chaos

Creation from chaos

From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus.^[19]

Main article: Chaos (cosmogony)

In creation from chaos myths, initially there is nothing but a formless, shapeless expanse. In these stories the word “chaos” means “disorder”, and this formless expanse, which is also sometimes called a void or an abyss, contains the material with which the created world will be made. Chaos may be described as having the consistency of vapor or water, dimensionless, and sometimes salty or muddy. These myths associate chaos with evil and oblivion, in contrast to “order” (cosmos) which is the good. The act of creation is the bringing of order from disorder, and in many of these cultures it is believed that at some point the forces preserving order and form will weaken and the world will once again be engulfed into the abyss.One example is the Genesis creation narrative from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.

Chaos (Ancient Greek: χάος, romanized: kháos) is the mythological void state preceding the creation of the universe (the cosmos) in Greekcreation myths. In Christian theology, the same term is used to refer to the gap / abyss created by the separation of heaven and earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)

Alchemy and Hermeticism

Further information: Prima materia

Magnum Chaos, wood-inlay by Giovan Francesco Capoferri at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, based on a design by Lorenzo Lotto.

The Greco-Roman tradition of prima materia, notably including the 5th- and 6th-century Orphic cosmogony, was merged with biblical notions (Tehom) in Christianity and inherited by alchemy and Renaissance magic.

The cosmic egg of Orphism was taken as the raw material for the alchemical magnum opus in early Greek alchemy. The first stage of the process of producing the philosopher’s stone, i.e., nigredo, was identified with chaos. Because of association with the Genesis creation narrative, where “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2), Chaos was further identified with the classical element of Water.

Ramon Llull (1232–1315) wrote a Liber Chaos, in which he identifies Chaos as the primal form or matter created by God. Swiss alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) uses chaos synonymously with “classical element” (because the primeval chaos is imagined as a formless congestion of all elements). Paracelsus thus identifies Earth as “the chaos of the gnomi“, i.e., the element of the gnomes, through which these spirits move unobstructed as fish do through water, or birds through air.^[40] An alchemical treatise by Heinrich Khunrath, printed in Frankfurt in 1708, was entitled Chaos.^[41] The 1708 introduction states that the treatise was written in 1597 in Magdeburg, in the author’s 23rd year of practicing alchemy.^[42] The treatise purports to quote Paracelsus on the point that “The light of the soul, by the will of the Triune God, made all earthly things appear from the primal Chaos.”^[43] Martin Ruland the Younger, in his 1612 Lexicon Alchemiae, states, “A crude mixture of matter or another name for Materia Prima is Chaos, as it is in the Beginning.”

The term gas in chemistry was coined by Dutch chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont in the 17th century directly based on the Paracelsian notion of chaos. The g in gas is due to the Dutch pronunciation of this letter as a spirant, also employed to pronounce Greek χ.^[44]