![]() In the most widely accepted tradition, Chaos did not have any parents: it either came into existence spontaneously or had always existed. Indeed, the Greek name “Chaos” is grammatically neuter (neither masculine nor feminine). Moreover, the fact that Chaos had several children does not necessarily indicate that it was female. In Hesiod, for example, Chaos “came to be,” whereas Ovid writes that, before anything else came into existence, Chaos simply “was.” Ĭhaos was almost always imagined as formless unlike many of the later Greek gods, it did not possess any human features. This more recent conception of Chaos went on to shape the English cognate “chaos,” which refers to a disordered mass rather than an abyss or chasm (like the original Greek name).Īncient traditions disagreed on the origins of Chaos: some saw it as having always existed, while others claimed that it was a created being. Were there congested in a shapeless heap. That nothing made except a ponderous weight Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poem composed in the early first century CE (some seven hundred years after Hesiod’s Theogony), describes Chaos as Much later, Chaos came to be seen as a mixture of the elements of all things. Even the location of Chaos is left vague, but several passages of the Theogony seem to locate it somewhere below the heavens and the earth but above Tartarus. Hesiod does not tell us anything more about Chaos or its attributes, but its name clearly implies a vast, gaping abyss, chasm, or void. The earliest reference to Chaos is found in Hesiod’s Theogony, where it is described simply as the first entity that came into existence. PronunciationĬhaos was sometimes used interchangeably with other Greek words or personifications for the atmosphere, especially Aēr (“Air”). The cognate English word “chaos,” which suggests a jumbled, disordered mass, represents something very different from the original Greek word. Cháos) is presumably derived from the Greek verbs χάσκω ( cháskō) and χαίνω ( chaínō), both meaning “gape, be wide open,” and both themselves related to the Proto-Indo-European * ǵʰeh₂n-, “gape.” The name of the primordial god Chaos is thus best translated into English as “abyss,” “chasm,” “gap,” or “void.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |