Erebus

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Erebus — Greek Erebos — is the primordial darkness of early Greek cosmogony: one of the first beings to come into existence, and also the name of the gloom that lies between the world of the living and the depths of the dead. The word does double duty, naming a god and naming a place, and the Greeks do not seem to have felt the need to keep the two apart.

The fullest early account is Hesiod’s Theogony, the eighth- or seventh-century poem that set the standard genealogy of the gods. There, out of Chaos — the first yawning gap — came Erebos and black Night, Nyx; and from the union of Erebos and Nyx were born Aither, the bright upper air, and Hemera, Day. The sequence is itself an argument: darkness comes first, and light is its child rather than its opposite. Later writers kept the broad shape while varying the details, and the Roman poets carried the name into Latin, where Erebus likewise served as both a deity and a region of the underworld.

As a place, Erebus is the threshold dark — the shadowed passage the dead enter on the way down, often used loosely as a name for the underworld as a whole. Homer sends souls there; in everyday Greek usage the word could stand for the murk below without much theological precision behind it. Unlike the Olympians, Erebos had no temples, no festivals, and no body of myth in which he acts. He is a figure of cosmogony and poetry rather than of cult: invoked to explain where things came from, not worshipped as a power to be petitioned.

That thinness is itself worth noting. Greek thought repeatedly placed something formless and dark at the origin — Chaos, Night, Erebos — and then derived the ordered, lit world from it by descent. Whether these primordial figures were ever the objects of genuine belief, or were always closer to the apparatus a poet needed to begin a story, is a question the sources do not settle; they read as cosmology told in the only vocabulary available, which was the vocabulary of persons and parentage. What survives is consistent on the essential point. Before the gods who ruled and the world they ruled, the early Greeks placed the dark, and gave it a name.

→ Related: Iapetos · Hyperion