The Greek Creation Myth: Chaos, Gaia, Ouranos and Eros

In the best-known Greek creation myth, told by the poet Hesiod around 700 BCE, the world began not with a creator but with Chaos, a yawning gap, after which came Gaia (Earth), Tartarus and Eros. Earth bore Ouranos (Sky), and from their union came the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers, until the youngest Titan, Kronos, castrated his father and separated sky from earth. The Greeks told other versions too, beginning with Ocean, with Night or with a cosmic egg, and all of them describe the universe as a family whose generations lead, through violence, to the rule of Zeus.

Chaos and the First Powers in Hesiod's Theogony§

The Theogony ("Birth of the Gods"), a poem of about a thousand hexameter lines usually dated to around 700 BCE, is the earliest surviving Greek account of the beginning of the world. After an invocation of the Muses, who met Hesiod as he herded sheep on Mount Helicon, the poet asks them what came first. Their answer, in Hugh Evelyn-White's public-domain translation of 1914, begins: "Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth."

The word chaos is related to the verb chainein, "to gape". Hesiod's Chaos is an opening or void, perhaps the space between earth and sky or the gulf beneath the earth, not a soup of jumbled elements. It simply "came to be"; Hesiod does not say from what or by whose will.

After Chaos came three further powers. Gaia, broad-breasted Earth, is the firm seat of everything that follows. Tartarus is the misty pit in the depths of the earth, later the prison of defeated gods. Eros, the fairest of the immortals, is less a god of romance here than the force of desire that makes generation possible. From Chaos itself came Erebus, the darkness of the underworld, and black Nyx, Night; Night lay with Erebus and bore Aither, the bright upper air, and Hemera, Day. Light is thus born from darkness, a pattern that recurs throughout Greek cosmogony.

Gaia, Ouranos and the Children of Earth§

Gaia next brought forth, without a partner, starry Ouranos (Sky), "equal to herself", to cover her on every side and to be a home for the gods. She also bore the high Mountains (Ourea), haunts of the nymphs, and Pontus, the barren sea. Only then did Earth take Sky as her mate.

Their children were the twelve Titans: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys and, youngest and most terrible, "crooked-counselling" Kronos, who hated his lusty father. Gaia also bore the three Cyclopes, Brontes, Steropes and Arges ("Thunder", "Lightning" and "Bright"), one-eyed smiths who would later forge Zeus's thunderbolt, and the three Hundred-Handers (Hekatoncheires), Kottos, Briareos and Gyges, each with a hundred arms and fifty heads.

Ouranos hated these children from the start. As each was born he hid it away in the hollows of Gaia and would not let it come up into the light, while vast Earth groaned within. The image is physical: Sky lies so close upon Earth that nothing she conceives can emerge, and the myth that follows explains how the sky came to stand high above the ground.

The Castration of Ouranos and the Birth of Aphrodite§

In her distress Gaia created grey adamant, made a great jagged sickle and urged her children to punish their father. All were afraid except Kronos. Gaia hid him in ambush, and when Ouranos came at nightfall, longing for love, and spread himself over the earth, Kronos stretched out from his hiding place, seized his father and cut off his genitals, throwing them behind him.

Nothing in the myth is wasted. The drops of blood that fell on Earth engendered the Erinyes (Furies), avengers of crimes against kin, the armoured Giants, and the ash-tree nymphs called Meliai. The genitals fell into the sea and drifted for a long time; around them white foam (aphros) gathered, and in it a maiden grew. She came first to Cythera and then to sea-girt Cyprus, where she stepped ashore and grass sprang up beneath her feet. She was Aphrodite, accompanied from her birth by Eros and Himeros (Longing). Homer, by contrast, makes Aphrodite the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and the two genealogies coexisted; Plato's Symposium later turned them into two Aphrodites, a "Heavenly" and a "Common" one.

Ouranos, Hesiod says, called his children Titans in reproach, punning on titainein, "to strain" (they had strained to do a great deed), and on tisis, "vengeance", which would come upon them afterwards. The power that Kronos seized, and its loss in the great war with Zeus and the Olympians, are the subject of the Titans and the Titanomachy.

The Children of Night, Sea and Ocean§

While the Titans were being born, the older powers were filling the world with their own lines. Nyx, without a partner, bore abstract and often grim forces: Doom (Moros), Fate (Ker), Death (Thanatos), Sleep (Hypnos) and the tribe of Dreams; Blame (Momus) and Woe (Oizys); the Hesperides who guard golden apples beyond Ocean; the Fates (Moirai) and the death-spirits (Keres); Nemesis, Deceit, Friendship, Old Age and hard-hearted Eris, Strife. Eris in turn bore Toil, Famine, Battles, Quarrels and Oath, so that a map of human misfortune is built into the structure of the cosmos.

Pontus, the sea, fathered Nereus, the truthful old man of the sea, and with Gaia bore Thaumas, Phorcys, Ceto and Eurybia. Nereus became the father of the fifty Nereids, among them Thetis and Amphitrite, while Phorcys and Ceto produced a line of monsters, including the Graiai and the Gorgons. The Titans Oceanus and Tethys became parents of all the rivers and of three thousand Oceanid nymphs; Hyperion and Theia produced Helios (Sun), Selene (Moon) and Eos (Dawn); Coeus and Phoebe were the parents of Leto, future mother of Apollo and Artemis, and of Asteria, whose daughter Hecate receives a remarkable hymn of praise in the middle of the Theogony.

