My Crime


Now, what important questions was I gliding over? In what questions did
I not expect to find reason? Why in this savage fatras about Cronos
swallowing his children, about blood-drops becoming bees (Mr. Max Muller
says 'Melian nymphs'), and bees being stars, and all the rest of a
prehistoric Marchen worked over again and again by the later fancy of
Greek poets and by Greek voyagers who recognised Cronos in Moloch. In
all this I certainly saw no 'reason,' but I have given in tabular form
the general, if inharmonious, conclusions of more exact and conscientious
scholars, 'their variegated hypotheses,' as Mannhardt says in the case of
Demeter. My error, rebuked by Professor Tiele, is the lack of that
'scientific exactitude' exhibited by the explanations arranged in my
tabular form.



My Reply to Professor Tiele


I would reply that I am not engaged in a study of the _Cult_ of Cronos,
but of the revolting element in his _Myth_: his swallowing of his
children, taking a stone emetic by mistake, and disgorging the swallowed
children alive; the stone being on view at Delphi long after the
Christian era. Now, such stories of divine feats of swallowing and
disgorging are very common, I show, in savage myth and popular Marchen.