Kronos and Chronos

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 5 pages

From The Secret Doctrine II, on a myth Blavatsky says the modern mythographers have never understood: the mutilation of Ouranos by his son Kronos, condemning him to impotence. Her position is that the story is very plain and, having been universal, must have contained a great abstract and philosophical idea now lost. Decharme is quoted as having rightly seen that the punishment marks a new period, a second phase in the development of creation, while renouncing any attempt to explain it.

The explanation offered is evolutionary. Ouranos, who personifies all the creative powers of and in Chaos — space, or the unmanifested Deity — tried to impede that development by destroying his children as soon as they were born, those powers being what cause the Pitris to evolve primordial men from themselves without sense or desire for procreation; hence the penalty. The work of generation, suspended for a moment, then passes into the hands of Kronos — Chronos, time — who unites with Rhea, the earth in esotericism and matter in general, and so produces terrestrial Titans after the celestial. The two names one letter apart are thus the same figure read on two levels, and the whole symbolism, she concludes, relates to the mysteries of evolution — with the same story repeating itself in Kronos that had already been told of Ouranos.

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