Chaos (mythology)

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Chaos (mythology)

In Greek myth, Chaos (X???) or Khaos is the original state of existence from which the first gods appeared. In other words, the dark void of space. It is made from a mixture of what the Ancient Greeks considered the four elements

Classical element

Many ancient philosophy used a set of archetype classical elements to explain patterns in nature. In this context, the word element refers to a chemical substance that is either a chemical compound or a mixture of chemical compounds , rather than a chemical element of modern physical science....
: earth, air, water and fire. For example, when a log is burned, the flames were attributed to the fire in it, the smoke the air in it, the water and grease that come from it were supposed to be the water, and the ashes left over were the earth.

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Classical element

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
it is ????, which is usually pronounced similarly to "house" (Coinè) or "cows" (Attic), but correctly in ancient Greek as ; it means "gaping void", from the verb ?a??? "gape, be wide open, etc", Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, linguistic reconstruction common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans....
*"ghen-", *"ghn-"; compare English "chasm" and "yawn", Old English

Old English language

Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century....
geanian = "to gape".

Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso was a Roman Empire poet known as Ovid to the English language-speaking world, who wrote about love, seduction, and Roman mythology transformation....
, in his Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses (poem)

The Metamorphoses by the Ancient Rome poet Ovid is a Narrative poetry in fifteen books that describes the Creation myth and history of the world....
, described Chaos as "rather a crude and indigested mass, a lifeless lump, unfashioned and unframed, of jarring seeds and justly Chaos named". From that, its meaning evolved into the modern familiar "complete disorder".

Chaos feat three main characteristics:

it is a bottomless gulf where anything falls endlessly. This radically contrasts with the Earth that emerges from it to offer a stable ground.
it is a place without any possible orientation, where anything falls in every direction.
it is a space that separates, that divides: after the Earth and the Sky parted, Chaos remains between both of them.

Theogonia

According to Hesiod

Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek language oral poet, his date is uncertain but leading scholars agree that Hesiod lived in the latter half of the Eighth-century BCE....
's Theogony
Theogony

The Theogony is a poem by Hesiod describing the origins and genealogy of the polytheism of the ancient Greeks, composed circa 700 BC....
(the origin of the gods), Chaos was the nothingness out of which the first objects of existence appeared. These first beings, depicted as children of Chaos alone, were Gaia

Gaia (mythology)

Gaia Gaia is a Greek primordial gods and chthonic deity in the Ancient Greek Pantheon and considered a Mother Goddess or Great Goddess....
(the Earth), Tartarus

Tartarus

In classic Roman mythology, below Heaven, Earth, and Pontus is Tartarus, or Tartaros . It is a deep, gloomy place, a pit, or an abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering that resides beneath the Hades....
(the Underworld), Nyx

Nyx

In Greek mythology, Nyx was the primordial goddess of the night. A shadowy figure, Nyx stood at or near the beginning of creation, and was the mother of personification gods such as Hypnos and Thanatos ....
(the darkness of the night), Erebus

Erebus

In Greek mythology, Erebus or Erebos or Erebes was the son of a primordial god, Chaos , and represented the personification of darkness and shadow, which filled in all the corners and crannies of the world....
(the darkness of the Underworld), and Eros

EROS

EROS may refer to:* Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science, the Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science, the United States national archive of remotely sensed images of the Earth's land surface...
(sexual love). These beings and the first generation of beings produced by them (the Sky, Ouranos, and the Sea, Pontus

Pontus (mythology)

File:ConstantaPontos.JPGIn Greek mythology, Pontus was an ancient, pre-Olympian sea-god, one of the protogenoi, the "first-born". Pontos was the son of Gaia , the Earth: Hesiod says that Gaia brought forth Pontos out of herself, without coupling....
) constitute, for Hesiod, the fundamental cosmic deities.

Primal Chaos

In Ancient Greek cosmology

Cosmology

Cosmology is study of the Universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity's place in it. Though the word cosmology is recent , study of the Universe has a long history involving science, philosophy, esotericism, and religion....
, Chaos was the first couple of things to exist and the womb from which everything emerged. For Hesiod

Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek language oral poet, his date is uncertain but leading scholars agree that Hesiod lived in the latter half of the Eighth-century BCE....
and the Olympian mythos

Mythos

Mythos is a Greek word meaning "story, legend, plot" and may refer to:* Myth or Mythology** The shared elements, characters, settings and themes in a set of works, e.g....
, Chaos was the 'vast and dark' void from which the first deity and maybe not the first, Gaia

Gaia (mythology)

Gaia Gaia is a Greek primordial gods and chthonic deity in the Ancient Greek Pantheon and considered a Mother Goddess or Great Goddess....
, emerged. In the Pelasgian

Pelasgians

The name Pelasgians was used by some Ancient Greece writers to refer to populations that preceded the Greeks in Greece, "a hold-all term for any ancient, primitive and presumably autochthonous people in the Greek world." During the Classical Greece enclaves under that name resided in several locations of mainland Greece, Crete and other regi...
creation myth, Eurynome

Eurynome

In Greek mythology, there were many women with the name Eur?nom?, with the possible significance "far-wandering" .#The Eurynome , or daughter of Oceanus....
('goddess of everything') emerged from this Chaos and created the Cosmos from it. For Orphics, it was called the 'Womb of Darkness' from which the Cosmic Egg
World egg

A world egg or cosmic egg is a mythology Motif found in the creation myths of many cultures and civilizations. Typically, the world egg is a beginning of some sort, and the universe or some primordial being comes into existence by "hatching" from the egg ....
that contained the Universe emerged. It is sometimes conflated with 'Black Winged Night'.

The idea is also found in Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding to modern Iraq, as well as some parts of northeastern Syria, some parts of southeastern Turkey, and some parts of the Khuzestan Province of southwestern Iran....
and associated with Tiamat

Tiamat

In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is a goddess who personifies the sea. Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos. Although there are no early precedents for it, some sources identify her with images of a sea serpent or dragon, In the En?ma Elish, the Babylonian Epic poetry of Creation myth, she gives birth to the fi...
the 'Dragon' of Chaos, from whose dismembered body the world was formed.

Genesis

Genesis

Genesis or Breishit is the first book of the Bible used by Judaism and Christianity, and the first of five books of the Pentateuch or Torah....
refers to the earliest conditions of the Earth as "without form, and void

Void

A void is an empty space. When used as an adjective, the word can also mean "invalid"....
", a state similar to chaos.

Primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality, particularly by philosophers such as Heraclitus

Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus was a Pre-Socratic philosophy Greeks philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor.Heraclitus is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and that the Logos is the fundamental order of all....
and those trained in Orphic schools. It was the opposite of Platonism

Platonism

Platonism is the philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it. In a narrower sense the term might indicate the doctrine of Platonic realism....
. It was also probably what Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
had in mind when he developed the concept of Prima Materia

Prima materia

Prima Materia is, according to Alchemy, the alleged primitive formless base of all matter, given particular manifestation through the influence of Substantial form....
in his attempt to combine Platonism with the Presocraticism and Naturalism

Naturalism (philosophy)

Naturalism is a philosophical position that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and natural law. In its broadest and strongest sense, naturalism is the metaphysics position that "nature is all there is and all basic truths are truths of nature." This is generally referred to as metaphysical or ontological natur...
. It was a concept inherited by the theory of alchemy

Alchemy

Alchemy , a part of the Occult Tradition, is both a philosophy and a practice with an aim of achieving ultimate wisdom as well as immortality, involving the improvement of the alchemist as well as the making of several substances described as possessing unusual properties....
.