Like an Abyss/Chasm, or something like an empty void? Or in a way can be similarly seen like the big bang where creation was a lump of mess that took time to form itself?
Does it have any ties with the sea (for the early people who created the myth)? (like Egyptian and Sumerian myth where things all began from the sea)
It is simply an abyss, a void, and more often than not, it is not even clear whether it should be considered a deity or merely an empty space.
Moreover, it is not always the first god to exist—in some theogonies, other gods precede it—and, in most cases, it is not the progenitor of all the gods either.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, the other primordial gods—Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros—seem to emerge independently.
Chaos is yawning gap of air, not a vacuum as ancients had no conception of it and it's not a lump of undifferentiated matter since etymologically it makes no sense, the actual lump of matter definition came latter. The closest example to it in comparative mythology is Ginnungagap, and like Ginnungagap there are two other contrasting types of regions on either side of it.
Above Chaos/South of Ginnungagap is Aether/Muspelheim, a region of light and warmth.
Below Chaos/North of Ginnungagap is Erebus/Niflheim, a region of darkness and cold.
It does have some connections to the sea in a sense since in the cosmology of the ancient greeks, Oceanus is shown as a parallel to Chaos both in location (In Hesiod, Zeus thunderbolt reaches as high as Aether, as low as Erebus and as far as Oceanus, symbolically Chaos) and as origin(In Homer, Oceanus is origin of all things).
In addition, turning to Ginnungagap, it too can be seen as a primordial sea, since the sparks from Muspelheim meet with the ice from Niflheim to melt into liquid that gives birth to the being Ymir, and Since Ymir must exist in Ginnungagap, Audumbla whose teats he sucks on licks out Buri from the ice, the frozen primordial sea. So all living things in Norse myth come from the Primordial sea Ginnungagap.
The word chaos means 'void' and is most likely related to the English word 'gaping'(litt. yawning) It must have been something like a gaping hole of empty
It's the Primordial Void/Abyss from which everything did not originate, but rather began.
Chaos is both the absence and presence of everything. It is the potential for anything to happen or come to pass—the state preceding the act of creation itself (which is instead embodied by Gaia and the other Protogenoi).
Every period had its own interpretations. From water to air to void and so on. The myths were around before philosophers tried to explain cosmology and write it down.
56
u/PlanNo1793 23h ago
It is simply an abyss, a void, and more often than not, it is not even clear whether it should be considered a deity or merely an empty space. Moreover, it is not always the first god to exist—in some theogonies, other gods precede it—and, in most cases, it is not the progenitor of all the gods either. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the other primordial gods—Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros—seem to emerge independently.