h red
ochre.--Spencer and Gillen. They are "sacred things," but not exactly
fetishes.

The myth of the swallowing and disgorging of his own children by Cronus
was another of the stumbling-blocks of Greek orthodoxy. The common
explanation, that Time ((Greek text omitted)) does swallow his children,
the days, is not quite satisfactory. Time brings never the past back
again, as Cronus did. Besides, the myth of the swallowing is not
confined to Cronus. Modern philology has given, as usual, different
analyses of the meaning of the name of the god. Hermann, with Preller,
derives it from (Greek text omitted), to fulfil. The harvest-month, says
Preller, was named Cronion in Greece, and Cronia was the title of the
harvest-festival. The sickle of Cronus is thus brought into connection
with the sickle of the harvester.(1)

(1) Preller, Gr. Myth., i. 44; Hartung, ii. 48; Porphyry, Abst., ii. 54.
Welcker will not hear of this etymology, Gr. gott., i. 145, note 9.

The second myth, in which Cronus swallows his children, has numerous
parallels in savage legend. Bushmen tell of Kwai Hemm, the devourer, who
swallows that great god, the mantis insect, and disgorges him alive with
all the other persons and animals whom he has engulphed in the course of
a long and voracious career.(1) The moon in Australia, while he lived
on earth, was very greedy, and swallowed the eagle-god, whom he had to
disgorge. Mr. Im Thurn found similar tales among the Indians of Guiana.
The swallowing and disgorging of Heracles by the monster that was to
slay Hesione is well known. Scotch peasants tell of the same feats, but
localise the myth on the banks of the Ken in Galloway. Basutos, Eskimos,
Zulus and European fairy tales all possess this incident, the swallowing
of many persons by a being from whose maw they return alive and in good
case.

(1) Bleek, Bushman Folk-lore, pp. 6, 8.

A mythical conception which prevails from Greenland to South Africa,
from Delphi to the Solomon Islands, from Brittany to the shores of Lake
Superior, must have some foundation in the common elements of human
nature.(1) Now it seems highly probable that this curious idea may have
been originally invented in an attempt to explain natural phenomena by
a nature-myth. It has already been shown (chapter v.) that eclipses are
interpreted, even by the peasantry of advanced races, as the swallowing
of the moon by a beast or a monster. The Piutes account for the
disappearance