Erebus: the Primordial of Darkness

Erebus was the Primordial entity of Darkness, one of the first deities born from Chaos at the beginning of creation. He came into being in the Void before the world had shape, the brother of Gaia and Nyx and a sibling of Ouranos, Tartarus, and Eros, the eldest generation of the Primordials. Called the Embodiment of Darkness and honored as God of Darkness and God of Shadows, he took Nyx as his consort, and the two dark powers together brought forth some of the oldest forces in the Greek cosmos. Where his sister Gaia became the living earth and Ouranos the starry heavens, Erebus was the gloom beneath and between all things, the shadow that pooled in the hollows of the world and gathered thickest in the Underworld, the domain that came to carry his name.

Born from Chaos#

In the beginning there was Chaos, the void from which all of creation came, at once the disordered state of the young universe and the deity embedded within it. From that formlessness emerged the first of the Protogenoi, the primordial gods who preceded Titans and Olympians alike. The earth, Gaia, came forth, and the infernal pit of Tartarus, and Eros, the force of new life. Then Chaos spawned the darkness, Erebus, and the night, Nyx, completing the eldest company of the Primordials.

Erebus was darkness itself given divine form. The Greeks understood his substance as the dark mists that encircled the world and filled the deep hollows of the earth, present wherever light failed. He was counted among the most prominent of the first gods beside Chaos, Gaia, Ouranos, Nyx, and Tartarus, though unlike his siblings who shaped and warred over the surface of creation, Erebus left few deeds on record. When Ouranos prevailed in the great war of the Primordials and assumed lordship over the cosmos, no account preserved what part, if any, the god of Darkness took in the fighting. Like his consort Nyx, he endured where lesser powers of that first age did not.

Consort of the Night#

Erebus took his sister Nyx as his consort, and the darkness and the night formed the first couple of Greek history, a union in which no rift or trouble was ever recorded. In this the pair stood apart from Gaia and Ouranos, whose marriage ended in mutilation and hatred. The loyalty between Erebus and Nyx never wavered through the long ages that followed.

Their first children were their own opposites. From the union of Darkness and Night came Aether, the light of the upper air, and Hemera, the day. In the reckoning of the ancient Greeks, the heavenly ether and the dark mists of the netherworld were the true sources of day and night rather than the sun. In the evening Nyx drew the darkness of Erebus across the sky, bringing night upon the world, and at dawn their daughter Hemera scattered it, revealing the shining air beneath. So the turning of every day and night was, in the oldest accounts, the working of this one family.

Father of dark children#

Beyond the light and the day, the line of Erebus ran deep into the dark places of creation. Charon, the grim ferryman who carried the souls of the dead across the waters of the Underworld, was a son of Erebus and Nyx. Greater still were the Sisters of Fate, born of Erebus and Nyx among the first creatures of the world, at the same moment that Chaos created the Island of Creation that became their seat. Clotho, Lahkesis, and Atropos held power over past, present, and future, and their rule over the destiny of every mortal, god, and Titan was one that none could defy. That the all-ruling Fates were counted among the offspring of Darkness spoke to the stature of their father, however quietly he kept to his own domain.

Many of Nyx's later children were said to be brought forth by the goddess alone, gods who personified the abstractions of nature, among them Morpheus and Thanatos. Yet some traditions extended the fatherhood of Erebus further, counting among his line such powers as Hypnos the sleep, Nemesis the retribution, the Oneiroi of dreams, and other dark spirits besides. Whatever the true count of his children, nearly every power of night, death, and destiny in the Greek cosmos traced its blood to the house of Darkness and Night.

The darkness below#

The name of Erebus was also given to a place. Among the Greeks, Erebus served as a byword for the netherworld domain of Hades, for the dark mists of the Primordial were held to fill the sunless hollows beneath the earth, and the god himself was placed within the Underworld. Long after the first age of creation, his name still marked the deepest reaches of the land of the dead.

It was there that the Spartan Kratos crossed the mark of the old god. During his final descent into the Underworld, Kratos was made to endure the Trials of Erebus before he could win an audience with the Three Judges of the dead. Within those trials a wandering soul was transformed into a hulking horned beast that the Spartan cut down. The completion of the Trials partially lifted the great Chain of Balance held by the Judges, exposing the Onyx that locked it in place within Hades' domain, a barrier Kratos later shattered with the Nemean Cestus after freeing Pandora from the maze that held her. The name of Darkness surfaced elsewhere in that age as well. At the gates of the Island of Creation, the shade of Theseus called up ice-wreathed beasts known as Erebus Minotaurs to fight in his stead, creatures that bore the old god's name into battle against the Ghost of Sparta.

An unrecorded fate#

Erebus himself was never seen to act in the wars that consumed the Greek world. While Kratos toppled the Olympians and the earth-mother Gaia perished with them, the god of Darkness remained apart, as he had through every recorded age. Of the eldest generation of Primordials, Gaia and Ouranos both met their ends, yet Erebus, like Nyx and Tartarus, endured within his own domain, and no chronicle ever counted him among the fallen.

What became of him after the ruin of Olympus was never told. Darkness itself did not pass from the world, and the mists of the netherworld did not lift. As with his brother Eros, the histories left the first god of Darkness where they found him, unseen and undiminished, at work wherever light failed. His status remained unknown.