Ghā́wos

*"All was Darkness, hidden within Darkness. Everything was an indistinct flood. There neither was being nor non-being, nor the firmament beyond it. There neither was death nor immortality then, nor a sign of day or night. Nor did Dyeus sit upon His Golden Seat of the gods, nor did the Brilliant Eye of Dyeus shone Her Radiant mead-colored rays. All was in a deep sleep like that of death. The Gods were born later. The deep Yawning abyssal waters called Ghā́wos then emerged, like something formless that can be metamorphosed. In the North region, it became filled with heaviness. In the South it was then lighten up by the Igneous Cədhnom in great succession. Which Ghā́wos is said to exist between the earth and Cədhnom. Who then knows from whence this divine creation came? What was it keeping had it had anything? Where? Whose was the impulsion? Even the Gods know not."* — beginning of the Érqos, a poem by Cassandra the Goth Indo-European.

**Ghā́wos** is the primordial deity of all that exists. It is the primordial abyssal waters, the yawning void. Siblings of Ghā́wos is the god of the cyclical ages Aiwṓn, who is said to have come before Ghā́wos. Through the *Ghā́wochernos* "energy of heat", begotten the Truthful Order that is the Ṛtós. From the abyssal waters of Ghā́wos, came the *Krəsenówiyom* "World Egg." It's the primordial land before Yemos' sacrifice to fashion the current world. Ghā́wos is said to exist between the earth and Cədhnom. The children of Ghā́wos with Ṛtós are Cówindā, the primordial cow Goddess of Plenty, Nóqts the Night goddess, Swépnos the god of sleep, Récos the darkness between Earth and the underworld, Cədhnom the deep abyss of what would later be apart of the Underworld the place where people who have done atrocious misdeeds go, which exists at the roots or bottom of the world tree. Ghā́wos is said to exist between the earth and Cədhnom. Ghā́wos' grandchildren are the twins Mánus the first human and Yemós the first giant, Stērésyā the goddess of the stars, Ḱólyā the death goddess, Swélcṃs (the Milky Way), the Dogs of Dyeus (stars). Ghā́wos' great-grandchildren are Fate itself, Wétos the god of the temporal time of past, present and future, the three Fates, the Misfortunes, Trítos and Ílā the first humans created from the ask tree, Aḱmōn the primordial Sky, and Érā the primordial Earth, and the other Gāgóntes.

## In Descendant Religions

In ancient Greek religion and modern Hellenismos, Greek Chaos Χάος, Kháos/Cháos) is the primeval deity of everything. For the Roman poet Ovid, Chaos was an unformed mass, where all the elements were jumbled up together in a "shapeless heap".

Hesiod and the Pre-Socratics use the Greek term in the context of cosmogony. Hesiod's Chaos has been interpreted as either "the gaping void above the Earth created when Earth and Sky are separated from their primordial unity" or "the gaping space below the Earth on which Earth rests."

In Hesiod's *Theogony*, Chaos was the first thing to exist: "at first Chaos came to be" (or was), but next (possibly out of Chaos) came Gaia, Tartarus and Eros (elsewhere the son of Aphrodite). Unambiguously "born" from Chaos were Erebus and Nyx. For Hesiod, Chaos, like Tartarus, though personified enough to have borne children, was also a place, far away, underground and "gloomy," beyond which lived the Titans. And, like the earth, the ocean, and the upper air, it was also capable of being affected by Zeus' thunderbolts.

Passages in Hesiod's *Theogony* suggest that Chaos was located below Earth but above Tartarus. Primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality, particularly by philosophers such as Heraclitus.

The notion of the temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious conception of immortality. This idea of the divine as an origin influenced the first Greek philosophers. The main object of the first efforts to explain the world remained the description of its growth, from a beginning. They believed that the world arose out from a primal unity, and that this substance was the permanent base of all its being. Anaximander claims that the origin is apeiron (the unlimited), a divine and perpetual substance less definite than the common elements (water, air, fire, and earth) as they were understood to the early Greek philosophers. Everything is generated from *apeiron*, and must return there according to necessity. A conception of the nature of the world was that the earth below its surface stretches down indefinitely and has its roots on or above Tartarus, the lower part of the underworld. In a phrase of Xenophanes, "The upper limit of the earth borders on air, near our feet. The lower limit reaches down to the "apeiron" (i.e. the unlimited)." The sources and limits of the earth, the sea, the sky, Tartarus, and all things are located in a great windy-gap, which seems to be infinite, and is a later specification of "chaos".

In Norse mythology and Modern Ásatrú, Ginnungagap ("gaping abyss", "yawning void") is the primordial void, mentioned in the Gylfaginning, the Eddaic text recording Norse cosmogony.

"Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void ... which faced toward the northern quarter, became filled with heaviness, and masses of ice and rime, and from within, drizzling rain and gusts; but the southern part of the Yawning Void was lighted by those sparks and glowing masses which flew out of Múspellheim"

—*Gylfaginning*

In the Rigveda and Vedism, the void is described as abyss of waters. It's agnostic as to where it came from, where it originated, and who was it's impulsion. It states:

"There was neither being nor not-being. There was neither darkness nor firmament beyond it. What was it keeping? Where? Whose was the impulsion? What was there in the deep abyssal water? There was neither death nor immortality then, there was no signal either of night or of day. It breathed without breath by its own condition. And there was nothing else apart from this. At the beginning darkness was hidden with darkness, everything was an indistinct flood. What was covered by hollowness, this thing alone was born with the energy of heat."

Then love emerged, the first seed of thought. From this heat, truth and order were born. From truth, came the night. From the night, came the ocean. By the wisdom of the sages, they found the link between being and non-being. It then states:

"Where this creation comes from, and whether it has been done or not, the one watching the firmament in the extreme remoteness knows, or perhaps does not know."

Implying that weather or not the creation of the world is knowable at all.