A. Saturn in Greek Mythology: The War With the Titans
Hoagland summarizes
Saturn’s role in Greek mythology in the following fashion:
Iapetus...is the seventeenth of Saturn’s thirty three currently known moons, and the third largest. It was named after a Titan - the son of Uranus and the father of Prometheus and Atlas (the latter said to be the “fathers of Mankind”). Thus, in Greek myth, Iapetus was also an ancestor... a progenitor... of “Homo Sapiens Sapiens.”....The current names of Saturn’s major moons, taken from a group of “:superbeings” in Greek myth called “Titans,” were given them by Sir John Herschel, in 1847. Herschel’s nomenclature for Iapetus and the other six (then) known moons, was based on the logical association of Saturn (“Cronus” (sic) in Greek) with the Titans; Herschel, continuing the ritual, named the largest Saturnian moon “Titan” itself - in honor of the entire pantheon.641
But Kronos (to give
Saturn’s Greek name literal transliteration) was more than just the
father of the Titans. In Greek mythology he was the “first god”
prior to Zeus, and he was overthrown by a rebellion against him by
the Titans, who were, let it be noted, a race of giants.
So in other words,
the entire mythological conceptual matrix concerning Saturn - at
least in Greek mythology - is precisely that of the ancient Cosmic
War in the Pantheon, a war which, in its Greek version, is clearly
associated with rebellion and a race of physiologically large
humanoids called Titans. And Iapetus is precisely one of these
Titans. The Titans, rebelling against Kronos, eventually overthrow
him, and in turn are overthrown by Zeus, who then becomes the more
familiar principle god in the Greek pantheon. One might therefore
justifiably amend the subtitle to Hoagland’s essay to include the
more pertinent question of “What did the ancient Greeks know, and
when did they know it?”
Hoagland does
eventually mention the connection of Saturn and Iapetus with this
ancient cosmic civil war in the pantheon, but ultimately favors a
very different hypothesis, as we shall see. In my opinion, however,
the mythological context of the War Against the Titans forms an
essential backdrop from which to view the anomalies of Iapetus, and
from which to weigh the various hypotheses Hoagland advances to
explain them.