Chaos

Chaos is the first thing that comes into being in Hesiod’s Theogony, before Earth, Tartarus and Eros. The name comes from the Greek verb meaning “to gape”, and Chaos is best understood as a gap or chasm, the empty space from which the earliest powers of the universe emerge. From Chaos came Erebus and Night, and through them Aether and Day.

What is Chaos?

Hesiod says that first of all Chaos came to be, and next broad-breasted Earth, the firm seat of all the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and misty Tartarus in the depths of the wide-wayed earth, and Eros, the fairest of the deathless gods (Theogony 116–122). The word is neuter in Greek, and Hesiod gives it no person, no shape and no myth. The statement is only that it existed first.

Chaos as a Dwelling Place

Elsewhere in the poem Chaos seems to be a place, not only an origin. When Zeus strikes the Titans with his thunderbolts, a marvellous heat seizes Chaos (Theogony 700). After their defeat the Titans are bound beneath the earth, and Hesiod places them beyond gloomy Chaos (Theogony 813–814). The poet also describes, near Tartarus, a great chasm (chasma), where lie the sources and limits of dark earth, Tartarus, the sea and the starry sky; the word comes from the same root as Chaos (Theogony 736–745). Chaos, Earth, Tartarus and Eros are the first four to appear, and Earth soon bears Uranus, the Sky, to cover her (Theogony 126–128).

Chaos as the First Progenitor

Chaos the Beginning of All

Of the four first powers, Hesiod makes only two the offspring of Chaos: from Chaos came Erebus and black Night (Theogony 123). Gaea, Tartarus and Eros are not said to be born from Chaos; they simply came to be after it. Erebus (Darkness) and Night then joined in love, and Night bore Aether (the bright upper air) and Hemera (Day) to Erebus (Theogony 124–125). Night, in turn, is the mother of a long list of dark children, among them Doom, Death, Sleep and the tribe of Dreams (Theogony 211–212). Hesiod tells nothing more of Chaos itself, and no other myth in the poem is about it.

Chaos in Other Cosmologies

Later writers told the beginning of the world in other ways, changing the order of the first beings or making Chaos a parent.

Orpheus and Chaos

The poet Orpheus was credited with songs about the origin of the world. In the Argonautica of Apollonius, Orpheus sings to the Argonauts how earth, heaven and sea, once joined together in a single form, were separated by deadly strife, and how the stars, the mountains, the rivers and all living things then came to be (Apollonius, Argonautica 1.496–502). Apollonius does not call this original mixture Chaos by name.

Aristophanes and Chaos

In his comedy The Birds, Aristophanes gives the birds a cosmogony of their own, in which they are older than the gods. The chorus sings that at first there were Chaos, Night, dark Erebus and wide Tartarus; there was no earth, air or heaven. In the boundless lap of Erebus, black-winged Night laid a wind-egg, from which Eros, shining with golden wings, hatched as the seasons turned. Eros then mingled with winged Chaos in wide Tartarus and so hatched the race of birds, bringing it into the light; the race of the immortals did not exist until Eros mixed all things together, and from their mixing came heaven, ocean, earth and the whole blessed race of gods (Aristophanes, Birds 693–703). The passage is comic, and it uses the Hesiodic names to make the birds the oldest of creatures.

Chaos in Philosophy

In the Roman poet Ovid, Chaos is no longer a gap but the state of the world before it was ordered. Before sea, land and sky, the whole world had one face of nature, which men called Chaos, a rough, unordered mass, nothing but dead weight, in which the seeds of things, ill matched, were piled together in discord. Earth, sea and air were mixed in it; the land could not be stood on, the sea could not be swum, and the air had no light, so that cold fought with hot, wet with dry and soft with hard (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.5–20). A god, Ovid says, then ended the strife and separated the elements (Metamorphoses 1.21–25). Through this use of the word, Chaos came to mean confusion and disorder, which is the sense of the English word today. It is not the meaning of Hesiod’s Chaos.

Chaos Sources

Hesiod, Theogony 116–128, 211–212, 700, 736–745, 813–814; Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 1.496–502; Aristophanes, Birds 690–703; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.5–25.

See Also: Gaea, Tartarus, Eros, Erebus, Nyx, Aether, Hemera, Uranus