Saleem Hallal Ms.

Kallstrom September 28, 2011 English 10

Chaos

In Greek mythology, there was nothing but Chaos in the beginning: Chaos was autogenic. Chaos is called an elemental force, which is force made of itself alone and not composed of anything else. It exists from the beginning of the universe. To coin a phrase, you could say, "in the beginning, there was Chaos." Period. The idea of having the principle of Chaos at the beginning of the universe is like the New Testament idea that in the beginning was "The Word". Out of Chaos spun out other elemental forces or principles, like Love, Earth, and Sky, and in a later generation, the Titans. Read about this in: Primeval Goddess of air, Chaos is believed to be one of the first beings to exist in the universe. Chaos is not really depicted as having a personality or physical form.[1] Chaos is the lower atmosphere which surrounded the earth. Her name Khaos means the gap, or the space between heaven and Earth.[2] In Greek mythology, Chaos or Khaos is the primeval state of existence from which the first gods appeared. In other words, the dark void of space. It is made from a mixture of what the Ancient Greeks considered the four elements: earth, air, water and fire. For example, when a log is burned, the flames were attributed to the fire in it, the smoke the air in it, the water and grease that come from it were supposed to be the water, and the ashes left over were the earth. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, described Chaos as "rather a crude and indigested mass, a lifeless lump, unfashioned and unframed, of jarring seeds and justly Chaos named". From that, its meaning evolved into the modern familiar "complete disorder". Chaos features three main characteristics:

it is a bottomless gulf where anything falls endlessly. This radically contrasts with the Earth that emerges from it to offer a stable ground. it is a place without any possible orientation, where anything falls in every direction; it is a space that separates, that divides: after the Earth and the Sky parted, Chaos remains between both of them.

Chaos - in one ancient Greek myth of creation, the dark, silent abyss from which all things came into existence. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, Chaos generated the solid mass of Earth, from which arose the starry, cloud-filled Heaven. Mother Earth and Father Heaven, personified respectively as Gaea and her offspring Uranus, were the parents of the Titans. In a later theory, Chaos is the formless matter from which the cosmos, or harmonious order, was created.