The pit curved beneath Gaia in a semicircle. While Gaia was a place of life, Tartarus was a realm of death. He despised the Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires for their monstrous appearances and had them imprisoned in the one place Gaia could not reach them.īeneath the flat expanse of Gaia, another primordial being had taken shape. Uranus, however, was not a good father to his children. These were the first gods to be born from a union between two other beings rather than spontaneously. Together, Uranus and Gaia became the parents of the Titans, the first Cyclopes, and the Hecatonchires. She was portrayed as a protective maternal figure who would go to great lengths, including violence, to protect her children. Gaia also featured prominently in many myths. While she was never entirely separate from the earth, she could be shown in a more relatable way. She appeared in art as a female figure emerging from the ground. Gaia was also one of the only primordial gods to be routinely shown with an anthropomorphic form and a distinct personality. As the primordial goddess of the world, she was the mother of all living things that came to inhabit it. Gaia is often referred to as Mother Earth. The most well-known of the primordial gods were the first to have a physical presence. Their bodies twisted around one another, encircling the whole of creation and constantly in motion. While the primordial gods were incorporeal, Chronos and Ananke were sometimes depicted as snake-like beings. Time began to progress in an orderly, predictable pace and maintain a consistent course that did not skip ahead or loop back on itself. Ananke represented inevitability, compulsion, and necessity.Īnanke and Chronos became intertwined and order was brought to the universe. Its course was erratic and unpredictable.Īnother primordial being was sometimes said to have come into being at about the same time as Chronos. There could be a clear division, for example, between things that came before his birth and things that came after.Īccording to some accounts, however, when only Chronos existed there was no order or structure to time. Once Chronos emerged, the progression of time could begin. The emptiness that came before creation was both eternal and momentary. The first of these was Chronos.īefore the god of time came into being, there was no progression or movement possible. When Chaos was said to be the origins of the primordial gods, others were believed to have emerged from her. Birds, insects, and other flying creatures were her first mortal children. The name was still applied to the air, however.Īs the first goddess of air, Chaos was also the mother of the things that lived in it. Later versions of cosmology expanded this role to make Chaos the progenitor of all of the primordial gods. She represented both the invisible element of air and the thicker mists and fogs that sometimes filled it.Īs the first elemental goddess of air, Chaos was the mother of all of the gods of air and mist that came after her. Her domain was the air that surrounded the living world, once that world was created. She was the primordial goddess of the lower atmosphere. In earlier cosmology, Chaos was not the first part of all creation. The word chaos in Greek meant “chasm.” It was not originally applied to a confused mess of mass, but to an empty space. This view of Chaos only existed in later mythology, however. Chaos contained the first building blocks from which all of creation would spawn. The first primordial gods were said to have emerged from within this chaotic space. Usually described as feminine, Chaos was the swirling mixture of elemental mass that existed before anything else.
Most retellings of Greek cosmology begin with Chaos. Gaia was not simply the goddess of the earth, she was the earth itself. The primordial gods were elemental powers. Most people believed that the earliest of them emerged spontaneously and then gave rise to the others. The primordial gods were believed to be the first to come into existence. The successive generations of gods went from having broad domains to increasingly specialized ones, so it was logical that the universe began with the most broad domains of all. The Greeks applied the trends of the generations of gods in their mythology to this question. While the gods and goddesses people worshiped could be responsible for different domains, how those domains and their gods came to be was a puzzling question. Around the world and throughout history, religions have attempted to solve the mystery of how the universe was created.
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