Hera asked Hypnos to place Zeus into a deep sleep, as she could plot against him. But perhaps, one of the most famous stories featuring Nyx involves one of her children. There are those who believe when Cronus castrated his father, he did so in the cover of night and thus, the goddess protected him. Regardless of how she was viewed, Nyx still doesn’t feature in many stories. However, Nyx was never really replaced throughout Greek mythology, and this could be because the ancient Greeks considered her to be extremely powerful and, as a result, held her in high regard. This story did change when Eos became the goddess of dawn, and Helios and Apollo would replace the roles of Aether and Hemera. And the ancient Greeks likely used Nyx and her children’s story as one of the first explanations of the night and day cycle. The cycle meant that Nyx wouldn’t spend much time off her daughter as they were never in the same place for very long. The following morning, Hemera, just as her parents had done previously, would emerge from Tartarus and sweep away the darkness, leaving her mother and father to return. A common belief was that during the day, both Nyx and Erebus would lay dormant in the darkest crevices of Tartarus, and each night they would emerge, hand-in-hand together, as they blocked the light that was emitted by Aether, bringing darkness and in turn the night to the world. Nyx and many of the other primordial deities were believed to reside in the depths of Tartarus. Nyx is one of the oldest deities in Greek mythology, which meant that she had numerous children, including Thanatos, the god of death Hypnos, the god of sleep Moros, the god of doom Eris, the goddess of strife Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution the Keres, bringer of violence and death the Oneiroi, the bringers of Dreams and in some cases, she was even mother to the Moirai, the three goddesses of fate. In her physical form, she was either shown as being an extremely beautiful woman, dressed in black surrounded by a dark mist, sometimes ride in a chariot or as a winged goddess with a halo made from a dark cloud. Nyx, in her literal form, would be the night that surrounds us. As many of them are thought to represent abstract or specific concepts. The exact opposite to their parents, night and darkness.ĭepictions of Nyx, like many of the other primordial deities, can vary drastically. Aether being light, and Hemera being day. This would, however, eventually change when Nyx and Erebus would partner together they produced Aether and Hemera. Erebus himself, after all, was the personification of darkness and shadows. With Nyx and Erebus being two of the earliest primordial deities, we can assume that the world was shrouded in darkness. She and her siblings, Gaia, Tartarus and Erebus, were amongst the four first deities born from Chaos that would shape the world.
Nyx was born at a time when the world as we know it didn’t exist. Still, we’ll be focusing on her depiction there’s a daughter of Chaos. There are different stories and versions of Greek mythology where Nyx is considered the first primordial deity assumed in a creator’s role that we generally associated with Chaos. Today, we’ll be looking at what many consider to be her first child, Nyx, the goddess of night. Every god and goddess that features in Greek mythology has somewhat descended from Chaos. Just an empty void, then came Chaos, the first of all of the primordial deities to appear in the Greek universe.
0 kommentar(er)
