The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree: Rhea

Last time I told the story of Gaia, the great grandmammy of the Greek Gods.  We go around the wheel again with the next generation.  Gaia’s daughter Rhea is the big momma in this generation paired up with her patricidal brother Cronos.  The poor kid had to do in his dad to save his siblings.  Is it any wonder if he’s kinda fucked up?

The story goes a little differently this time, since Cronos one-ups his father in the Dooming-Your-Children Department.  He wises up and doesn’t stuff his kids back into his wife.  He has a better idea. You have to understand, he’s afraid. Like his father before him, he knows that his children will do better and be stronger than himself. Eventually they will take over the family business and what’s an immortal being supposed to do then? Retire?  Did they even have RV Golf Parks back then?  So naturally, given the circumstances, he eats them.  None of this stuffing your kids into the dark earth for him, thank you very much.

Clearly, the thing he learned from his father was that if you want a job done well you do it yourself.

But surprisingly, Rhea is unhappy with this. She prefers her children not to be eaten. In good mafia tradition she hatches a plan.  When her last child is born she feeds Cronos a stone instead of their youngest son.  That youngest son happens to be a god most people raised in Western culture recognize:  Zeus.

“Wait!”, I hear you say, dear reader.  Isn’t this almost exactly like what happened in the last episode?  Are the names just replaced by new actors?  Is this just like the re-boot of the Spiderman franchise? Not quite.

This time, it goes a bit differently.  Rhea gives him the stone wrapped in swaddling and he swallows it down thinking he’s done the deed.  Her son is then raised in secret until he is old enough to save his siblings. There is no bloody sickle death moment.  Either Cronos barfs them up aided by an herbal mixture made by Zeus’s sister Metis, or he gets his stomach cut open like the big bad wolf.  And like that fairy story, all the Gods emerge unharmed and fully adult to become the all the Olympian Gods, along with Aphrodite, who was born of the violence of the last generation.

So the story changes a little bit in this generation.  It’s a little less gory, a little kinder.  Chronos doesn’t take it all out on his wife/sister and in return he even gets to live. Maybe a lesson is learned here?  Maybe the generations have become a little less brutal?

In my journey through the generational sagas of Grecian cosmic rulership I came across an interesting side note.  What we know of Rhea comes mostly from male writers, since most of the writers in ancient Greece and for most of history have been men.   However in this instance, we have fragments of a lyric poem written about Rhea from the perspective of a Grecian woman. I have a deep fondness for the feminine poets of the ancient world.  This particular poet was a woman named Corinna.  She may well have been the teacher of Pindar, who was a big name in Greek poetry.  Most of his poetry survives to this day.  Only two of her poems survive in complete form, and the one about Rhea was not among them.  Of the lyric poem about Rhea we only have papyrus fragments.  The thing that is wonderful about the fragment is how Corinna portrays Rhea.  She is no helpless female to be tossed about by the cruelty of fate, but takes control.  The song ends with the hiding of the baby Zeus and states that Rhea gains honor from this.  “…and great was the honor she got from the Immortals” I like that the song doesn’t end with the defeat of Chronos by Zeus.  It ends when Rhea breaks the chain of abuse.

Rhea was honored by the immortals for the intelligence and cunning that allowed her to avoid the violence of the generation before her.  She manages to save both her children and her husband, who had in fact, saved her life too.  Thinking of it that way, the story begins to become a rather desperate knife edge of love and hate, with fear driving it all. 

It is this fear that interests me. 

Cronos, who is in many ways, Father Time, is afraid of the future he is helping to create.  He is afraid of his son who will overthrow him and does his best to delay the process.  Fear of the future, of death, of the unknown, it’s something we all have to come to terms with.

Together, Cronos and Rhea navigate the difficult territory of how it is that we will pass on the world to future generations.  This seems particularly poignant to me.  In a day and age when we are more connected than we ever have been, when we know more clearly the atrocities and the pain that occur every day, we cannot in any honesty think that we are better than the ancients and their stories of the attempts of the Titans and Gods to succeed and survive.  We have too many reminders to think otherwise: police brutality and racism in our own country,  the perpetuation of violence in Israel  against the people of Palestine, the death and destruction of ISIL, everywhere the cycle of violence perpetuates. 

Cronos was right to be afraid. I am too.  But the lesson that Rhea gives us is that we can strive, in each generation, to be better than the one before.  Each of us is the inheritor of this earth, each of us gives it to the next generation.  I challenge you who read this to ponder your own intelligence and cleverness and to think about how you might apply it in order to change the cycle of violence, both against our fellow humans and against the earth herself.

Rhea’s solution wasn’t perfect, and ours won’t be either.  Maybe here again we have the lesson of permission to fail.  The Gods themselves cannot make things perfect, why would we be able to?  But they use the gifts they have to make the best decisions they can in a world where there can be overwhelming emotions and realities.

There is one more generation yet in this saga of life and death, and so next up: Demeter.

For the first part in this series, click here.