ce of gods, by earth and wide heaven
begotten".(1) So the New Zealanders, as we have seen, say, "The
heaven which is above us, and the earth which is beneath us, are the
progenitors of men and the origin of all things". Hesiod(2) somewhat
differs from this view by making Chaos absolutely first of all things,
followed by "wide-bosomed Earth," Tartarus and Eros (love). Chaos
unaided produced Erebus and Night; the children of Night and Erebus are
Aether and Day. Earth produced Heaven, who then became her own lover,
and to Heaven she bore Oceanus, and the Titans, Coeeus and Crius,
Hyperion and Iapetus, Thea and Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys,
"and youngest after these was born Cronus of crooked counsel, the most
dreadful of her children, who ever detested his puissant sire," Heaven.
There were other sons of Earth and Heaven peculiarly hateful to their
father,(3) and these Uranus used to hide from the light in a hollow of
Gaea. Both they and Gaea resented this treatment, and the Titans, like
"the children of Heaven and Earth," in the New Zealand poem, "sought to
discern the difference between light and darkness". Gaea (unlike Earth
in the New Zealand myth, for there she is purely passive), conspired
with her children, produced iron, and asked her sons to avenge their
wrongs.(4) Fear fell upon all of them save Cronus, who (like Tane Mahuta
in the Maori poem) determined to end the embraces of Earth and Heaven.
But while the New Zealand, like the Indo-Aryan myth,(5) conceives of
Earth and Heaven as two beings who have never previously been sundered
at all, Hesiod makes Heaven amorously approach his spouse from a
distance. This was the moment for Cronus,(6) who stretched out his
hand armed with the sickle of iron, and mutilated Uranus. As in so many
savage myths, the blood of the wounded god fallen on the ground produced
strange creatures, nymphs of the ash-tree, giants and furies. As in
the Maori myth, one of the children of Heaven stood apart and did not
consent to the deed. This was Oceanus in Greece,(7) and in New Zealand
it was Tawhiri Matea, the wind, "who arose and followed his father,
Heaven, and remained with him in the open spaces of the sky". Uranus now
predicted(8) that there would come a day of vengeance for the evil deed
of Cronus, and so ends the dynasty of Uranus.

(1) Theog., 45.

(2) Ibid., 116.

(3) Ibid., 155.

(4) Ibid., 166.

(5) Muir, v. 23, quoting Aitareya Brahmana, iv. 27: "These two wo