Was it Cronos’s patricide that also marked the end of a universe ruled by eternity, and the violent beginning of a world governed by time? And with his sickle, Cronos ruptured the idyllic eternity where all beings are immortal—a temporal Garden of Eden—until time gushed forth, like the blood from Uranus’s wound. I see this as the beginning of the implacable flight of time from the past into the future—the arrow of time, forever seeking its target in the future. For Plutarch, the arrow metaphor was more fluid: “There is Eternity, whence flowed Time, as from a river, into the world.”
Cronos in turn married and had five children. Because it had been foretold that he would be overthrown by one of his children, just as he had overthrown his father, he swallowed each child at birth. However, his wife Rhea, like Gaia before her, outwitted her husband by hiding one newborn son, Jupiter, and giving Cronos a stone to swallow instead. The deception worked, and Jupiter escaped the wrath of his father.
Some have interpreted Cronos eating his children as an allegory about time, which, like a parent, brings things into being, but which also outlives, and ultimately destroys them. As Ovid observed in his Metamorphoses at the beginning of the first millennium AD, “Time is...the devourer of all things.” Writers and artists have flirted with this cannibalistic theme througout the ages, though none as graphically as Francisco Goya.
There is a painting by Goya, completed in 1823, that hangs in the Prado museum in Madrid. Entitled Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, it is one of fourteen of his works, known as the “black paintings,” with which Goya decorated the interior of his house in Madrid. The painting is quite literal and macabre. Against a nightmarish black background, a naked, bug-eyed figure is eating one of his small sons, holding the bloody, headless corpse in his strong hands while tearing off an arm with his mouth. For some reason Goya chose to adorn his dining room with this disturbing work. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could have worked up an appetite sitting opposite this grisly portrait.
But, on another level, Goya’s interpretation makes sense. As Aldous Huxley wrote in Seasons, “Blood of the world, time staunchless flows;/The wound is mortal and is mine.” Like Uranus, we bleed time from the wound of mortality. Although Goya never titled the painting himself, it has come to be seen as a bloody, allegorical work portraying the power and ruthlessness of Cronos: Time consuming his children. That which Time brings into being and nourishes, Time also, ultimately destroys. Echoing Plutarch, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell took a more optimistic view of this ancient myth. As he wrote in A Free Man’s Worship and Other Essays, “A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.”
Perhaps Russell was anticipating the meditative tranquility of the modern physicists’ notion of a “timescape” in which the past, present, and future commingle. But time’s arrow still rules our daily life, and the past seems to press against the back of every second.
Every day, I negotiate between consuming the present—drinking my coffee, savouring it—and being consumed by time. Time may not swallow me, but it gnaws away. It says, “In five more minutes, you will be late for your class, your students are waiting for you.” We flirt and bicker and hide from time like this all day long. “At my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”—in the slam of your car door the moment before you realize the engine is on and the keys are in the ignition; in the moment after you mistakenly press “send all” on a piece of very private email. The deed has already slipped into the past. History owns it now.
Cronos is often conflated with Chronos, the Greek personification of time—more of an idea than a deity. This was probably the source of such time-related words as “chronology,” “chronicle,” and “synchronous.” In fact, all the instruments we use to measure time preserve this name, such as “chronometers,” the clocks that ocean-going vessels used to navigate the seas before gps was invented. It seems clear to me that the aged, sickle-wielding figure of Saturn has also persisted, turning up in editorial cartoons, and in New Year’s imagery—as the slightly pathetic figure of Father Time.
father time
He has a long white beard and always carries the tools of his trade—a scythe and hourglass. The scythe represents the harvest of the bounty of time (and, by association, death), while the hourglass stands for the ceaseless flow of time (and the measure of how little we have). This association of Father Time’s scythe with death is echoed by another figure, the Grim Reaper, who also carries a scythe. In fact the Reaper, who sometimes carries an hourglass too, resembles a skeletal version of the more benevolent Father Time, whose scythe, reflecting his Roman origins as a god of agriculture, is said to represent the waxing and waning of the seasons and the regenerative cycle of crops. Some link the shape of the scythe to the crescent moon. Others say that the scythe represents the flint sickle that Cronos used to castrate his father.
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