ED sent me a beautiful early 20th century Chromolithograph of Father Time and the Young Year as a boy signing the Book of Life together. A chromolithograph is created on a lithographic stone. BUT the color is filled in with separate strikes to the stone, in which these very garish colors were inserted, and these were special colors, chemically different from those used previously. Chemists in the late 18th and early 19th century discovered a way to make color right, not using natural dyes found in nature, but chemically made dyes. Interestingly, the first such color to be chemically man made and marketed in dyes for clothing was the color mauve in the first quarter of the 19th C.
Origins of Father Time
Here we see the Old Man Time with his scythe, a very common icon to us today. His origins go back before the Pre-Romans. Himself not a Greek God who came to Rome but a God native to the pre-Hellenes, sometimes termed the early Italians, a rural agricultural community native to Attica. So Father Time goes back to possibly 800 BCE or earlier. Very early on, they called his festival in Attica the Kronia, the festival of the Harvest.
Because of his association with the fields, he carries a sickle or a scythe, to mow down the foodstuffs of life. His name to the very early Italian pre-Hellenes became The Sower.
The Sower God
Prior to the adoption of Jupiter as the Roman Ruler of the Gods, they identified this Sower God with the race of Gods before the birth of Zeus/Jupiter. That generation called him Saturn, the Titan of Time. Saturn belonged to the generation of Gods before the Olympic Gods, called the Titans. He’s known as the last and youngest of the 12 Titans, and the son of Uranus (Heaven or Sky Father) and mother Gaea (Earth). Saturn castrated his father with a sickle which his mother made from a stone consecrated to her, Flint. She made this sickle in the shape of the moon, crescent shaped, representative of the wane and wax of the moon, a symbolic of the flow of life and death. A smart mother, but not a very loyal wife, she assured her youngest son, Time, ruled the Titans.
Saturn (Time) ruled with his sister Rhea (Necessity), and she bore him five children, Veta, Ceres, Juno, Pluto and Neptune. Because he overthrew his father Uranus, Saturn knew one of his children similarly planned to overthrow him. So he ate each one. Yet his wife Rhea tricked him into eating a little boulder which resembled a baby in bunting instead of her favorite child Jupiter. Hidden away and growing to manhood, when Jupiter accosted his father Saturn again, he forced him to throw up his siblings. Saturn thereby freed Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto (Air, Water and Death) the three elements which TIME cannot imprison.
The legend says his son Jupiter banished Saturn to Latium in Italy where he turned his sickle to agriculture and became an exalted farmer, the God of Fertility of the Fields. Thus the pre-Hellenes worshiped him as The Sower, and the Romans as Saturn. Time rules the cycle of things growing and dying.
Saturn now lies asleep in one of two places:
We need to wait to see from whence Time emerges. Either he comes back from his sleep on Elysium, the Isle of the Blest, orawaken from his sleep from an island near Britain. When he re-awakens, they say Saturn (Time) will bring another Golden Age of Humankind.You might ask yourself why the Grim Reaper will bring back a Golden Age. This is because, like the sickle he carries, nothing new can come from old growth. The old must die to create a new age.
His attributes are the Hourglass, the Scythe, and his aged face with a long white beard. A black crow accompanies him. The flint sickle clears old growth as it gathers in the fruits of the new growth. An hourglass trickles out sand leaving space at its top for wisdom and sagacity. His long white beard signifies the wisdom of age purified into whiteness.
The black crow or raven comes from the family of birds called the Corvidae, common in many forms all over the world. Ravens are said to be the smartest of all the birds. In fact, I’ve seen experiments carried out to measure the intelligence of such crows. If you fill a pitcher with water below the level at which a crow may insert his head to drink, he will gather pebbles and fill the pitcher with them, one by one, until the water level rises enough for him to drink. Not only smart, but crafty and long-lived. Some species of crow can live for 20-years. The oldest captive crow lived to be almost 60-years old! A fit companion to Old Father Time.
In early Rome
The Sower with the scythe and Saturn became one god celebrated in a mid-winter festival called the Saturnalia. Rome shut down for days, for a universal street banquet, and gave presents to the children, as well carried on with much feasting, drinking and lovemaking.
ED’s chromolithograph is worth $800 as it’s in perfect condition and falls into a category of collectibles of early 20th century. Rare chromolithographs which people associate with the New Year holiday. I wish you all space and courage for a new beginning. As T. S. Eliot said in Little Gidding, “for last year’s words belong to last year’s language/And next year’s words await another voice/And to make an end is to make a beginning.”