The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (7 page)

c
. Others say that the God of All Things – whoever he may have been, for some call him Nature – appearing suddenly in Chaos, separated earth from the heavens, the water from the earth, and the upper air from the lower. Having unravelled the elements, he set them in due order, as they are now found. He divided the earth into zones, some very hot, some very cold, others temperate; moulded it into plains and mountains; and clothed it with grass and trees. Above it he set the rolling firmament, spangling it with stars, and assigned stations to the four winds. He also peopled the waters with fish, the earth with beasts, and the sky with the sun, the moon, and the five planets. Lastly, he made man – who, alone of all beasts, raises his face to heaven and observes the sun, the moon, and the stars – unless it be indeed true that Prometheus, son of Iapetus, made man’s body from water and clay, and that his soul was supplied by certain wandering divine elements, which had survived from the First Creation.
²

1
. Hesiod:
Theogony
211–32; Hyginus:
Fabulae
,
Proem
; Apollodorus: i. 7. 1; Lucian:
Prometheus on Caucasus
13; Pausanias: x. 4. 3.

2
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
i–ii.

1
. In Hesiod’s
Theogony
– on which the first of these philosophical myths is based –the list of abstractions is confused by the Nereids, the Titans and the Giants, whom he feels bound to include. Both the Three Fates and the Three Hesperides are the Triple Moon-goddess in her death aspect.

2
. The second myth, found only in Ovid, was borrowed by the later Greeks from the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, the introduction to which records the goddess Aruru’s particular creation of the first man, Eabini, from a piece of clay; but although Zeus had been the Universal Lord for many centuries, the mythographers were forced to admit that the Creator of all things might possibly have been a Creatrix. The Jews, as inheritors
of the ‘Pelasgian’, or Canaanitish, creation myth, had felt the same embarrassment; in the
Genesis
account, a female ‘Spirit of the Lord’ broods on the face of the waters, though she does not lay the world egg; and Eve, ‘the Mother of All Living’, is ordered to bruise the Serpent’s head, though he is not destined to go down to the Pit until the end of the world.

3
. Similarly, in the Talmudic version of the Creation, the archangel Michael – Prometheus’s counterpart – forms Adam from dust at the order, not of the Mother of All Living, but of Jehovah. Jehovah then breathes life into him and gives him Eve who, like Pandora, brings mischief on mankind (see
39.
j
).

4
. Greek philosophers distinguished Promethean man from the imperfect earth-born creation, part of which was destroyed by Zeus, and the rest washed away in the Deucalionian Flood (see
38.
c
). Much the same distinction is found in
Genesis
vi. 2–4 between the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘daughters of men’, whom they married.

5
. The Gilgamesh tablets are late and equivocal; there the ‘Bright Mother of the Hollow’ is credited with having formed everything ‘Aruru’ is only one of this goddess’s many titles – and the principal theme is a revolt against her matriarchal order, described as one of utter confusion, by the gods of the new patriarchal order. Marduk, the Babylonian city-god, eventually defeats the goddess in the person of Tiamat the Sea-serpent; and it is then brazenly announced that he, not anyone else, created herbs, lands, rivers, beasts, birds, and mankind. This Marduk was an upstart godling whose claim to have defeated Tiamat and created the world had previously been made by the god Bel – Bel being a masculine form of Belili, the Sumerian Mother-goddess. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy seems to have come about in Mesopotamia, as elsewhere, through the revolt of the Queen’s consort to whom she had deputed executive power by allowing him to adopt her name, robes, and sacred instruments (see 136.
4
).

