The Sickle of Cronus was born from the pain of Gaia, the primordial earth, the first being to emerge from the chaos that existed before the cosmos. Gaia had given birth to Uranus, the sky, and together they had produced the Titans, twelve divine children of immense power: six sons and six daughters, including Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Cronus, the youngest. Gaia had also borne the Cyclopes, the one-eyed master smiths, and the Hecatoncheires, the hundred-handed giants, and all of them were her children. But Uranus, the sky, hated his offspring. He feared their strength, for he had heard a prophecy that one of his sons would overthrow him, and so he took each child as it was born and thrust it back into Gaia's own body, burying them in the darkness beneath the earth. Gaia groaned under the weight of her imprisoned children, and her pain was so great that the mountains shook and the seas churned.

Gaia could not strike Uranus herself, for he was the sky and she was the earth, and they were bound together in a union that could not be broken by her own hand. So she turned to her children. She fashioned a sickle of grey adamant, the hardest substance in the cosmos, a metal that no fire could melt and no hammer could break, and she called the Titans to her. She begged them to avenge her, to strike down their father and free their brothers, but the elder Titans were afraid. Oceanus, the world-encircling river, refused. Hyperion, the god of light, refused. Iapetus, the father of Prometheus, refused. Only Cronus, the youngest, the darkest, and the most cunning of the Titans, stepped forward. He took the sickle from his mother's hand and swore that he would do what his brothers would not.

Cronus lay in wait for his father. Uranus came down from the heavens to lie with Gaia, as he did every night, covering the earth with his vast body, and in that moment of intimacy Cronus struck. He seized the sickle in both hands and slashed at his father, cutting off the genitals of the sky and casting them into the sea. The blood that fell upon the earth sprang forth new beings: the Furies, the Erinyes, the terrible goddesses with snaky hair and burning eyes who pursue those who swear false oaths and kill their own kin; the Giants, the monstrous beings who would one day rise against the Olympian gods in the Gigantomachy; and the Meliae, the ash-tree nymphs who were the first women of the bronze age. The genitals themselves, severed and falling, landed in the sea near the island of Cyprus, and from the foam that gathered around them rose Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, stepping onto the shore on a scallop shell, attended by the Hours and the Graces. The sickle had destroyed the old order and created the new in a single stroke.

Uranus, maimed and defeated, withdrew from the earth and cursed his son. He prophesied that Cronus too would be overthrown by one of his own children, a fate that no god could escape. Cronus, now supreme among the Titans, took his sister Rhea as his wife and began to rule the cosmos from Mount Olympus, which was then the seat of the Titan gods. But the curse of Uranus haunted him. When Rhea bore him children, Cronus remembered his father's prophecy and swallowed each infant whole as soon as it was born. Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, went down his throat first. Then Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. Then Hera, who would one day be queen of Olympus. Then Hades, who would rule the dead. Then Poseidon, who would rule the sea. Rhea wept for her children, but Cronus would not be swayed. The sickle that had freed him from his father had made him a monster in his own right.

At last Rhea, desperate, turned to Gaia and Uranus for help, and they advised her to hide her next child and give Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow instead. That child was Zeus, and he was raised in secret on the island of Crete, hidden in a cave on Mount Ida, fed by the goat Amalthea and guarded by the Curetes, young warriors who clashed their spears against their shields to drown out the infant's cries. When Zeus grew to manhood, he forced Cronus to disgorge his brothers and sisters, and then he rose against the Titan king in the war called the Titanomachy, the ten-year war between the old Titans and the young Olympian gods. The Cyclopes, whom Cronus had imprisoned in Tartarus, were freed by Zeus and forged for him the thunderbolt, the weapon that would break the Titan host. Cronus fought with the sickle that had once castrated Uranus, but the thunderbolt was stronger. The Titans fell, and Cronus was cast into the dark pit of Tartarus, where he remains to this day, the sickle lost or taken from him, his reign ended by the very violence he had unleashed.

What became of the sickle itself, the old stories do not agree. Some say it was taken by Zeus and kept as a trophy of the victory over the Titans, a reminder of the weapon that had both created and destroyed the age of the gods. Others say it passed into the keeping of the nymphs who guarded the treasures of the gods, and from them to Perseus, the son of Zeus and Danae, who used it to sever the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Still others say it was buried deep in the earth, returned to Gaia, its work done. But the image of the curved blade, the reaper's sickle that cuts down the father to let the son rise, passed from Greek myth into the Roman imagination and then into the medieval world, where old Father Time, Saturn himself, still wields the sickle that harvests lives as surely as Cronus harvested his father's reign.