Hesiodic Chaos

The theogony begins: Chaos came to be first. Χάος is not disorder in the modern sense; it is the yawning gap, the opening, the gaping space that precedes all differentiation. From Chaos come Erebos and Night; alongside Chaos arise Gaia (Earth), Tartaros, and Eros, the four primordial powers that constitute the cosmogonic condition. Vernant frames the mythic structure: “the myth recounts the adventures of divine figures… Zeus fights for sovereignty against Typhon, the dragon with a thousand voices, the power of confusion and disorder” — but behind all such conflict stands the original gap out of which differentiation first arose (Vernant 1983).

For the Seba tradition, Hesiodic Chaos stands beside the tehom of Genesis 1:2, the apeiron of Anaximander, and the prima materia of alchemy as an archaic name for the condition from which the articulated world emerges. Vernant’s observation that the early Milesian philosophers — Anaximander in particular — modeled their cosmogonies on “embryological terms that simultaneously evoke and rationalize the themes of sexual generation” traces a direct line from Hesiod to pre-Socratic natural philosophy (Vernant 1982). The philosophical cosmogonies did not break from the theological; they metabolized it.

For the depth tradition, the yawning gap is the primordial name for what Jung will call the unus mundus in its undifferentiated aspect — the condition of pre-distinction out of which psychic life, like cosmic life, emerges through articulation.

Relationships

• chaos-cosmogony
• separation-of-the-world-parents
• theogony
• prima-materia
• apeiron

Primary sources

• theogony (Hesiod)
• Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (Vernant 1983)
• The Origins of Greek Thought (Vernant 1982)