5

THE FIVE AGES OF MAN

S
OME
deny that Prometheus created men, or that any man sprang from a serpent’s teeth. They say that Earth bore them spontaneously, as the best of her fruits, especially in the soil of Attica,
¹
and that Alalcomeneus was the first man to appear, by Lake Copais in Boeotia, before
even the Moon was. He acted as Zeus’s counsellor on the occasion of his quarrel with Hera, and as tutor to Athene while she was still a girl.
²

b
. These men were the so-called golden race, subjects of Cronus, who lived without cares or labour, eating only acorns, wild fruit, and honey that dripped from the trees, drinking the milk of sheep and goats, never growing old, dancing, and laughing much; death, to them, was no more terrible than sleep. They are all gone now, but their spirits survive as genii of happy music retreats, givers of good fortune, and upholders of justice.

c
. Next came a silver race, eaters of bread, likewise divinely created. The men were utterly subject to their mothers and dared not disobey them, although they might live to be a hundred years old. They were quarrelsome and ignorant, and never sacrificed to the gods but, at least, did not make war on one another. Zeus destroyed them all.

d
. Next came a brazen race, who fell like fruits from the ash-trees, and were armed with brazen weapons. They ate flesh as well as bread, and delighted in war, being insolent and pitiless men. Black Death has seized them all.

e
. The fourth race of man was brazen too, but nobler and more generous, being begotten by the gods on mortal mothers. They fought gloriously in the siege of Thebes, the expedition of the Argonauts, and the Trojan War. These became heroes, and dwell in the Elysian Fields.

f
. The fifth race is the present race of iron, unworthy descendants of the fourth. They are degenerate, cruel, unjust, malicious, libidinous, unfilial, treacherous.
³

1
. Plato:
Menexenus
6–7.

2
. Hippolytus:
Refutation of All Heresies
v. 6. 3; Eusebius:
Preparation for the Gospel
iii. 1. 3.

3
. Hesiod:
Works and Days
109–201, with scholiast.

1
. Though the myth of the Golden Age derives eventually from a tradition of tribal subservience to the Bee-goddess, the savagery of her reign in pre-agricultural times had been forgotten by Hesiod’s day, and all that remained was an idealistic conviction that men had once lived in harmony together like bees (see
2.
2
). Hesiod was a small farmer, and the hard life he lived made him morose and pessimistic. The myth of the silver race also records matriarchal conditions – such as those surviving in Classical times among the Picts, the Moesynoechians of the Black Sea
(see 151.
e
), and some tribes in the Baleares, Galicia, and the Gulf of Sirté – under which men were still the despised sex, though agriculture had been introduced and wars were infrequent. Silver is the metal of the Moon-goddess. The third race were the earliest Hellenic invaders: Bronze Age herdsmen, who adopted the ash-tree cult of the Goddess and her son Poseidon (see
6.
4
and
57.
1
). The fourth race were the warrior-kings of the Mycenaean Age. The fifth were the Dorians of the twelfth century
B
.
C
., who used iron weapons and destroyed the Mycenaean civilization.

Alalcomeneus (‘guardian’) is a fictitious character, a masculine form of Alalcomeneïs, Athene’s title (
Iliad
iv. 8) as the guardian of Boeotia. He serves the patriarchal dogma that no woman, even a goddess, can be wise without male instruction, and that the Moon-goddess and the Moon itself were late creations of Zeus.

6

THE CASTRATION OF URANUS

U
RANUS
fathered the Titans upon Mother Earth, after he had thrown his rebellious sons, the Cyclopes, into Tartarus, a gloomy place in the Underworld, which lies as far distant from the earth as the earth does from the sky; it would take a falling anvil nine days to reach its bottom. In revenge, Mother Earth persuaded the Titans to attack their father; and they did so, led by Cronus, the youngest of the seven, whom she armed with a flint sickle. They surprised Uranus as he slept, and it was with the flint sickle that the merciless Cronus castrated him, grasping his genitals with the left hand (which has ever since been the hand of ill-omen) and afterwards throwing them, and the sickle too, into the sea by Cape Drepanum. But drops of blood flowing from the wound fell upon Mother Earth, and she bore the Three Erinnyes, furies who avenge crimes of parricide and perjury – by name Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. The nymphs of the ash-tree, called the Meliae, also sprang from that blood.

b
. The Titans then released the Cyclopes from Tartarus, and awarded the sovereignty of the earth to Cronus.

However, no sooner did Cronus find himself in supreme command than he confined the Cyclopes to Tartarus again together with the
Hundred-handed Ones and, taking his sister Rhea to wife, ruled in Elis.
¹

1
. Hesiod:
Theogony
133–87 and 616–23; Apollodorus: i. 1. 4–5; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
v. 801.