Chaos in Greek Mythology – The Creation of Everything

 

 

 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

 Now the earth was formless and empty”

Genesis

 

According to Greek mythology, the original meaning of the Greek word chaos means formless and empty; a void, not a state of pandemonium or utter confusion as we know the word today.

 

 

 

How chaos, a dark void, became the pandemonium of today

 

We can mostly blame the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD) for the general meaning of chaos as we know it today.

Ovid, in his work Metamorphoses, declared chaos was not a void, a chasm, or empty space, its original Greek meaning but a disorganized mass.

During the 1600s with the renewed interest in classical authors Ovid’s Metamorphoses became widely read and the word chaos, in the sense of how we now know it, complete disorder or confusion, worked its way into the English language.

 

 

What is Chaos?

 

 In greek mythology, so said Hesiod, a Greek poet writing between 750-650 BC, in his poem “Theogony” (birth of the gods), chaos is the first thing that ever existed.

Hesiod tell us chaos is the origin of everything, the creation of the universe, the big bang, the gap which separates Heaven from Earth and that chaos went on to give us the first Greek gods, the primordial deities.

 

 

How the Universe was born from empty space (chaos)

 

Chaos (thought to be female, a logical perception), declared Hesiod, gave birth to the first gods; the primordial deities.

  First born was Gaia, who went on to become Mother Earth, a male followed, Uranus –  Heaven, then came Tartarus, another male, the underworld, the dreaded abyss of suffering for the wicked and then, maybe to make up for Tartarus, came Eros – Cupid, another male, the winged god of sensual love and desire.

Fourth of Hesiod’s primordial gods was Erebus, male again, meaning deep darkness, shadow or covered and fifth in line was his sister, Nyx, in Greek-night and so, you guessed it, she is the Greek goddess of night said to be so powerful and beautiful even Zeus was afraid of her.

 

 

Nyx, goddess of night and her brother, Erebus, the personification of darkness, went on to produce, among other offspring,  Aether – air, or light, personification of the upper sky and Hemera – day, goddess of daytime.

 

 

Depending on which version of the story you read, somewhere in the genealogical tree, come Ourea, a male who represents mountains and Pontus, the sea god, again, male.

Now we have Heaven and Earth, mountains, sea and sky, an underworld, darkness and light, day and night and spreading love over it all, Eros.

 

 

The Universe has more or less been created out of nothing, that is, out of chaos; however there are some who believe it hatched forth from an egg!

 

The Orphic or Cosmic Egg

 

The Orphic Theogonies or orphism are a set of religious beliefs of ancient and Hellenistic Greece, attributed to the mythical poet, Orpheus, who thought the whole universe was squashed into a giant cosmic egg.

This egg, created by Chronos: time in Greek, when it broke open, produced not chickens but the first gods, again, we are talking about the primordial deities.

Another story has the universe hatching from the egg or Phanes, an hermaphrodite, whose name means to bring light; the first god of  procreation.

Others would have the egg created by different entities or a different order of birth but all are variations on a theme which have one thing in common; before the Orphic egg, there was an abyss, a void, a black hole, nothing but chaos!

 

 

The Orphic or Cosmic Egg, also known as the World or Mundane Egg, is a motive found in many cultures and is depicted as a god emerging from an egg entwined with a serpent, the serpent is said to have squeezed the egg until it burst open.

 

 

I find it rather amazing that as a result of a Roman poet thinking differently to the ancient Greeks, the meaning of the word chaos as we know it  today: a complete mess, a jumble, bedlam, disorder, a state of pandemonium, is a far cry from its original meaning of empty space.

 

 

Did you know, until John Milton wrote his remarkable epic poem, ‘Paradise Lost’, in 1667, the word pandemonium did not exist?

Milton took two ancient Greek words; pan, meaning all, and demon – evil spirits, spliced them together and coined the word pandemonium, all the evil spirits!

 

Related links:

The Word Panic Originates From the Greek God Pan