Tartaros

The deepest depth, the darkest darkness.

In the Greek Mythos, personifications run rampant. If one includes the Roman myths as part of a Graeco-Roman Mythos, one finds personifications of cities, hills, rivers, valleys, and a large assortment of others that are anthropomorphised and deified personifications of natural features and political structures.

The nature of these personifications is one deserving of some debate, since many neo-Hellenes today subscribe to a very hard form of polytheism that makes of all mythically attested divinities as true deities (in some cases Angeloi and Nymphs.) Because I do not subscribe to so all inclusive a philosophy on deity, I tend to look at these personifications carefully when I encounter them, and then place them into several categories.

• Aspect: A personification can be an aspect of a god or goddess, such as the personification of the different stages of plant development in Roman times (the seed, the seedling, etc) which I would see as aspects of the goddess Demeter (the Roman Ceres.)
  
• Simple Personification: That would be the localised personification of a place, such as a river, mountain, grove, or valley.
  
• Poetic Personification: These would be the personification in art and poetry of abstract human concepts, like the personified Roma, personification of the city of Rome, or the personifications of concepts like victory, philosophy, mathematics, etc.
  

Tartaros fits into more than one of these, but I place it in the Aspect category, for I see Tartaros as the primordial aspect of the great dark lord Aidoneus, whose other Olympian Era name, Hades, is also the name of a place, the underworld.

In the version of the underworld that was judgmental in nature, it had an Elysium or Elysian Fields and a Tartaros, the two places most analogous to Heaven and Hell in Christian Cosmology. The Greeks, however, had more than one version of the underworld, though we will not go into discussing them here.

Tartaros makes appearances in all kinds of religious cosmologies. The Hel of the Nordes, the Hell of the Christians, the Gehenna of the Hebrews, etc, all have some deep finality to them. The darkest, coldest, hottest, etc, where the souls of the dead, or fallen angels, or defeated gods end up for an eternity that is never really certain.

The Tartaros of the Greeks was the deepest of all places, the lowest depths of the underworld. It is as deep within the earth as Olympus is high above it, which puts the Earth smack dab in the middle, like the Midgard of the Nordes, and which has been interpreted to be either a dark desolate place where there is nothing of true existence or a place of vile torment where the evil doer must suffer for his hubris and his waste of life.

As a personification, Hesiod would have him be part of the beginning, and that would make sense if the God of the underworld is also form giver to the foundations of nature's most dreaded aspect, that which is headed by Nyx, Entropy.

Tartaros is foundational power, an aspect of the destructive powers of nature in their most final manifestations, destruction and total darkness. Tartaros is the end. If the cosmos will one day go dark, all its energy spent, that will be Tartaros. And if the universe had a true beginning, that dark nothingness before was also Tartaros, which Hesiod calls Chaos.

So, as we see here, all of the major deities of the Olympian pantheon, those who were children of Kronos in myth, are essentially represented. The Sky, The Sea, The Underworld are all manifest from the very beginning.