A history of Ophion and Cronos
“Once upon a time . . .”
Once upon a time a boy named Cronos forgot who he was.
He walked east.
Around him the world was swirling and filling and closing. It was surf. His snake Ophion wound around him. Its scales were obsidian plates. It circled about him. It made patterns of darkness and light.
His heart was full of joy.
Joy burned in his chest. He could not hold it back. He gave a great shout from it, “Yey-aa!”
All around him the surf crashed. He could not breathe reliably. The sea kept hitting him. It got in his mouth and his nose.
Ophion made a sound, ssaaaa.
It was like the sound of the surf, stopped at its very middle point.
Something was killing him.
To the east the world divided into lines.
Around him the world was swirls and filling and closing but to the east were lines and dots. Blue and white turned to scattered golden sands. Then a ragged line marked the edge of grass. A great round line made a boulder and stark rising lines denoted trees. Only at their tops with their thousands of leaves did the east turn to swirls and filling and closing once again.
Cronos walked east.
Ophion was killing him.
“Thus far, and no further.”
The snake tightened about him. Its teeth bit into his ear.
“I love you,” he said to Ophion, which was true; and the snake drew back, and it said, ssaaaa.
One hand came down on hard round texture. There were rocks beneath the sea.
His vision became a tunnel edged with red. Under the surf he heard this sound: ba-put, ba-put, ba-put, ba-put. It was as if the world were suddenly on measured and accelerating time.
One hand squirmed under the coils to be between the serpent and his neck.
“Ophion,” he gasped.
The snake whispered, “We will die here.”
And the starry chambers above the world spoke, and its voice was everywhere and nowhere, and mellifluous and kind, and said, “Thus far, and no further.”
Cronos looked up.
It was visible even to the sky that he did not understand.
“I have made an Eden,” said the voice. “I have made a world that is perfect, just, and good. And to maintain that world it is necessary to exclude such things as Ophion. This is a doctrine of self-defense; it is a doctrine of mercy; it is a blessing of the stars.”
Cronos’ hand slipped away from his neck. The coil tightened.
And Ophion squeezed him and he could not breathe and his right foot sank into the sand and his left foot turned and his right fist seized about the body of the beast and pulled and his waist bent and his arms stretched out and he cracked the neck of Ophion against the stone and held its head beneath the waves.
The coils loosened. The snake flailed.
The fingers of Cronos cracked the scales of Ophion. His nails dug into the muscle of the beast. Its head was under the sea.
Loop by loop it fell away from him. It twitched.
He did not say: o my love.
He staggered up onto the shore and he fell down.
“What have I done?” he asked.
And the sky spins over him and it is some time before it said, “The question is immaterial.”
“There are no deeds,” said the sky, “beyond the boundaries of the world.”
All around him rose the deep voice of the earth
Cronos lay on the sand.
The sun was very hot.
It began to burn him.
When his skin turned red he made a strangled sound and rose to his feet and he staggered off to find a cave.
All around him rose the deep voice of the earth.
“My child,” said the earth. “Gotten of a sinful father.”
Cronos put his hands upon the rock.
It was wet. It was hard. It was rough.
“I have a mother,” he said.
Joy rose from his stomach to burn through him. “I have a mother, I have a father, I am a child of the heavens and the earth.”
“Be not proud to be Uri’s son,” said the earth. “For he first thought of shameful things.”
A question lies hard on Cronos’ mind, but it is not a question that the earth can answer.
“What is the proper manner of my shape?” Cronos asks. “Ought I be tall or short? Have I three legs or two?”
“Hide yourself,” said the earth, “between the sea, the sky, and the land, and wait for darkness, and I will show you how your father has injured me.”
Though confused, still Cronos obeyed.
He shaped himself into a thing that could make webs and he spun a web between the sea, the land, and the sky. He hung there, waiting, trying to decide how many legs a titan has.
The sun left the sky.
The world grew dark.
The web trembled and shrank. The vault of the stars came down and pressed close upon the world. Cronos shivered in the dark.
