Chaos- Greek PrimordialPrimordial

The Void and Its Children

First of all, Chaos came into being. The word means a gap, an opening. Hesiod gives no explanation, no creator, no cause. Just the void, gaping where before there had been nothing at all.

From this emptiness the first beings arose. Gaia came, broad-chested Earth, on which everything would stand. Tartarus formed in the misty depths below. Eros appeared, who loosens the limbs and overpowers the mind. Then Erebus and Nyx, darkness and night.

Erebus and Nyx were the first to couple. From darkness and night came their opposites: Aether, the bright upper air, and Hemera, Day. Light was born from darkness. Gaia bore starry Ouranos without consort, to cover her completely, then the mountains, then the barren sea. She lay with Ouranos and the Titans were born. The Titans in turn bore the Olympians. When Zeus overthrew his father Kronos, the world had rulers. But they ruled on top of the void, and the void remained.

The Great Chasm

The void made itself known during the war between gods and Titans. Zeus unleashed his thunderbolts against the older gods. The Hundred-Handers hurled three hundred boulders in a single volley. The sea boiled, the forests caught fire, and the blaze reached all the way down to Chaos. In the Theogony, Chaos resounded terribly with the noise.

After Zeus won, the cosmos took its shape: sky above, earth in the middle, Tartarus below. But Chaos still yawned beneath everything. Below the earth, beyond the bronze threshold of Tartarus, it gaped: a great chasm where blast after blast of terrible winds carried whatever entered this way and that. A man who fell inside its gates would not reach the floor in a whole complete year. Even the gods shuddered at it.

The roots of the whole cosmos converged at this abyss. The houses of Night and Day stood at the threshold. They passed each other as one entered and the other departed, never both home at once. Sleep and Death, twin sons of Night, dwelt nearby. Sleep was gentle and wandered freely among men. Death had a heart of iron and a will of bronze, and whom he caught, he held. Atlas stood near the edge, holding the wide sky on tireless shoulders. Styx, eldest daughter of Oceanus, had her halls roofed with tall rocks, her silver pillars reaching toward the sky. When any god swore falsely by her cold water, he lay breathless for a year, voiceless, without nectar or ambrosia. For nine years after, he was cut off from the councils and feasts of the gods.

Ovid's Creation

Before the sea and land and the sky that covers all, nature wore one face. Ovid calls it Chaos. In the Metamorphoses, it was a shapeless lump, a mass of ill-joined seeds where everything existed at once. Nothing held its form. The ground would not bear weight, and the sky had no light. Cold fought hot, wet fought dry, and each thing obstructed every other.

A god, or some higher nature, ended the strife. He separated earth from sky and sea from land, rounded the earth into a sphere, and spread the waters around it. He gave each zone its weather: burning heat at the equator and bitter cold at the poles. He ordered the winds to their quarters and set the stars in their courses. He assigned each river to its channel and each sea to its shore. Fish filled the waters. Birds filled the air. Last came humankind, fashioned from earth and water in the image of the gods, the only creature made to walk upright and lift its eyes toward the sky.

Night's Egg

The Orphic traditions told a different beginning. In Apollonius's Argonautica, Orpheus sings to the Argonauts of how all things once subsisted in Chaos under a single form, and how earth and sea and sky tore themselves apart. The Orphic cosmogonies went further. Before the world, there was Chronos, Time itself, and from Time came Aether and a dark Erebus without end. In this darkness, black-winged Night laid a silver egg in the bosom of Erebus. From that egg burst Phanes, the Firstborn, four-faced and golden-winged. He bore the seeds of all the gods within him. In later Orphic hymns, Zeus swallowed Phanes and all creation with him, then remade the world from within himself. The Derveni Papyrus, found charred in a funeral pyre near Thessaloniki and dated to the fourth century BCE, preserves fragments of these cosmogonies.

In Aristophanes' Birds, a chorus of birds claims the true origin story: "In the beginning there was only Chaos, Night, dark Erebus, and deep Tartarus. There was no Earth, no Air, no Heaven." Night laid her egg in the bosom of Erebus, and from it hatched golden-winged Eros, who mated with Chaos in the whirling winds and brought forth the race of birds before any of the immortals existed. The gods built their world inside Chaos, and it has not gone away.