Hesiod goes on to note that the two first things born from chaos were Erebus (darkness) and Nyx (night), followed by Day and Aether. In Greek, this word is sometimes translated as “chasm” or “gap”, and calls to mind the notion of a formless void. The cosmogony of Hesiod and the Pre-Socratics identifies chaos as the genesis from which both the world and the gods emerge.
In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. The following post is from a paper written for my 2016 course in New Religious Movements.
