Rulers of the Titans
While Greek mythology is pretty brutal with its treatment of innocent humans who stumble or catch a god or goddess’ eye, there are moments when we see love. After all, what makes Greek mythology so powerful are its larger-than-life emotions such as relentless anger, true jealousy, violent hatred, self-sabotaging pride, and all-encompassing love. Let’s remember that two of the most powerful deities of this pantheon are Eros and Aphrodite.
Let’s talk about the king and queen. Cronus was the ruler of the Titans, and for a time he was the ruler of the heavens and of all under the sky. He inherited the throne after he conspired with his mother, Gaia, to dethrone Uranus, the primordial sky. This is the famous castration of the elder titan of the sky, that led to the birth of Aphrodite/Venus and the rise of the Titans.
The Rise of Cronus
As a ruler Uranus, or Ouranus, was a strict and pretty hateful father. His first few children, the Hecatonchires and the Cyclops were imprisoned in the underworld by him because he saw them as lesser beings. He saw them as ugly and unfit to be his children. The Titans, the third set of children of Uranus and Gaia, were also imprisoned in the underworld until Gaia Helped Cronus to get rid of him.
You’d think this would make Cronus some sort of liberator. well not really. He inherited his father’s bad temper. While he did free his immediate siblings, the other titans, he kept the “ugly” or unworthy ones, the Cyclops and Hecatonchires, safely locked away in the underworld.
After he dethroned his father Cronus named himself the king of the Titans. Together the Titans led a golden age on the earth. The Titans were a generation of more brutish gods and goddesses that had a more inhuman ruthlessness to their elements, how they treated the earth, and how they approached the world. Oceanus and Tethys took to the sea, Oceanus himself is the surrounding world ocean, Hyperion and Theia held the reigns of the sun, Crius, Mnemosyne, Themis, Iapetus, Phoebe, Coeus each took different aspects of memory, light, and more elements. Then we have the King and Queen, Cronus and Rhea.
As King and Queen
What is the duty of a king and his queen, other than governing the realm they rule? Yup, it’s time to talk about babies.
Many of the Titans had children, most of those children are referred to as Titans themselves such as Helios and Prometheus who are pretty well known. however, when it came to Cronus and the children he would have, there was a problem.
You see Cronus inherited his dad’s nasty temper and the manner in which they solve problems with over-the-top violence. His father, once he was defeated, told Cronus one last thing. He told the new king of the universe that a child of his will do unto him what he himself has done. Whether this was a prophecy or a curse from the ancient sky god, we just don’t know, but we do know it was enough for Cronus to be very anxious about his children.
Devour them All
Rhea is an earth goddess, the inheritor of Gaia’s strength and powers. She was beloved and brought fertility to the land. However, when it came to her children she had very little choice as to what would happen to them. When her first child, Hestia was born, Cronus took the child from her hands and swallowed the baby whole. There are more gruesome depictions in art of how Cronus did the devouring, like literally ripping the child apart, but ancient sources say that he swallowed them. This allowed the babe to continue to live, they are immortal deities after all, and the baby Hestia was forced to live in the belly of the Titan King.
Rhea had four more children, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, and Hera, and each time she was forced to present her child to the King of the Heavens and he would in ritualistic cruelty take the babe, judge it for a moment then devour the being whole.
5 gods, 5 children of Cronus and Rhea, 5 of the most important beings in the Olympic story spend their childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood in the stomach of King Cronus.
The Sixth Child
Rhesa was pregnant yet again, this time with a sixth child and she could not bear to see another child be eaten alive by her husband. His tyranny, his arrogance have grown to an exponential level. The endless age of the Titans had a time limit and Cronus was none the wiser.
At the birth of the 6th child, Rhea took a stone, called the Omphalos and wrapped it up in a blanket, and presented it to Cronus. In his arrogance Cronus didn’t even bother looking over the child, he just swallowed the babe whole, not knowing it wasn’t even a living thing. the omphalos stone fell into the belly, an odd sign for the 5 Olympians inside.
The baby was called Zeus, and he had been hidden away. Then Rhea took the baby from the seat of Othrys, the royal home of the Olympians, and came down to earth, to an island in the Mediterranean that would one day host a great kingdom. She came to an empty cavern in Crete and there she stored her child. With the child was a nymph called Melissa, and a goat called Amalthea, which Zeus fed from. There were others, shield bearers that would hit their shield loudly so that Cronus could never hear the baby Zeus cry.
Conclusion
With this act of love to protect her children, Rhea planted the seeds that would eventually grow into the fall of the Titans. Zeus would grow up in this cavern and grow into a handsome young man that would eventually free his siblings and challenge the power of the Titans in the universe. Rhea would then pass on her gifts of earth and growth to her daughter Demeter and would live out her days in Olympus.
Myths Reborn 