Kronos, Saturn, and a Festival of the World Turned Upside Down

Although the myth of Cronus is one of violence, castration of his father, swallowing of his children, his cult carried a strikingly different mood. In Athens the festival of the Kronia, held at harvest, was a day on which masters and slaves ate together and ordinary hierarchies were briefly suspended, remembering the Golden Age over which Cronus was said to have ruled, when the earth gave its fruits without labour. When Greek Cronus was identified with Roman Saturn, this association passed into the Saturnalia, the December festival of gift-giving, licence and inverted order that is one of the ancestors of later midwinter celebrations. The devouring, sickle-bearing tyrant of the succession myth and the benign king of a lost age of plenty are the same god held at two ends.

Adding to the confusion between Cronus and time, Orphic cosmogony, a separate strand of Greek religious thought associated with texts attributed to the mythical singer Orpheus, posited an entirely distinct primordial being called Chronos, personified Time itself, as the ultimate source of the cosmos, prior even to Cronus and the other Titans; ancient and modern scholars alike stress that this Orphic Chronos and the Titan Cronus are, properly, two different figures whose names happen to sound alike in Greek, even though the later popular pun conflating Kronos with chronos made the distinction increasingly difficult for ordinary worshippers and readers to keep straight.