Chaos: Primordial Void at the Start of Creation

The Story of Chaos

Chaos was the very first thing to exist, according to Hesiod's account of creation. Before the earth, the sky or any god, there was only Chaos. The Greek word means a gap or chasm, a vast, dark, empty space.

From Chaos came the first beings of the world. Erebus, the darkness, and Nyx, the night, were born from it. Soon after appeared Gaia, the broad earth, along with Tartarus, the deep pit, and Eros, the power of desire.

Nyx and Erebus then had children of their own, Aether, the bright upper air, and Hemera, the day. In this way light and darkness, day and night, earth and sky slowly took shape out of the original emptiness. Everything else in Greek myth, from the Titans to the Olympians, grew from these first steps.

Chaos itself has no clear form or gender in most ancient sources. It was not imagined as a person with a story, but as a vast open space. In the war between Zeus and the Titans, Hesiod says the heat of the thunderbolts reached even Chaos, showing how deep and far away it was thought to be.

Later writers gave Chaos new meanings. The Roman poet Ovid described it as a shapeless mass of jumbled elements, which led to the modern sense of chaos as disorder and confusion. For the early Greeks, though, Chaos was simply the beginning, the great gap from which all things came.