Cronus - Name and Comparative Mythology

Name and Comparative Mythology

H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (1928), observed that attempts to give Kronos a Greek etymology have failed.

Recently, Janda (2010) offers a genuinely Indo-European etymology of "the cutter", from the root *(s)ker- "to cut" (Greek κείρω, c.f. English shear), motivated by Cronus' characteristic act of "cutting the sky" (or the genitals of anthropomorphic Uranus). The Indo-Iranian reflex of the root is kar, generally meaning "to make, create" (whence karma), but Janda argues that the original meaning "to cut" in a cosmogonic sense is still preserved in some verses of the Rigveda pertaining to Indra's heroic "cutting", like that of Cronus resulting in creation:

RV 10.104.10 ārdayad vṛtram akṛṇod ulokaṃ "he hit Vrtra fatally, cutting a free path"

RV 6.47.4 varṣmāṇaṃ divo akṛṇod "he cut the loftiness of the sky."

This may point to an older Indo-European mytheme reconstructed as *(s)kert wersmn diwos "by means of a cut he created the loftiness of the sky". The myth of Cronus castrating Uranus parallels the Song of Kumarbi, where Anu (the heavens) is castrated by Kumarbi. In the Song of Ullikummi, Teshub uses the "sickle with which heaven and earth had once been separated" to defeat the monster Ullikummi, establishing that the "castration" of the heavens by means of a sickle as part of a creation myth, in origin a cut creating an opening or gap between heaven (imagined as a dome of stone) and earth enabling the beginning of time (Chronos) and human history.

During antiquity, Cronus was occasionally interpreted as Chronos, the personification of time, and the Renaissance, the identification of Cronus and Chronos gave rise to "Father Time" wielding the harvesting scythe.

A theory debated in the 19th century, and sometimes still offered somewhat apologetically, holds that Kronos is related to "horned", assuming a Semitic derivation from qrn. Andrew Lang's objection, that Cronus was never represented horned in Hellenic art, was addressed by Robert Brown, arguing that in Semitic usage, as in the Hebrew Bible qeren was a signifier of "power". When Greek writers encountered the Levantine deity El, they rendered his name as Kronos.

Robert Graves proposed that cronos meant "crow", related to the Ancient Greek word corōnē (κορώνη) "crow", noting that Cronus was depicted with a crow, as were the deities Apollo, Asclepius, Saturn and Bran.