Chaos Cosmogony

The Theogony opens with four primordial powers: “First of all chaos came into being, and then broad-breasted Earth, safe seat of all things for ever, and misty Tartarus in a recess of broad-pathed earth, and Eros” (Hesiod, Theogony, cited in Seaford 2004). The Greek chaos is “a dark and gloomy chasm”; the earliest state is envisaged as undifferentiated, whether as a dark chasm or as sky and earth forming “one shape” (Seaford 2004).

The sequence is interpretable as a structure rather than a chronology: undifferentiated ground, the emergence of foundation (Gaia), the place of loss (Tartarus), and the principle of desire (Eros) that arises between what has been sundered. Kerényi notes that the philosophical tradition retains Eros as a cosmogonic power: “As in Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods, the more content a figure has and the more he encompasses the cosmos and contains the world …, the higher he stands” (Kerényi 1944). The Eros of the Theogony becomes the daimonic Eros of Plato’s Symposium.

The cosmogony is also a template. Parmenides and the Milesians, in Seaford’s reading, inherit from Hesiod and Orphic theogony the idea of a cosmos that emerges from undifferentiated unity — though the Milesians “depersonalise” the myth and render it in the vocabulary of physis (Seaford 2004). The Hesiodic cosmogony is thus the mythic stratum from which pre-Socratic cosmology differentiates.

Relationships

• theogony
• succession-myth
• eros
• gaia-as-foundation

Primary sources

• theogony (Hesiod, c. 700 BCE)
• seaford-money-early-greek-mind (Seaford 2004)
• kernyi-hermes-guide-souls (Kerényi 1944)