Everyman’s Saturn

Abstract

That the various fragments of myth associated with the name of Saturn and implicitly his Greek counterpart Kronos persisted in the mythological writings of the Christian West is, in a theoretical sense, remarkable. Since scholars in that age were no longer in touch with the occult significance of these fragments relating to the fertility cults of the ancient Mediterranean world,1 it was not particularly obvious to them what to do with a brutal protagonist remembered for consuming and disgorging his own children, and for having his genitals cut off by his son and cast into the sea. Yet certain of those pieces of an assumed story about this pagan cosmocrator not only survived but even managed to preserve their narrative integrity, in spite of internal contradictions and in spite of centuries of adaptation, glossing, moralizing and allegorizing — through which manipulation alone the Christian mythographers could justify their interest in this pagan lore.