which both she and they resented. The children conspired against their father, and their mother assisted them by producing iron, with which she bade them avenge their wrongs. But fear fell on them all except Cronus, who determined to deliver his mother from Heaven's embraces; so when the latter was amorously approaching his wife from a distance, their son Cronus, armed with a sickle of iron or steel, mutilated him. Thus the wedded pair, Heaven and Earth, were practically divorced, but Oceanus clung to his father ever after the shameful treatment which the latter had undergone.
The Chinese[1] likewise possess the myth; and it is known to various peoples of the Pacific, including the Maori, whose version is in the highest degree interesting on account of its close resemblance, even in details, to the Greek one; but I must be content to pass over them in silence, giving you the story alone as reproduced by Mr. Lang:[2] 'In the beginning, the Heaven, Rangi, and the Earth, Papa, were the father and mother of all things. In these days the Heaven lay upon the Earth, and all was darkness. They had never been separated. Heaven and Earth had children, who grew up and lived in this thick night, and they were unhappy because they could not see. Between the bodies of their parents they were imprisoned, and there was no light. The names of the
- ↑ Lang, p. 50; Pauthier, Livres sacrés de l'Orient (Paris, 1852), p. 19.
- ↑ Lang, pp. 45-6, who gives as his authorities Taylor's New Zealand, pp. 118—121, where the story is given with more detail, and Bastian, Die heilihe Sage der Polynesier, pp. 36—39, adding that a crowd of similar myths, in one of which a serpent severs Heaven and Earth, are printed in Turner's Samoa: see more especially pp. 198, 292, 300.
