Chaos

In the beginning, before heaven and earth were created, there existed a primeval egg, a "rude and undigested mass," an inert weight in which "the discordant atoms of things inharmonious were heaped together:" heat and cold, land, sea and air, being mingled in wild confusion. This primordial mass of heterogeneous matters was known to Hesiod and Ovid and all the ancients under the name of "Chaos," a word derived from the Sanscrit root "Cha," to yawn, to gape wide open, whence, in English, we have the word "chasm." Thus in the Graeco-Roman Chaos we find the same conception as in the Chaldean Tiamat, the Hebrew Tehom, the Scandinavian Ginungagap, viz., an immeasurable abyss, as the scene of the subsequent Divine work of creation.

When it is known that all ancient theogonies were derived from that part of the Ancient Word which is preserved in the opening chapters of Genesis, and when it is further known that the story of Creation in that Word deals not with the natural conformation of the visible heaven and the habitable earth, but with the spiritual creation, that is, the regeneration of man, and, in the internal historical sense, with the establishment of the first Church of God among men, it will be easily recognized that by "Chaos" is meant the original state of man, before his regeneration; historically it depicts the crude and almost animal condition of the first men created upon earth, the Pre-adamites, who, though furnished by the Creator with the seeds of all possible human development, yet, in the beginning, like all babes, were in a purely corporeal and sensual state, of themselves unable to distinguish or discriminate between good and evil, truth and falsity.

"To this discord God and bounteous nature put an end." What "God" was this who existed before all the known gods of the Pantheon? To this question Ovid answers, '' the Artificer of all things," "whoever of the gods He was,"—in other words, the one and only real God who had become '' the unknown God'' in the declining days of the Ancient Church. He it was who first of all brought out of Chaos the '' ample-bosomed earth,'' personified as "Gaea, the great mother of gods and men, which was expanded wide above the "gloomy Tartarus." Next out of Chaos "Erebus" and "Nyx," evening and night, were born.

Gaea, the earth, signifies the external man in general. Tartarus is the sensual proprium, Erebus and Nyx are the "darkness" and "thick darkness" reigning in that proprium. Thus the Theogony repeats in substance, and very nearly in form, the opening verses of the Ancient Word: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was empty and void, and thick darkness was upon the faces of the abyss."

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