The piece started when I came across Goya's "Saturn Devouring his Son" (to the right) again about a year ago. When I first saw it in middle school, it was a cool-scary mythology painting. All these years later, I saw the archetypical paternalistic leader, devoured by fear from within, devouring that which it was his duty to nurture.
In the decades since middle school, how many times have such devouring leaders arisen, consumed their people in one form or another, and been over-thrown or replaced?
One of the things that really jumped out at me regarding the Uranus-Cronus-Zeus genealogy was the cyclical nature. Each father-figure in turn attempts to secure his dominion in perpetuity by swallowing up the next generation, a pattern that Zeus continued briefly.
It mirrors, if not directly mythologizes, a very common fear in human societies - the fear of being supplanted or replaced by the future - future generations, future religions, future idealogies, future governments.
In the event of the last decade, we've witnessed the fall of one domineering father type leader, who had endeavored to restore the glory of an ancient empire, at the orders of a similar leader also endeavoring to reclaim the glory of a more recent idealogical empire. Both have consumed metaphorically whatever was perceived by them as presenting a potential opposition.
There were examples of this cycle of fear and consuming in the decade prior, and the decade before that, and so on back to the very birth of the story of Uranus, Cronus and Zeus.
Fitting with in all this, the meme' of 'revolutions devour their children'. Post WWII revolutions devoured the children of the nation's involved, reactions to those revolutions devoured the children of reacting nations. The Industrial revolution devoured its own children, the Information revolution devoured its children.
I have wondered, since I starteded looking at this myth and its parallels to our times, if this is a pattern written into humanity itself, all but inescapable. Under it, collectively the individual fears of fathers of being replaced in society by their sons and mothers replaced by their daughters, become the fears of entire generations being replaced and made irrelevant, growing into a fear of entire religions and value systems and idealogies being discarded for the next generation of belief. Perhaps the reason why Psychoanalytic theories of Oedipal and Elektral complexes produce so little value, is that the real heart of the myths of Oedipus and Elektra is one generation's fear of being replaced, of dying.
One last thought for today.
This cycle of being devoured and devouring is one founded, at the core, on fear of death, mortality. Though the world is as pregnant as Gaea before Cronus's castration with religions that endeavor to scour away the finality from death,
what does it mean for us about our many faiths that our societies are still trapped in this cycle of fear and devouring?
