Chaos (cosmogony)

Depiction of the Christianized chaoskampf: statue of Archangel Michael slaying Satan represented as a dragon. Quis ut Deus? is inscribed on his shield.

Chaos
Children	Gaia, Tartarus, Erebus, Nyx and Eros[1]

Chaos (Greek χάος khaos) refers to the formless or void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos in creation myths, particularly Greek but also in related religions of the Ancient Near East. The motif of chaoskampf (German for struggle against chaos) is ubiquitous in these myths, depicting a battle of a culture hero deity with a chaos monster, often in the shape of a serpent or dragon. He is known as the god of darkness.

Terminology

Greek χάος means "gaping void, chasm, abyss", from the verb χαίνω "gape, be wide open, etc", from a PIE *ghen-, cognate to Old English geanian "to gape", whence English yawn.

Hesiod and the Pre-Socratics use the Greek term in the context of cosmogony. Hesiod's Chaos has often been interpreted as a moving, formless mass from which the cosmos and the gods originated, but Eric Voegelin sees it instead as creatio ex nihilo,^[2] much as in the Book of Genesis. The term tohu wa-bohu of Genesis 1:2 has been shown to refer to a state of non-being prior to creation rather than to a state of matter.^[3] The Septuagint makes no use of χάος in the context of creation, instead using the term for גיא "chasm, cleft" in Micha 1:6 and Zacharia 14:4.

Nevertheless, the term chaos has been adopted in religious studies as referring to the primordial state before creation, strictly combining two separate notions of (a) primordial waters or a primordial darkness from which a new order emerges and (b) a primordial state as a merging of opposites, such as heaven and earth, which must be separated by a creator deity in an act of cosmogony.^[4] In both cases, chaos refers to a notion of a primordial state which contains the cosmos in potentia but which needs to be formed by a demiurge before the world can begin its existence.

This model of a primordial state of matter has been opposed by the Church Fathers from the 2nd century, who posited a creation ex nihilo by an omnipotent God.^[5]

In modern biblical studies, the term chaos is commonly used in the context of the Torah and their cognate narratives in Ancient Near Eastern mythology more generally. Parallels between the Hebrew Genesis and the Babylonian Enuma Elish were established by H. Gunkel in 1910.^[6] Besides Genesis, other books of the Torah, especially a number of Psalms, some passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Book of Job are relevant.^[7]

Use of chaos in the derived sense of "complete disorder or confusion" first appears in Elizabethan Early Modern English, originally implying satirical exaggeration.^[8]

Chaoskampf

Examples of the chaoskampf in religions of the Ancient Near East include Baal's fight against Yamm in Ugaritic myth, Marduk against Tiamat in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, Tarhunt against Illuyanka in Hittite myth, Yahweh against Leviathan in the Hebrew Bible (particularly the Book of Job). The Near Eastern myth was adopted in Greek mythology, as reflected in the fight of Zeus against Typhon in Greek myth, etc.

The chaoskampf was also inherited by Christian belief, in the form of Saint George and the Dragon, Saint Michael and the Devil, and more abstractly in some aspects of the narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus in the gospels (Rudman 2003).

In the feminist Goddess movement, specifically in Merlin Stone's When God was a Woman (1976), the Chaoskampf as cosmological metaphor is associated with the supposed rise of institutionalised warfare and patriarchal power during the Early Bronze Age.

Greco-Roman tradition

In Greek cosmology, Chaos was the primordial state of matter from which the cosmos and the gods emerged. For Hesiod and the early Greek Olympian myth (8th century BC),^[9] Chaos was the 'vast and dark' void from which the first deity, Nyx emerged. Chaos was also personified in Greek mythology, as the first of the Protogenoi and the god of the air.

Primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality, particularly by philosophers such as Heraclitus. It was also probably what Aristotle had in mind when he developed the concept of Prima Materia in his attempt to combine Platonism with the Presocraticism and Naturalism.

Ovid (1st century BC), in his Metamorphoses, described Chaos as "a rude and undeveloped mass, that nothing made except a ponderous weight; and all discordant elements confused, were there congested in a shapeless heap".^[10]

5th-century Orphic cosmogony had a "Womb of Darkness" in which the Wind lay a Cosmic Egg whence Eros was hatched, who set the universe in motion.

Alchemy

The Greco-Roman tradition of Prima Materia, notably including 5th to 6th century

Orphic cosmogony, was merged with biblical notions (Tehom) in Christian belief and inherited by alchemy and Renaissance magic.

The Cosmic Egg of Orphism was taken as the raw material for the alchemical Opus Magnum in early Greek alchemy. The first stage of the process of producing the Lapis Philosophorum, i.e. nigredo, was identified with chaos. Because of association with the creation in Genesis, where "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Gen. 1:2), Chaos was further identified with the element Water.

Alchemy in the middle ages and renaissance

Raimundus Lullus (1232–1315) wrote a Liber Chaos in which he identifies Chaos as the primal form or matter created by God.

Swiss alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) uses chaos synonymously with element (because the primeval chaos is imagined as a formless congestion of all elements). Paracelsus thus identifies Earth as "the chaos of the gnomi", i.e. the element of the gnomes, through which these spirits move unobstructed as fish do through water, or birds through air.^[11]

An alchemical treatise by Heinrich Khunrath, printed in Frankfurt in 1708, was entitled Chaos.^[12] The 1708 Introduction to the treatise states that the treatise was written in 1597 in Magdeburg, in the author's 23rd year of practicing alchemy.^[13] The treatise purports to quote Paracelsus on the point that "The light of the soul, by the will of the Triune God, made all earthly things appear from the primal Chaos".^[14]

Martin Ruland in his 1612 Lexicon Alchemiae states "A crude mixture of matter or another name for Materia Prima is Chaos, as it is in the Beginning."

The term gas in chemistry was coined in the 17th century directly based on the Paracelsian notion of chaos. The inventor of the word, Dutch chemist J. B. Van Helmont (1577–1644) the g in gas is due to the Dutch pronunciation of this letter as a spirant, also employed to pronounce Greek χ.^[15]

References

• Clifford, Richard J, Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly (2007).
• Rudman, Dominic, The crucifixion as Chaoskampf: A new reading of the passion narrative in the synoptic gospels = La crucifixion comme Chaoskampf: une nouvelle lecture du récit de la Passion dans les évangiles synoptiques, Biblica 84, 2003, 102-107.
• Nick Wyatt, Arms and the King: The Earliest Allusions to the Chaoskampf Motif and their Implications for the Interpretation of the Ugaritic and Biblical Traditions (1998), republished in There's such divinity doth hedge a king: selected essays of Nicolas Wyatt on royal ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament literature, Society for Old Testament Study monographs, Ashgate Publishing, 2005, ISBN 9780754653301, 151-190.
• John Day, God's conflict with the dragon and the sea: echoes of a Canaanite myth in the Old Testament, Cambridge oriental publications no. 35, 1985, ISBN 9780521256001.

See also

• Greek primordial gods
• Ginnungagap
• Tohu wa bohu
• Hundun
• creatio ex nihilo