Nyx
The Goddess Night and the Dark Aspect of the Universe
The light, or objective, aspect of the universe is the domain of Gaea and the rest of the Gods as we know them. The gods of light are all part of this domain, they are the gods as we humans have experienced them in all religions throughout time, throughout the world. Even those gods we call dark in aspect are part of the light. The dark, or abstract aspect, has fewer deities than the light, indeed, many of these are not true deities at all but lesser forces which I often call daemones or angeloi of the goddess Nyx herself.
Picture the universe. It, like the gods, is eternal and does not change in a way that we know as change. The gods exist within it, part of it, and because there is as yet nothing we would recognize as time, they do not partake of it. To them, all time is but one instant, eternal and essentially unchanging. But then, the gods move, and they cause something to happen that had never happened before, they caused a need for time and for emptied space, and Nyx, that awesome goddess, spread her black wings and made it so.
Hesiod tells us that it all began with Chaos, which translates not as uncontrolled and unpridictable activity, but as a great chasm, that is, a great still emptiness, and that it is from this that the first gods were born. Gaea, the sure foundation of all that is, and abode to all life. Eros, the beauteous, who draws all things together. Erebus, the darkness. Nyx, the goddess night.
He tells us too that Nyx mated with Erebus (darkness) to bring forth children, but the children of Nyx, unlike the children of Gaea and Ouranos, are not divine perfection, but abstract negations. These are forces, like death, hunger, destruction, dream, and a great many others, that balance out the forces brought into being by Gaea and her son/mate Ouranos.
Let us then talk about the Dark Side, all joke comments about Darth Vader will be laughed at and then deleted. { :-) }
The dark side of the universe is not evil. The Hellenic system has concepts of good and evil, good and bad, but not in the same absolutes as more duotheistic or so-called monotheistic religions. The dark and light aspects of the universe can be seen more as the seen and the unseen, creation and destruction, objective and abstract, and the dark aspect of the universe is that which negates, in a complimentary and necessary way, that which the light aspect produces. If the light aspect creates the dark destroys. If the light aspect is life the dark is death.
But that is far too simple, because to the dark aspect there are creative aspects and to the light aspect there are destructive aspects. Nyx is the supreme goddess of the dark aspected universe, just as Gaea is the supreme goddess of the light, yet the Hellenic tradition is patriarchal, and it makes the sky god, not the earth goddess, the divine monarch.
Nyx, as a goddess, is a distant entity. Though we can see the night as her epiphany, it is difficult to get a grasp on her because she is not as initmately involved with life as the Olympian gods, or even the primordial Ge and Eros, both of whom have made their presence felt in all things.
Because we perceive death itself as a negative, some even think of it as an evil, we tend to fear those deities that represent it, that work its power on the cosmos, and of these, none is greater than the great dark goddess herself, the great night who works her terrible power of entropy on the very cosmos. Bringing, eventually, the chaotic energy of being back into the stillness of non-being, which in itself
What is this entropy, what is its purpose?
Simply put, entropy is the force of destruction and dissolution that is part of all things. Nothing in the cosmos lasts eternally except the energy that was its foundation in the first place, and that energy was not as we know it today, it was still. So, if we think of the cosmos as a pond, and the universe after the big bang as the ripples caused by the movements of the gods, then Nyx brings to bear the power that eventually makes the pond still again if it is not acted upon by more movement. The Children of Ge stir the pot, the children of Nyx seek to still it again.
The universe, you see, is not in its natural state, it has been disturbed, and the gods continue to disturb it as the two forces, the objective and the abstract, seek to balance each other out and come to equilibrium. The order and chaos seek to nullify each other, but can only come to a stalemate, and that is the universe, and the nullifying force is also a restorative force, because through this entropy, things can be destroyed so that new things may come to be. Nyx is not only a destroyer, but a bringer of new potentiality.
But wait, does this mean Nyx is a goddess of Chaos?
No. If we leave behind the modern conception of that word, we are left with the meaning of Hesiod, that of a void or chasm. This still void is chaos, it is formless, it has not been separated into a variety of forms, has not been defined. It is the entirety of the energy of the universe, which is finite, dispersed evenly and still in the eternal space of the cosmos.
Right away we have a contradiction, because finite energy cannot fill infinite space, but the space of this primordial universe is not infinite, and it is not today, it is eternal (if one uses eternal as a word to define time and infinite as word to define space.) It is everlasting, not infinite in size. The chaos, then, is not a deity or a true force, but a state. It is a state in which all that is was still and undefined, and at the spreading of her wings, Nyx stirs the waters, Gaea rises out of them, and Eros draws it all together so that it does not simply float away and return to stillness. The formless energy, the watery void, now begins to acquire definition, to acquire form.
Nyx is not a goddess of chaos, but she is a balancer, for the energies of the universe cannot all become subsumed into the solid matter of Gaea, nor can they be allowed to all be gathered to the center by Eros. Matter is formed, and it must be unformed so that it returns to an energetic form, and then reform into matter again. Combining and recombining to form more and more complex materials. Stars that shine cannot do so forever, they must die and release their energies, their matter into the universe so that it continues.
The gods stirred, and they saw that what was made by that stirring was good, to borrow that bit from Genesis, and it is part of the role of Nyx to assure that it continues by destroying what is made, and that is the role of the dark aspect of the universe, the dark domain of Night.