The Greek word for ‘everything that is the case’, what we could call ‘the universe’, is COSMOS. And at the moment – although ‘moment’ is a time word and makes no sense just now (neither does the phrase ‘just now’) – at the moment, Cosmos is Chaos and only Chaos because Chaos is the only thing that is the case. A stretching, a tuning up of the orchestra …
But things are about to change very quickly.
The First Order
From formless Chaos sprang two creations: EREBUS and NYX. Erebus, he was darkness, and Nyx, she was night. They coupled at once and the flashing fruits of their union were HEMERA, day, and AETHER, light.
At the same time – because everything must happen simultaneously until Time is there to separate events – Chaos brought forth two more entities: GAIA, the earth, and TARTARUS, the depths and caves beneath the earth.
I can guess what you might be thinking. These creations sound charming enough – Day, Night, Light, Depths and Caves. But these were not gods and goddesses, they were not even personalities. And it may have struck you also that since there was no time there could be no dramatic narrative, no stories; for stories depend on Once Upon a Time and What Happened Next.
You would be right to think this. What first emerged from Chaos were primal, elemental principles that were devoid of any real colour, character or interest. These were the PRIMORDIAL DEITIES, the First Order of divine beings from whom all the gods, heroes and monsters of Greek myth spring. They brooded over and lay beneath everything … waiting.
The silent emptiness of this world was filled when Gaia bore two sons all on her own.fn1 The first was PONTUS, the sea, and the second was OURANOS, the sky – better known to us as Uranus, the sound of whose name has ever been the cause of great delight to children from nine to ninety. Hemera and Aether bred too, and from their union came THALASSA, the female counterpart of Pontus the sea.
Ouranos, who preferred to pronounce himself Ooranoss, was the sky and the heavens in the way that – at the very beginning – the primordial deities always were the things they represented and ruled over.fn2 You could say that Gaia was the earth of hills, valleys, caves and mountains yet capable of gathering herself into a form that could walk and talk. The clouds of Ouranos the sky rolled and seethed above her but they too could coalesce into a shape we might recognize. It was so early on in the life of everything. Very little was settled.
The Second Order
Ouranos the sky covered his mother Gaia the earth everywhere. He covered Gaia in both senses: he covered her as the sky still covers the earth to this day and he covered her as a stallion covers a mare. When he did so, something remarkable happened. Time began.
Something else began too – what shall we call it? Personality? Drama? Individuality? Character, with all its flaws and failings, fashions and passions, schemes and dreams. Meaning began, you might say. The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky. I will leave such speculation to those better qualified, but it was nevertheless a great moment. In the creation of and conjoining with Ouranos, her son and now her husband, Gaia unwound the ribbon of life that runs all the way to human history and our own very selves, yours and mine.
Right from the start, the union of Ouranos and Gaia was gratifyingly productive. Twelve robust, healthy children came first – six male, six female. The males were OCEANUS, COEUS, CRIUS, HYPERION, IAPETUS and KRONOS. The females, THEIA, THEMIS, MNEMOSYNE, PHOEBE, TETHYS and RHEA. These twelve were destined to become the Second Order of divine beings, earning themselves a legendary name.
And somewhere, as Time crept into being the clock began, the clock of cosmic history that still ticks today. Perhaps one of these newborns was responsible, we can look into that later.
Not content with these twelve strong beautiful brothers and sisters, Ouranos and Gaia gave the world yet more progeny – two distinctive, but distinctly not beautiful, sets of triplets. The three CYCLOPES came first, one-eyed giants who gave their father sky a whole new range of expressions and modulations. The eldest cyclops was called BRONTES, thunder,fn1 next came STEROPES, the lightning, and then ARGES, brightness. Ouranos could fill the heavens with flashes of lightning and crashing thunder. He gloried in the noise and spectacle. But the second set of triplets Gaia bore sent even greater shudders through him and all who saw them.
Perhaps it is kindest to say that they were a mutational experiment never to be repeated, a genetic dead end. For these newborns – the HECATONCHIRESfn2 – each had fifty heads and a hundred hands and were as hideous, fierce, violent and powerful as anything that had yet been released into being. Their names were COTTUS the furious, GYGES the long-limbed and AEGAEON the sea goat, sometimes also called BRIAREOS the vigorous one. Gaia loved them. Ouranos was revolted by them. Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.
Filled with disgust, he cursed them: ‘For offending my eyes, you shall never see light again!’ As he roared these furious words, he pushed them and the Cyclopes back into Gaia’s womb.
Gaia’s Revenge
We have good cause to wonder here what ‘he pushed them into Gaia’s womb’ really means. Some people have taken it to indicate that he buried the Hecatonchires in the earth. Divine identity at this early time was fluid, how much a god was a person and how much an attribute is hard to determine. There were no capital letters then. Gaia the Earth Mother was the same as gaia, the earth itself, just as ouranos, the sky, and Ouranos the Sky Father were one and the same.
What is certain is that in reacting like this to the three Hecatonchires, his own children, and in treating his wife with such abominable cruelty, Ouranos was committing the first crime. An elemental crime that would not go unpunished.
Gaia’s agony was unbearable and inside her, alongside the trio of writhing, flailing three-hundred-handed clawing and a hundred-and-fifty-headed butting Hecatonchires, there sprang up a hatred, a most terrible and implacable hatred against Ouranos, the son she had borne and the husband with whom she had given birth to a new generation. And, like ivy twisting round a tree, there grew a plan of revenge.
The piercing pain of the Hecatonchires still gnawing at her, Gaia visited Othrys, a great mountain that looks down over what we now call the central Greek region of Phthiotis. From its peak you can see the plain of Magnesia reaching down to the blue waters of the western Aegean as they curl round the Malian Gulf and embrace the sporadic scattering of islands called the Sporades. But Gaia was consumed with too much pain and too much fury to enjoy one of the world’s most charming views. On the summit of Mount Othrys she set to work fashioning a most unusual and terrible artefact from its rock. For nine days and nights she laboured until she had produced an object which she then hid in the cleft of the mountain.
Next she took herself off to visit her twelve beautiful, strong children.
‘Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?’ she asked each in turn. ‘You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.’
Perhaps we imagine that Gaia – Mother Earth – is soft, warm, bountiful and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueller, harsher and more terrifying than even the wildest sea.