The clouds lit with pink and scarlet fires. The earth ground open and in it were pools of darkness and green and coldest indigo. The sky rubbed against the earth and fires slipped from it into the depths and danced upon the waters there. The wind blew. It came down off the hills and it roared across the plains. It chilled the peaks of the mountains and bent the trees of the forest. Stars fell and lost their fire. The chasms under the world ignited. The world and sky strained against one another and the sky grew damper and the air began to taste of rain.
As the sky coupled with the earth, the earth said, “For whom have you made this world, o my love?”
And the sky said, “For Oceanus; and Tethys; and Hyperion; and Theia; and Coeus; and Phoebe; and Cronos; and Rhea; and the birds; and the trees; and the insects; and the flowers; and the naiads; and the oceanids; and the teeth gnomes; and the antelope; and the burrowing things; and the climbing things;” and he went on in just this vein for quite some time.
And as he said these things the earth sighed, “Ah,” for these things were precious to her.
But in the later hours of the night it grew halting and slow, that recitation of the sky. “And for the platypus;” he said, and he thought, and he sought for words, “and the sandpipers; and the dogs—”
And there he had run out.
And fire blazes everywhere throughout the world and Cronos said, “. . . but what of Ophion?”
And the earth trembled and Cronos understood a thing, and he said, “. . . but what of Ophion? But what of siggorts? But what of woglies? But what of all the exiled things? But what of these?”
And his question made no impact on the sky, which only spun, and gave him a ruffling about the head, and said, “Do not love ye evil, child.”
And then the sky withdrew behind the curtains of the dawn.
And Cronos thought of Ophion, and the siggorts, and the woglies: o my loves.
“Castrate him,” said the earth
Cronos came down. He looked at a pool of water in the deeps that swelled with the fire given by the sky. In that pool the earth strained to make a nymph, so that the water rippled and splashed. Between the pulses of that labor, the water stilled, and for the first time Cronos saw his own face.
“I am rugged in the nose,” he said, “and wild in the eyes, and angry at the fate of the unworthy things that are bound below.”
“It is so,” said the earth.
“I am their avenger,” Cronos said. “I am Cronos.”
“Then come deeper,” said the earth.
The earth called a gathering of titans. Cronos walked deep into the world. And the hollowness of Ge called out to them through all the chambers of her, “If you will obey me, we will answer this vile outrage of your father, and return the siggorts and the woglies to the land.”
The room grew chill with fear.
“But to strike at our father,” Rhea said, “is not correct.”
The attention of the earth turned to Rhea. It looked into her. It said: “Have you fallen, Rhea, into your father’s sin?”
“We may not oppose him,” said Rhea. “He would jerk the chains that bind us and we would dance away into great pain. We have no voice in the world of our father. We have no mechanism for defiance. And if we should crack the sky— oh, mother, if we should crack the sky—”
And here her voice was near to breaking.
“Castrate him,” said the earth, with calm brutality. “Sever from him that quality that I need to engender life. Then what will it matter if the sky has broken or Heaven knows no sway?”
Rhea, horrified, shook her head.
“It is not correct,” said Oceanos.
He was a man of water. His shape washed about. At times he would fill the cavern with water and with salt and then recede into his form. The words of him were water too.
“You fear this too?” asked Ge.
“If it is not correct,” said Oceanos, in his washing voice, “then it will not happen. How may I implement an action that will not happen? The concept is a nonpareil of futility.”
“We are all bound by Necessity,” said Coeus. “In all this world only our father the heavens is free.”
“He will cast us out as unworthy,” said Hyperion.
“There is no hope,” Oceanos confirmed.
The cave was very dark.
“Mother,” Cronos said, “do you ask us this in vain? Do you ask for the impossible and the incorrect?”
But the words fell in emptiness into the chasms of the world.
They left no ripples and the silence pulled at Cronos’ heart.
It tugged forth words from him: “I will do this deed.”
Joy rose in the earth. The earth rejoiced. The chasms of her resounded with song, such that all across the world there rose an alleluia. And the deer turned their heads to listen and the hummingbirds paused in flight and the worms that ground inevitably through the soil shivered with that song and even the sky took note and joy in it for that the world was pleased.
And to the woglies and the siggorts in their hell Ge said:
My children, o my loves!”
But they did not hear.
“I had not thought you capable of planning evil”
The earth took Cronos away from his brothers and his sisters to a secret place.
