Chaos
In Greek mythology, Chaos or Khaos is the primeval state of existence from which
the first gods appeared. In other words, the dark void of space. 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", 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".
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 Gods), 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), and Erebus (the darkness of
the Underworld). Thus, at the very start of his story, Hesiod establishes the
deities related to each element known to man, beginning with the primordial
elements: the Earth, the starry Sky, the Sea.
Theogonia presents two ways to come to life: division (Gaia, Nyx) and mating.
After Gaia, almost all deities brought to life by division are negative concepts
(Death, Distress, Sarcasm, Deception, and so on) and for the most part are
produced by the goddess Nyx. From this point on is set the model for
reproduction, from the action of two entities, male and female, as it appears in
the divine world in response to human society. So the first answer by the myth
to the question "What is the cause of this?" becomes "This is the father and
this is the mother".
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 universe as "without form and
void," a state similar to chaos.
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.
Chaos is also a character in John Milton's Paradise Lost.