- For the state of disarray, see chaos.
In Greek mythology, Chaos or Khaos is the primordial state of existence from
which the first gods appeared. In other words, it is the dark void of space. It is made from a mixture of what the
Ancient Greeks considered the four elements:
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. In
Greek it is Χάος, which is usually pronounced similarly to "house" (Koiné) or "cows"
(Attic), but correctly in ancient Greek as ['kha.ɔs]; it means
"gaping void", from the verb χαίνω "gape, be wide open, etc", Proto-Indo-European *"ghen-", *"ghn-"; compare English "chasm" and "yawn", Old English geanian = "to gape".
Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, 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 features 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's Theogonia (The origin of the
titans), Chaos was the nothingness out of which the first objects of existence appeared. These first beings, described as
children of Chaos alone, were Gaia (the Earth), Tartarus (the Underworld), Nyx (the darkness of the night),
Erebus (the darkness of the Underworld), and Eros (sexual love).
From these beings and the first generation of beings created by them, Hesiod establishes the deities related to each element
known to early Greeks, beginning with the primordial elements: the Earth, the bright Sky
(Ouranos), and the Sea (Pontus).
Primal Chaos
In Ancient Greek cosmology, Chaos was the first thing to exist and the womb from which
everything emerged. For Hesiod and the Olympian mythos, Chaos was
the 'vast and dark' void from which the first deity, Gaia, emerged. In the
Pelasgian creation myth, Eurynome ('goddess of everything')
emerged from this Chaos and created the Cosmos from it[citation needed]. For Orphics, it was called the 'Womb of
Darkness' from which the Cosmic Egg that contained the Universe emerged. It is
sometimes conflated with 'Black Winged Night'.
The idea is also found in Mesopotamia and associated with Tiamat the 'Dragon' of Chaos, from whose dismembered body the world was formed.
Genesis refers to the earliest conditions of the Earth as "without form and void," a state
similar to chaos.[1]
Primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality, particularly by philosophers such as Heraclitus and those trained in Orphic schools. It was the opposite of Platonism. It was also probably what Aristotle had in mind when he
developed the concept of Prima Materia in his attempt to combine Platonism with the
Presocraticism and Naturalism.
It was a concept inherited by the theory of Alchemy.
References
- Ovid, Metamorphoses (I, 7)
- Hesiod, Theogony (116; 123-132)
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