Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/322

 Earth produced Heaven, who then became her own lover, and to Heaven she bore Oceanus, and the Titans, Cœeus and Crius, Hyperion and Iapetus, Thea and Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phœbe, Tethys, "and youngest after these was born Cronus of crooked counsel, the most dreadful of her children, who ever detested his puissant sire," Heaven. There were other sons of Earth and Heaven peculiarly hateful to their father, and these Uranus used to hide from the light in a hollow of Gæa. Both they and Gæa resented this treatment, and the Titans, like "the children of Heaven and Earth" in the New Zealand poem, "sought to discern the difference between light and darkness." Gæa (unlike Earth in the New Zealand myth, for there she is purely passive), conspired with her children, produced iron, and asked her sons to avenge their wrongs. Fear fell upon all of them save Cronus, who (like Tane Mahuta in the Maori poem) determined to end the embraces of Earth and Heaven. But while the New Zealand, like the Indo-Aryan myth, conceives of Earth and Heaven as two beings who have never previously been sundered at all, Hesiod makes Heaven amorously approach his spouse from a distance. This was the moment for Cronus, who stretched out his hand armed with the sickle of iron, and mutilated Uranus. As in so many savage myths, the blood of the wounded god fallen on the ground produced strange creatures, nymphs of the ash-tree, giants, and