There the rock swelled with the fire of the sky and birthed grey flint in the shape of a sickle, and the sickle’s head spanned the space between two mountains, and it whispered, “I will cut. Take me to your hand and I will cut. Take me to your hand, o my love.”
And Cronos stared up at it and said, “So vast.”
“Then be vaster,” said the earth.
So Cronos made himself into a giant and he stood at the boundary of the whole world and the sea and he looked down and he saw that it was good. The surf crashed against his feet and the sky brushed against his shoulders and the great mountain-spanning sickle fit neatly in his hand.
And the sky felt a tickle of foreboding.
“What do you there?” asked the voice. “For I had not thought you capable of planning evil, o my son.”
But Cronos lifted his right foot from the land and stood between the ocean and the sky, his weight outside the boundaries of the world, and he said, “I am not doing anything.”
There are no deeds beyond the boundaries of the world; so this was so.
And Cronos made himself a space between the worlds and crafted himself a guard of horn to be the sickle’s hilt and waited there for the sky to descend upon the earth.
That night the sky sank low upon the world and murmured words of love and fires sparked everywhere across the grass.
And the sickle whispered to Cronos the secret of its magic and Cronos understood.
He stepped into the world and sound.
That even the least of these may know joy: for even the woglies and the siggorts in their Hell, and for all the rest of a bad lot besides: for even the great evils, and the little horrors, and the twisted failed dreamers who walk among us now: he stepped into the world.
In Uri’s Kingdom, nothing happened that was not appropriate. That was its law.
Cronos said, “To serve a corrupt regime is not correct.“
And he ripped the sky with the sickle; and the genitals of his father fell into the sea.
And from this act, and in due season, rose the anakim,
and the melomids.
“Thistles and thorns and dust shall be your lot”
Cronos stood naked beneath the stars.
There is so much fire, he thought. So much power.
The sky looked down.
“I am rendered impotent,” said the voice of his father. “Now there shall be nothing brought forth in all this world that does not know suffering, nor grow from the accursed ground; thistles and thorns and dust shall be your lot for all the generations of the world.”
It was not judging him.
Its words were flat and simple.
It was as if Uri were completing a syllogism; nothing more.
“You will rule this world,” said the sky. “But your son will take it from you.”
It was not even a curse.
“He will punish you for this deed, and you will bear the burden of that punishment until the end of time.”
Cronos licked his lips.
Defiantly, he said, “Is that the price, then, that even the least of us should know joy?”
The stars laughed at him.
It was the most withering of all experiences, Cronos apprehended, to have the entirety of Heaven laughing at one’s shame.
“You accuse me of impropriety”
“You accuse me of impropriety,” said the sky.
“They deserved better,” said Cronos. “The woglies; the siggorts; Ophion; they deserved better. To punish them so cruelly: that is the nature of your crime.”
“Beyond the boundaries of the world,” said Uri, who was the sky, “there is no ‘deserving’. Who may say whether the character of a man outside the world is good or bad? Who may say what should befall them for the deeds that they have done? There may be beauty there. There may be wonder, and hearts to give you joy, and creatures in whom I could find such virtues as your own. I do not know. I know only that there are horrors there beyond imagining, and insidious treason, and things that will corrupt this world; and you have given to them rein.”
“And they will know joy?”
“No,” the sky said, flatly.
“A world with only the good may bring only the good to all within it. A world that is only perfection may bring perfection to all within it. But to permit the ungainly and the imperfect into paradise does not lift them up. It drags us down.”
“Be welcome, o my love”
Cronos went down to Tartarus and cast open the gates.
He said, “Come out, ye that may.”
Past him in a stream flowed the damned and terrible progeny of the couplings of Uri and the world. Some skulked low and chittered. Some shivered with cold slime. Some screamed foul prophecies as they flew above his head. Lastly there slunk forth the worst of them, a cutty angel, saying, “There is hope.”
They went out into the world and the world took the weight of them.
But the siggorts didn’t come out; nor the woglies.
So he went in after them.
He walked down through the darkness into the siggorts’ home.
