greek Gods. We go around the
wheel again with the next generation.
Gaia’s daughter Rhea is the big momma in this generation paired up with
her patricidal brother Cronos.
The poor kid had to do in his dad to save his siblings. Is it any wonder if he’s kinda fucked
up?
The story goes a little differently this time, since Cronos
one-ups his father in the Dooming-Your-Children Department. He wises up and doesn’t stuff his kids
back into his wife. He has a
better idea. You have to understand, he’s afraid. Like his father before him, he
knows that his children will do better and be stronger than himself. Eventually
they will take over the family business and what’s an immortal being supposed
to do then? Retire? Did they even
have RV Golf Parks back then? So
naturally, given the circumstances, he eats them. None of this stuffing your kids into the dark earth for him, thank you very much.
Clearly, the thing he learned from his father was that if
you want a job done well you do it yourself.
But surprisingly, Rhea is unhappy with this. She prefers her
children not to be eaten. In good mafia tradition she hatches a plan. When her last child is born she feeds
Cronos a stone instead of their youngest son. That youngest son happens to be a god most people raised in
Western culture recognize: Zeus.
"Wait!", I hear you say, dear reader. Isn’t this almost exactly like what happened in the last
episode? Are the names just
replaced by new actors? Is this
just like the re-boot of the Spiderman franchise? Not quite.
This time, it goes a bit differently. Rhea gives him the stone wrapped in
swaddling and he swallows it down thinking he’s done the deed. Her son is then raised in secret until
he is old enough to save his siblings. There is no bloody sickle death moment. Either Cronos barfs them up aided by an
herbal mixture made by Zeus’s sister Metis, or he gets his stomach cut open
like the big bad wolf. And like
that fairy story, all the Gods emerge unharmed and fully adult to become the
all the Olympian Gods, along with Aphrodite, who was born of the violence of
the last generation.
So the story changes a little bit in this generation. It’s a little less gory, a little
kinder. Chronos doesn’t take it
all out on his wife/sister and in return he even gets to live. Maybe a lesson
is learned here? Maybe the
generations have become a little less brutal?
In my journey through the generational sagas of Grecian cosmic
rulership I came across an interesting side note. What we know of Rhea comes mostly from male writers, since
most of the writers in ancient Greece and for most of history have been men. However in this instance, we have
fragments of a lyric poem written about Rhea from the perspective of a Grecian
woman. I have a deep fondness for the feminine poets of the ancient world. This particular poet was a woman named
Corinna. She may well have been
the teacher of Pindar, who was a big name in Greek poetry. Most of his poetry survives to this
day. Only two of her poems survive
in complete form, and the one about Rhea was not among them. Of the lyric poem about Rhea we only
have papyrus fragments. The thing
that is wonderful about the fragment is how Corinna portrays Rhea. She is no helpless female to be tossed
about by the cruelty of fate, but takes control. The song ends with the hiding of the baby Zeus and states
that Rhea gains honor from this.
“…and great was the honor she got from the Immortals” I like that the
song doesn’t end with the defeat of Chronos by Zeus. It ends when Rhea breaks the chain of abuse.
Rhea was honored by the immortals for the intelligence and
cunning that allowed her to avoid the violence of the generation before
her. She manages to save both her
children and her husband, who had in fact, saved her life too. Thinking of it that way, the story begins
to become a rather desperate knife edge of love and hate, with fear driving it
all.
It is this fear that interests me.
Cronos, who is in many ways, Father Time, is afraid of the
future he is helping to create. He
is afraid of his son who will overthrow him and does his best to delay the
process. Fear of the future, of
death, of the unknown, it’s something we all have to come to terms with.
Together, Cronos and Rhea navigate the difficult territory
of how it is that we will pass on the world to future generations. This seems particularly poignant to
me. In a day and age when we are
more connected than we ever have been, when we know more clearly the atrocities
and the pain that occur every day, we cannot in any honesty think that we are better
than the ancients and their stories of the attempts of the Titans and Gods to
succeed and survive. We have too
many reminders to think otherwise: police brutality and racism in our own
country, the perpetuation of
violence in Israel against the
people of Palestine, the death and destruction of ISIL, everywhere the cycle of
violence perpetuates.
Cronos was right to be afraid. I am too. But the lesson that Rhea gives us is
that we can strive, in each generation, to be better than the one before. Each of us is the inheritor of this
earth, each of us gives it to the next generation. I challenge you who read this to ponder your own
intelligence and cleverness and to think about how you might apply it in order
to change the cycle of violence, both against our fellow humans and against the earth herself.
Rhea’s solution wasn’t perfect, and ours won’t be either. Maybe here again we have the lesson of
permission to fail. The Gods
themselves cannot make things perfect, why would we be able to? But they use the gifts they have to
make the best decisions they can in a world where there can be overwhelming
emotions and realities.
There is one more generation yet in this saga of life and
death, and so next up: Demeter.
No comments:
Post a Comment