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Chapter One
The Origin of the Universe
What was there when there was not yet anything, when there was nothing? The Greeks answered that question with stories and myths.
At the very beginning, what existed first was the Void; the Greeks say Chaos. What is the Void? It is an emptiness, a dark emptiness where nothing is visible. A realm of falling, of vertigo and confusion -- endless, bottomless. That Void seizes us like the yawning of an immense gullet where everything is swallowed up by murky darkness. So at the start there is only that Void, a blind, black, boundless abyss.
Then Earth appears. The Greeks call it Gaia. Earth rises up in the very heart of the Void. And here it is: born after Chaos, and in some respects its opposite. Earth is not that realm of falling, dark and boundless and undefined; Earth has a distinct, separate, precise form. Against the confusion and shadowy vagueness of Chaos stand Gaia's sharpness, firmness, stability. On Earth everything is outlined, visible, solid. Gaia can be defined as the entity upon which the gods, men, and beasts can walk with confidence. It is the floor of the world.
The Depths of the Earth: The VoidThe world now has a floor, born out of the vast Void. At one end this floor rises upward as mountains; at the other it plunges downward as underground. That nether-earth stretches on forever, unbounded -- so that, in a way, what underlies Gaia, beneath the firm and solid ground, is still the abyss, Chaos. Earth arose out of the heart of the Voidbut still clings to it deep down. To the Greek mind this Chaos evokes a kind of impenetrable murk in which all frontiers are scrambled. At the bottommost reach of Earth there is still that original chaotic element.
Though Earth is quite visible, though it has a clear-cut form, and though anything born of the Earth may possess those same distinct edges and boundaries -- yet, in its depths, Earth remains akin to the Void. It is a Black Earth. The adjectives that describe Earth in the stories can be much like those that describe the Void. The Black Earth stretches between the low and the high; between on the one hand the darkness and the rootedness in the Void that its deep places embody, and on the other, the snowcapped mountains that Earth thrusts toward the sky, the shining mountains whose highest pinnacles reach up into that realm of the sky continually drenched in light.
In the house that is the cosmos, the Earth constitutes the foundation, but that is not its only function. It breeds and nourishes everything, except for certain entities, to be discussed later, that come from Chaos. Gaia is the universal mother: Forests, mountains, underground caves, ocean waters, vast sky -- all of them come from Gaia, Mother Earth. So first there was the abyss, the Void, an enormous gullet in the form of a lightless, boundless chasm; but later that Void gives onto a solid floor -- the Earth -- the Earth that leaps to the heights, descends to the depths.
After Chaos and Earth, third in the sequence comes what the Greeks called Eros and later called "Old Love" (pictures show him with white hair): This is primordial Love. Why this primordial Eros? Because back in those distant times, there was no masculine or feminine yet, no sexed or gendered beings. This original Eros is not the one who will appear later on, with the occurrence of men and women, males and females. From that point on, the problem will be to pair off opposite sexes, which necessarily calls for some desire on the part of each, some kind of consent.
So Chaos is a neuter term, not masculine. Gaia, Mother Earth, is obviously a feminine term. But whom can she love outside herself, since she is all alone with only Chaos? Eros, after Void and Earth the third entity to appear, is not the same figure who later presides over gendered lovemaking. The original Eros expresses a new thrust in the universe: In the same way that Earth emerged from Void, from out of Earth there springs what she contains within her own depths. What was in her, as part of her essence, comes forth and out: She gives birth to it with no need for sexual congress with anyone. What Earth delivers and reveals is precisely the thing that had dwelled darkly within her.
Earth first gives birth to a very important figure, Uranus -- Sky, and Starry Sky at that. Next she is delivered of Pontus, water -- all waters, and specifically those of the sea. And Earth conceived them without coupling with any other being. Through her own internal power, Earth develops an entity that already lay within her and that, the moment she expels it, becomes her double and her opposite. She produces Starry Sky equal to herself -- a replica just as solid, as substantial, and the same size as she is. Uranus then stretches out on her. Earth and Sky are two superimposed planes of the universe -- a floor and a ceiling, a bottom and a top -- and they cover each other completely.
Earth gives birth to Pontus, or Sea, and he thereupon completes her and insinuates himself inside her -- he sets her boundaries with his vast liquid expanses. Like Uranus, Sea also represents the opposite of Earth: Earth is solid, compact, nonporous -- things cannot blend into it -- whereas Sea is all liquidness, shapeless ungraspable fluidity: His waters mingle, undifferentiated and flowing together. Sea is bright at the surface, but in his deep reaches it is utterly dark -- and this links him, like Earth, to a chaotic strain.
Thus the world is constructed out of three primordial entities: Chaos, Gaia, Eros, plus two offspring of Earth: Uranus and Pontus -- Sky and Sea. All of them are natural powers and divinities at the same time: Gaia is both the earth we walk on and a goddess; Sea...
The Universe, the Gods, and Men. Copyright © by Jean-Pierre Vernant. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