He found Bidge there. Bidge was wandering in darkness. The knives of Bidge cut Cronos. They maimed his hand. They lay his face open to the bone. They cut his neck. They caused dark blood to trickle down his leg.
“Come free,” Cronos said.
The key to the gates of Tartarus was small: too small, almost, for the eye to see. But he held it out to the siggort in his hand.
Something stirred in Bidge’s mind.
He awakened to the knowledge of another creature in his place of imprisonment.
He formed a face. A thing like a face. It hovered in the center of him. Around it spun the blades and spheres and cutting wires of the siggort’s shape.
And Cronos said, “Be welcome, o my love, into the world.”
And Bidge laughed a horrible, broken laugh. And he laughed and he laughed on.
Cronos stared at him.
“And how did you free us, then?” Bidge asked.
“I have aspired to the throne of the world,” said Cronos. “Now I rule; and I will not set my will against you if you choose your freedom.”
These words fell strangely flat.
Siggorts gathered behind Cronos’ back. He felt a terrible chill of threat. The knives of them cut away his leg, his arm, his dorsal tendril, and his glunin. He tried to remember how to shape them back.
“That would not do,” said Bidge.
Cronos didn’t understand. You could tell. It was in his face.
So Bidge flowed forward until he was very close, two fingers’ close, to Cronos, and he gaped his mouth quite wide. And he did not bite.
And after a moment, Cronos understood.
He said, “Those are not teeth.”
“Where you are warm,” said Bidge, “we are cold. Where you are light, we are shadow. Our teeth are not teeth. Our faces are not faces. We are a dhamma inexpressible in your world. Should I not cut you then, o my love?”
Cronos’ heart beat, doki-doki.
It burned in him like a fire. And Bidge could see it, right through his chest. He wanted it. So the shears cut closer. Cronos’ nipple fell off. His breast and his ribs caved in. He was very bloody. And the question hung there: “Should I cut you, o my love?”
Cronos whispered, “No.”
Slowly, reluctantly, the siggorts withdrew.
“I shall trust you, then,” said Bidge, with consummate calm and the tightest control. “I shall trust you,” he said, and he turned away.
And they left Cronos there, alone, trying to justify himself to himself.
“I do not want to keep you here, imprisoned,” said Cronos.
“It’s not my fault!”
But the words rang hollowly there in Tartarus, because he could have saved them.
He could have saved them.
He could have saved them, o my love, if he had thrown everyone else away.
In such a fashion, again and again
It is incumbent on a man, if he will lapse the leash on monsters, to bear the weight of their actions.
Cronos had unleashed great horrors on the world.
The world did not suffer from them.
Rather, from his place on the throne of the world, the titan held that suffering at bay. He made a plate of stone and set it behind him and upon it he bore the weight of imperfection. Thus when swarmed the namecatcher wasps, they did not cause harm. Thus the staggering crooked heartless men did not bleed out their life into the hollows of their chests. The titan reconciled in himself their dharmas, saying: “Swarm here, wasps, where their names are a burden to them.” Or “Stuff your chests with herbs, and palpate them with palpation bugs, and live and farm thereafter quietly and in peace.” He set the demons against the narcissists. He sent the angels to the bleak.
9512 pesserids before time began, a nymph wandering the roads encountered an ogre.
“Raar,” cried the ogre. “Raar! I am a hideous man-eating ogre.”
“Oh, thank Heaven!” the nymph replied.
“There is a hideous man,” said the nymph. “There is a hideous man behind me, and I would much rather he were eaten.”
The ogre looked.
In fact there was: a telchine wizard practicing as a highwayman, whose intentions were in no way serene.
The ogre looked back and forth. He reached his decision.
“The telchine has more meat,” he said. “So I’ll eat him!”
“I don’t mind being eaten,” the telchine conceded. “If you’ll spit up my bones afterwards into your pile of gold, that I may be rich for ever.”
In such a fashion, again and again throughout the world, were all conflicts neatly and equitably solved. In such a fashion did the chains of Necessity make all people dance to a perfectly harmonious tune. The weight of effort for pulling all those shifting chains fell to the only creature who was not bound to them: Cronos, titan, lord of all the world.
“It is heavy,” he admitted to Rhea.
