Chaos

Chaos (χάος) is, in the Greek cosmogonies, the first thing of all — not 'disorder' in our modern sense, but a vast yawning gap or void, from a root meaning 'to gape' or 'to yawn' (akin to 'chasm'). It is the formless opening out of which the ordered world arises.

The birth of the world

In Hesiod's Theogony — among the texts this library preserves — 'first of all Chaos came to be', and after it broad-breasted Earth, and Eros; from Chaos issued Night and the dark, and the long genealogy of the gods unfolds. The Orphic theogonies tell kindred stories, setting at the beginning a primal void, or a cosmic egg from which all things hatch. Cosmogony — the tale of the world's coming-to-be — is the seed from which philosophical cosmology grew.

From chaos to cosmos

Greek thought is, in a sense, the long passage from chaos to kosmos — from the gaping void to the beautiful, ordered whole. Where myth had a formless beginning give birth to the gods, philosophy sought a rational first principle and an intelligible order; and Plato's Timaeus retells the old story in a new key, as a Demiurge who takes up the disordered, errant motion of the primordial stuff and persuades it into measure and form.