Other Greek Creation Stories§

Hesiod's account was influential but never authoritative. In Homer's Iliad (Book 14), Hera calls Oceanus the "origin of the gods" and Tethys their mother, which some ancient readers took as evidence that Homer placed water at the beginning of all things, an idea that Thales of Miletus, the first Greek philosopher, was said to have turned into a physical theory. The same book mentions that even Zeus hesitated to anger swift Night.

Night stands first in several Orphic cosmogonies, poems attributed to the legendary singer Orpheus. The Derveni papyrus, a charred roll found near Thessaloniki in 1962 and usually dated to the fourth century BCE, contains a commentary on an Orphic theogony in which Night, Ouranos and Kronos precede Zeus, and Zeus swallows a primeval power in order to recreate the world from within himself. The later Orphic Rhapsodies, known mainly through Neoplatonist quotations, begin with Chronos (Time), from whom come Aither and Chaos and a shining egg; from the egg bursts Phanes, also called Protogonos ("First-born"), a radiant, winged and bisexual creator. These ideas are discussed further in Orphism and the Orphic gold tablets.

Aristophanes parodied such poems in his Birds (414 BCE), where Night lays a wind-egg from which golden-winged Eros springs. In the sixth century BCE Pherecydes of Syros wrote a prose theogony in which Zas (Zeus), Chronos and Chthonie existed always, and Chthonie became Ge (Earth) when Zas gave her an embroidered robe as a wedding gift. The poet Apollonius of Rhodes, in the third century BCE, has Orpheus sing of Ophion and Eurynome, who ruled from Olympus before Kronos and Rhea threw them down. The elaborate "Pelasgian creation myth" built around Eurynome in Robert Graves's The Greek Myths (1955) is Graves's own reconstruction, not an ancient text.

The Roman poet Ovid gave the West its most familiar picture. At the opening of the Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE), Chaos is "a rough and unordered mass" (rudis indigestaque moles) of warring elements, which "a god, or kindlier nature" separated into earth, sea and sky. This philosophical version, shaped by Stoic thought and by the craftsman god of Plato's Timaeus (compare the Demiurge), is the source of the modern meaning of "chaos" as disorder. Human beings, by contrast, have no single origin story; see Prometheus and Pandora.

Near Eastern Parallels and the Meaning of the Myth§

Since the decipherment of Hittite tablets from Hattusa in the twentieth century, scholars have recognised that Hesiod's succession myth has close relatives in the ancient Near East. In the Hurrian-Hittite Kumarbi cycle (often called the "Song of Kumarbi" or "Kingship in Heaven", preserved in copies of the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BCE), kingship passes from Alalu to Anu (Sky) to Kumarbi, who bites off Anu's genitals and becomes pregnant with gods, including the storm god Teshub, who eventually takes power, just as Zeus succeeds Kronos. The Babylonian Enuma Elish likewise moves from primeval waters through generations of gods to the kingship of a young storm-warrior, Marduk. The Phoenician history attributed to Sanchuniathon and preserved by Philo of Byblos even includes a castration of Sky. Scholars such as M. L. West have argued that these stories reached Greece through contacts in the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps during the eighth century BCE, though the routes remain debated.

Within Greek culture the myth sets out the order of the world as a genealogy, moving from the undifferentiated towards ever more defined beings and finally to the just rule of Zeus. It is also a story of fathers and sons, a cycle of overthrow that ends only when Zeus learns to prevent it. Ancient philosophers read it as allegory: the Stoics took Kronos as chronos, Time devouring his children, and Neoplatonists saw the generations of gods as stages in the unfolding of being from the One.

Frequently asked questions§

What was there before Chaos in Greek mythology?§

Hesiod does not say; Chaos simply "came to be" first. Other Greek traditions put Ocean, Night, Time or an eternal Zeus at the beginning, so there was no single answer, and no Greek source describes creation out of absolute nothing.

Is the Gaia of myth the same as the "Gaia hypothesis"?§

Only by name. In the 1970s the scientist James Lovelock, on the suggestion of the novelist William Golding, borrowed the name of the Greek earth goddess for his theory that the Earth's living and non-living systems regulate one another. The ancient Gaia was a goddess of myth and cult, not a scientific model.

Who created human beings in Greek mythology?§

The Greeks had several answers. Hesiod describes successive races of people made by the gods; later writers such as Apollodorus and Ovid say that Prometheus shaped humans from earth and water; and the survivors of the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha, created a new people from stones.

Why did Kronos castrate Ouranos?§

Because Ouranos imprisoned his children inside Gaia, who could not bear the pain and asked them for help. Kronos alone agreed, and with the sickle Gaia had made he separated Sky from Earth, freeing his siblings and taking power himself.

Sources and further reading§

• Theogony — Hesiod, c. 700 BCE
• Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica — Hugh G. Evelyn-White (trans.), 1914
• Metamorphoses — Ovid, c. 8 CE
• Hesiod: Theogony, Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary — M. L. West, 1966
• The Orphic Poems — M. L. West, 1983
• The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth — M. L. West, 1997
• Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources — Timothy Gantz, 1993
• The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology — Robin Hard, 2004