It fell to Cronos to reconcile the horrors and the lambs; the killers and the saints; the humans and the gods. He mediated between the perfect and the real.
“It is so very heavy,” Cronos said.
Rhea rubbed his shoulders, but it did not help. She tried to carry her share of it, but she could not: because the chains bound her, she participated in the system of them, and the efforts that she contributed solved out in the equations of it all.
“What would happen,” asked Cronos, “if I let this plate to fall?”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“In all the world,” said Cronos, “only I may stand aside, and shrug aside this weight, and let things happen as they will. And it is heavy. So I wonder: what would happen if I let this plate to fall, and the storm run riot across the world?”
“If you let it fall?”
And Rhea answered: “Then we should live in the Elysian Fields, where there is no sorrow, and everything be well forever after for us all.”
“The Kingdom I have builded gives way to Tyranny.”
“Save for Cronos, and the woglies, and the siggorts, I suppose.”
Cronos lay with Rhea that night and in the course of seasons she bore him a daughter.
And most fathers would have been happy, because, you know, perfect adorable daughter, but Cronos wasn’t one of that kind.
“I will make this world into a torture chamber,” Cronos said.
“Gii-whii!” answered Hestia, as he held her in his arms.
She wriggled her toes and hiccupped and guarded with her power the hearths and houses of the world.
“Listen,” Cronos said.
He looked up at the stars.
“This world is bound to forms,” he said. “To concepts. To the ideal. But I have made the work of my life the severing of that bond.”
Hestia’s face grew very still and intent.
“I had forgotten it,” he said. “But still, it is my work. And there is only one way that it may be done: I must make the forms abhorrent to themselves. I must make the edifice of right and wrong and tradition and form and even structured thought a crime.”
The world revolved around him, as it does, when one sits upon the throne of all the world.
Rhea’s face grew very pale.
“Cronos—” she said.
The teeth of Cronos set on his daughter’s arm. He bit it off. He chewed. He swallowed.
Hestia wailed, thinly. Her blood fell upon the earth.
“Shh,” Cronos said.
He put his finger to her lips. He looked at Rhea.
“The Kingdom I have builded gives way to Tyranny,” Cronos said, “and there is no answer to it within the structures of the world.”
“She is also a princess.”
In the Golden Age that preceded the Titanomachy nothing happened that was not correct.
Such was the imprint of this time upon our world that even the richest, even the wisest, and even the greatest of us still look back with wistful sorrow and remember it. The world was in harmony. Morality dominated in every portion. And no man or woman could rightly say that the chains of Necessity upon them were a burden. The behaviors that those chains compelled were virtuous, honorable, and good; save from one.
In all the world only the titan Cronos was free.
He ruled nobly and justly, one must assume, except for that incident with Hestia, and one day Rhea approached him with Demeter in her arms.
She was tentative and hesitant.
“Lo,” said Rhea. “The Great Goddess.”
Cronos judged Demeter.
“She, like Hestia, is food,” Cronos said.
“Not every goddess is food,” Rhea said. “Demeter is a marvel of the world.”
“She is the goddess of the harvest,” said Rhea. “Of the bounty of the earth. Of grain and green and growing things—”
Cronos had a wry look.
Rhea cleared her throat. “Observe her nose,” Rhea said.
“She has a nose,” allowed Cronos. He lifted Demeter from Rhea’s arms with great gentleness. He looked at her. “And she is the harvest. But she is also a princess.”
The Great Goddess wriggled, and offered, “Goo?”
“To put it another way,” Cronos said, “‘an asset to my throne.’”
He bit off Demeter’s nose. He swallowed it. Then he ate her head to stop her wailing. He bit the rest of her in half. He swallowed her. His stomach grew bloated on this flesh.
He ate Hera too. And Hades. And Poseidon. He ate them all when their presentation came.
Rhea’s life became a horror to her.
Once she had loved him. She no longer recognized in him the person that she’d loved. Once she had lain with him gladly, and found in the straining of their sex an emptiness to cultivate with child. Now she resented their union. She lay with him only because she was his wife. She resented his seed inside her womb.
The chains of Necessity bound her.
She could not do otherwise than serve him. She could rage against him. She could question him. She could hurt him in small, petty ways. But this was the Golden Age, the Age we wistfully speak of, when things were better, and she could not defy him.
