Time After Time

Question: (K/Ch)ronos vs. Cronus: who's who? A lot of sources pin "Chronos" as the father of the titans and the master of time. I thought it was Cronus. Are these the same person, and if so, does Cronus truly have some myth about lording over time?

I think there may be some confusion with spelling already here: Kronos and Cronus are the same person (the K version is just the more proper Greek spelling, while the C version is the more often used one), the Titan father of the gods. Khronos or Chronos with a Kh/Ch is the Titan having to do with time. The names themselves are etymological clues to the difference between them; chronos literally means time, while cronos is thought to mean he who cuts or he who creates.

These are in fact two completely different Titans, but the confusion is understandable; people have been getting confused about which was which and accidentally syncretizing them together here and there for centuries thanks to the similar names, which folks who weren't ancient Greeks couldn't always differentiate very well. Many sources, especially modern books on popular mythology, do claim them as the same person, or describe one with the attributes of the other, but this is generally the result of those sources using other sources who were using other sources who were just confused about the whole thing.

Cronus is the Titan that everyone knows about; he is the son of Ouranos who castrated his father and in turn the father of all the gods, who ate them until forced by his son Zeus to disgorge them. It was he who led the first Titanomachy against the gods and he who was said to rule the Elysian Fields or to dwell in Tartarus with the rest of those that were eventually defeated by the Olympians. His Roman equivalent is Saturn, and both versions of him were gods of plenty and fertility (symbolized by the sickle, which is both the implement he used to castrate his father and the tool used to reap bountiful harvests). He ruled over the Golden Age of humanity, in which there was no sadness, no hunger and no law because there was also no crime. The Greeks viewed him as more of a story figure, an intermediary step between Ouranos and Zeus and an important footnote but not a major figure after the end of the Titanomachy, whereas the Romans were much more invested in Saturn (being more of a farming people than the Greeks) and built more temples and held more celebrations in his honor. When people talk about any variant of C/K-ronos, nine times out of ten they're talking about this guy.

Chronos, on the other hand, is a much more obscure and bizarre figure, one who seldom appears in mainstream Greek myth and was more popular as a philosophical idea than an actor in any stories. He is the Titan of eternity, and with his wife Ananke, the Titaness of inevitability, was said in alternate cosmologies to have created the word and given birth to the first other beings in it. He is the ultimate creator in the Orphic cosmology, though whether or not you use Orphic material in Scion is totally up to the individual Storyteller (Orphic myths tend to be kind of batshit insane and often contradictory to the main body of Greek mythology, but they're definitely interesting). Chronos doesn't actually do anything in mythology other than be a creator/progenitor figure in those alternate histories; his Roman counterpart is Aion/Aeon, who as the Titan of Endless Time was considered the protector of the Roman Empire (ensuring that it should survive forever), and the Romans envisioned him as married to Aeternitas, a Titaness of Eternity who is basically just his clone and resembles Ananke only in passing.

So, as you can see, the two are not the same person at all, nor do they really have anything to do with one another; they don't even inhabit the same cosmology, most of the time. But there has been confusion between them for a long time, starting with the fact that Cronus does actually have some small time connotations of his own; as a fertility and farming god, he has control over the seasons and the cycle of growth. This control over the cycle of time, specifically as it regards the seasons, is not at all the same as Chronos' personification of eternal time, but the later you get in history and the further you go from the early Greek myths, the more common it becomes for someone to confuse them - either intentionally, as some philosophers occasionally do to make a point, or accidentally, as many interpreters from Rome or other cultures do when confused by the similar names.

By this point in history, your average joe on the street, provided that he is not secretly a scholar of Classical mythology, probably doesn't know the difference. "Chrono" is a Greek root we use for lots of time-related words - chronological, chronographical, chronometrical, etc. - so when someone says "Cronus" and we don't hear that there's no H there, we automatically assume that guy must have something to do with time. Modern conceptions of time, thanks in large part to science fiction and developments in measuring and relativity in the past several centuries, don't really make a distinction between seasonal, cyclical time and time as represented by eternity, so, we reason, if there are two guys with the same name who are both associated in some way with time, they must be the same guy.

The most obvious final product of this centuries-long process of confusion and misidentification is the popular folkloric figure of Father Time, who is the personification of time and eternity, much like Chronos, but who carries the scythe or sickle that is quintessentially Cronus'. This is a very recent development in world mythology, occurring in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but it makes a good illustration of the pernicious confusion between the two Titans. (Theoretically, the connection between time leading to inevitable death and the transformation from sickle to scythe may also point to some Slavic influence from Smert, the scythe-wielding dead goddess, but considering the extremely low influence of the Slavs on Renaissance Italy, where the idea of Father Time originated, that's likely to be an even later addition to the imagery.)

For Scion's purposes, Cronus is pretty much always the guy that matters. He's the one leading the other Titans against Olympus, he's the one who fathered the gods, he's the one who has active myths of doing active things, he's the one who used to rule the world and he's the one that has the chip on his shoulder. Chronos, on the other hand, is basically a non-entity, one of those Titans who exists on a vast, primordial scale but doesn't really do anything, and as a result there are few times that he needs to be at the forefront unless you're running a story that either deals heavily with Orphic and mystery cult alternate theories or is strongly invested in the idea of messing around with eternity.

But, theoretically, they're both out there; playing with what they're doing, who they're supporting in the war and why, and what irritation being syncretized with one another might be inflicting on them could all be interesting avenues for exploration. It's unlikely that they're actively strongly Fatebound to one anothers' roles, considering that both of them would have been locked in Tartarus most if not all of the time that this confusion was occurring, but either of them might be surprised by the modern confusion, and either of them might be interested in correcting it, taking advantage of it or letting humanity (and thus many up-and-coming Scions who don't know any better) continue in their ignorance.