Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

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.fn9 ‘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 Roman’s called him MORS, of mortals, mortuaries and mortification.

These new beings were frightening and loathsome in the extreme. They left on creation a terrible but necessary mark, for the world seems never to offer anything worthwhile without also providing a dreadful opposite.

There were, however, three lovely exceptions:fn10 three beautiful sisters, the HESPERIDES – nymphs of the west and daughters of the evening. They heralded the daily arrival of their mother and father, but with the soft gold of the gloaming rather than the dread black of night. Their time is what movie cameramen today call ‘magic hour’, when the light is at its most beguiling and beautiful.

These then were the offspring of Nyx and Erebus, who even now were shrouding the earth in the darkness of night as Gaia lay waiting for her husband for what she hoped would be the last time and Kronos lurked in the shadows of that recess in Mount Othrys, keeping a firm grip on his great scythe.

Ouranos Gelded

At last, Gaia and Kronos heard from the west the sound of a great stamping and shaking. The leaves on the trees shivered. Kronos, standing silently in his hiding place, did not tremble. He was ready.

‘Gaia!’ roared Ouranos as he approached. ‘Prepare yourself. Tonight we shall breed something better than hundred-handed mutants and one-eyed freaks …’

‘Come to me, glorious son, divine husband!’ called Gaia, with what Kronos thought a distastefully convincing show of eagerness.

The horrible sounds of a lustful deity slobbering, slapping and grunting suggested to him that his father was attempting some kind of foreplay.

In his alcove Kronos breathed in and out five times. Never for a second did he weigh the moral good of what he was about to do, his thoughts were only for tactics and timing. With a deep inhalation he raised the great sickle and stepped swiftly sideways from his hiding place.

Ouranos, who had been preparing to lie on top of Gaia, sprang to his feet with an angry snarl of surprise. Walking calmly forward, Kronos swung the scythe back and swept it down in a great arc. The blade, hissing through the air, sliced Ouranos’s genitals clean from his body.

All Cosmos could hear Ouranos’s maddened scream of pain, anguish and rage. Never in creation’s short history had there been a sound so loud or so dreadful. All living things heard it and were afraid.

Kronos leapt forward with an obscene cry of triumph, catching the dripping trophy in his hands before it could reach the ground.

Ouranos fell writhing in immortal agony and howled out these words:

‘Kronos, vilest of my brood and vilest in all creation. Worst of all beings, fouler than the ugly Cyclopes and the loathsome Hecatonchires, with these words I curse you. May your children destroy you as you destroyed me.’

Kronos looked down at Ouranos. His black eyes showed nothing, but his mouth curved into a dark smile.

‘You have no power to curse, daddy. Your power is in my hands.’

He juggled before his father’s eyes his grisly spoils of victory, burst and slimy with blood, oozing and slippery with seed. Laughing, he pulled back his arm and hurled the package of genitals far, far from sight. Across the plains of Greece they flew and out over the darkening sea. All three watched as Ouranos’s organs of generation vanished from sight across the waters.

Kronos was surprised, when he turned to look at her, that his mother had covered her mouth in what appeared to be horror. Tears were leaking from Gaia’s eyes.

He shrugged. As if she cared.

Erinyes, Gigantes and Meliae

Creation at this time, peopled as it was by primal deities whose whole energy and purpose seems to have been directed towards reproduction, was endowed with an astonishing fertility. The soil was blessed with such a fecund richness that one could almost believe that if you planted a pencil it would burst into flower. Where divine blood fell, life could not help but spring from the earth.