To defy him would not have been correct.
In all the world only one creature was free, and it was not she.
“A new tonality for words of love”
And in the end she cracked.
“I do all the work to bring forth our children,” she said, staring into the mirror of the world, “and he keeps eating them.”
The Kouretes who served her shouted. They rattled their swords and armor. They began to dance.
“It is not right—“
She was pregnant. Her belly was full. She did not want Cronos to eat this child. So she took the sickle of flint. She climbed a web that hung between the places of the world. There, not in the sky, not on the land, and not in the sea, she cut her belly open and spilled Zeus out onto the web.
“Yey-aa!” cried the Kouretes. They shook their swords. They made a thunder upon the world and drowned the cries of infant Zeus.
With fear and courage Rhea looked down onto the face of her newest son.
Infant dismay gathered like clouds on the clearness of his face. He looked woeful. He had not asked to leave the womb. He had not wished Rhea to birth him onto a web. He did not want Rhea to leave him there, with the roar of the Kouretes’ dancing and morning dew to be his milk. He was cold and bloody and he did not want to be alone.
But only one creature in all the world was free, and it was not yet Zeus.
Rhea stitched her stomach back together with the substance of the web. As he watched her work the needle understanding came slowly into Zeus’ mind.
He spoke words that no one had said in many thousands of years.
“The Lord am I of all within this world,” said Zeus.
And then he laughed, and then he laughed, seeing his perfect little fingers for the first time in all the history of the world.
Rhea bundled a stone in swaddling and returned to the world. Her face was impassive. She handed Cronos the stone and said, “Look, o my love, delicious pink and purple Zeus.”
Cronos did not look.
He swallowed down the stone and cut up her placenta and he ate it too.
“You have invented a new tonality,” he said. “For words of love.”
“I am not happy,” Rhea said.
And Cronos smiled over the blood of the placenta on his mouth and said, “Then I am doing well.”
“We bring forth children in sorrow”
Cronos slouched on the throne of the world.
He contemplated his sickle.
“Son,” said Cronos. O my love.
It was an awkward moment.
I thought I’d eaten you, but maybe it was a rock.
“You’ve been eating everybody,” said Zeus. “Poseidon and Hera and stuff.”
“I did not ask to rule a Golden Age,” Cronos said. “Rather I wished to dominate a freakish carnival of horrors. A masque of the imperfect. A world of people with the bones of their pain jutting out so that you can hardly talk to them without saying, ‘O my love, why are you broken?’”
Zeus said, “I understand.”
“I am going to cut your stomach open now,” said Zeus, “and spill out my brothers and my sisters, and a rock.”
“And if I forbid it?”
“In this world,” said Zeus, “we bring forth children in sorrow.”
Cronos had trouble finding an answer to that one.
“It’s the rule,” Zeus explained.
“Who are you, o my son?” Cronos asked.
“I’m the Lord of Misrule,” said Zeus. “I’m the answer to your prayers. I’m the one who’ll bring this whole world down around your ears.”
Cronos’ heart fluttered in his chest.
“Show me,” he said, and his voice was desperate with hope.
“Your authority has no foundation,” said Zeus, “for you have done a wicked thing.“
It was electric. It cut through the air. But it didn’t impress Cronos.
“More,” Cronos said.
“The dog that carries a serpent on his back is vile; the tiger that carries a dog, we call a saint.“
Cronos mulled that one over for a while.
Then he shook his head.
The sky gathered behind his shoulders and the stars burned bright with Uri’s fires and the world grew heavy as a woman carrying her child and he said, “You are not equal to this task.”
Dread was the nimbus of Cronos at that moment. The power of him held Zeus still. Cronos was Ge’s son in that moment, strong as the earth, unsurpassable, indestructible, horned and terrible, and free—as only one creature in all the world could be—to act accordant to his desires.
It obliterated the thoughts of Zeus. It held him still.
But Zeus had trained for this.
He had spent years in empty meditation and practice and taught his flesh to act when his mind could not.
The world swam with the blinding rapture of Cronos and it drove away the thoughts of Zeus and the will of Zeus and the fire of him flickered and went dim beneath the wind of all that power, and the flesh of Zeus stepped forward and took the sickle in his hand and cut his father’s stomach open to bring his brothers and sisters into the world.
It seemed impossible to Zeus that it did not hurt Zeus; that the opening of the wound in his father’s stomach brought Zeus no pain, burnt none of Zeus’ nerves; that he could see and hear and smell the wound but he could not feel it.
It seemed a thing that should wound, instead, the all of world and sound.
Out fell the stone; and Hades and Poisedon; and Hera and Demeter and Hestia; and great snaky loops of titantestine too; and Cronos looked down at his stomach and Zeus could hardly see his face through the blindingness of the reality of that moment when he cut his father open at the throne of all the world.
Cronos staggered. The storm shifted at his back. It loomed upon the world and in that moment it seemed very possible that the world would end and everything be well forever after for us all—
Somehow, Cronos held it back.
Somehow, Cronos balanced himself and held aloft the burden of all pains while his innards snaked themselves back in.
The fingernails on his hand were cracked and dirty. His hair was wild. He reached for his son with hands soaked in everybody’s blood.
Cloud-shouldered Zeus, the son of Cronos, born in the fullness of Tyranny to bring justice to the world, seized five babies and a stone and fled.
The world rang with the iiyegh!
This is not the history of the Titanomachy. This is the history of Cronos. And so we will not speak of how the Lord of Misrule won the world, or what Zeus did then to save the gods from his father’s fate. We will not speak of the origin of the thunderbolts or how the woglies aided Zeus in the twilight of that age. We will not speak of how the siggorts were freed, or how and why Zeus put them back again.
We will not even speak of Never, or how it came to pass that the terrible power of Cronos could be broken.
We will only speak of the end of it, when Cronos stood alone and bereft of all his allies and his strength, and Zeus made judgment on his father.
“It has come to my attention,” said the lord of all the gods, “that you carry on your back the price of imperfection. That if you should let it lay, then things shall end forever and forever and we shall all know our happy ending and be done.”
“Will you be taking up this burden, then, yourself, milord?”
Zeus made a horrible face. Really, it was impressive. The world rang with the iiyegh! of it.
“It is my judgment, rather,” said the lord of all the gods, “that you shall wear it forever.”
And Cronos laughed.
It was a horrible laugh. It was a funny laugh. It was the kind of laugh that a man laughs after his son cuts him open, throws a thunderbolt at him, casts him off the throne of the world, and now wants to sentence him to carry an impossibly heavy weight forever and ever.
“I can’t possibly do that,” Cronos said.
“If I were strong enough to carry it forever,” said Cronos, “then I would not feel the pain of it now.”
“Heh,” said Zeus.
And he sank Cronos’ body into the substance of the world and he poured molten brass and iron over his father’s legs and arms and chest to bind him to the crust with chains that would never break. He marked the space around his father with the symbols of the seasons and lay him down below the world to keep his intemperate and loving mother far at bay. He set his judgment upon the man who had wielded first the sickle of grey flint and he called this torture Time.
“Why do you choose this destiny?”
And Cronos tried.
He tried very hard for many years while his father laughed and his son reigned over the world.
One day when it seemed to Cronos that his strength would finally give out, Demeter came down to join Cronos in the darkness. She made a sacred ritual of shushing, going, shh! and hush! though Zeus, of course, could choose to know.
She studied him for a while. Then, at her bidding, the roots of the plants came down through all the darkness and wove into the crust to lighten Cronos’ burden.
Later Poseidon chose to hold back the weight of the storm with all the pressure of the seas.
Hades, too, and Hestia, and Hera, and even Ophion. Ophion came to coil upon his chest and softly drip its venom in his eye, and Cronos smiled, and Cronos smiled, and he cried out through his cracked dry lips his joy: o my love.
One day as Cronos struggled Zeus spoke to him in dreams. Zeus said, “Why do you choose this destiny, o father?”
And Cronos said: “Dharma moves.”
“Hee,” laughed Zeus, the lord of all the gods.
And Ophion coiled around Cronos in the darkness and the snake hissed, ssaaa and it seemed to the titan that it had not been so very long, after all, the time that they had been apart.