CHAOS

CHAOS , in the history of religions, refers primarily to the primordial condition, precosmic period, or personified being found in many oral and literary mythologies. It is commonly, although not always legitimately, taken to mean the horribly confused state, muddled matrix, vacuous condition, or monstrous creature preceding the foundation of an organized world system. By extension, the idea of chaos in myth and ritual may also apply to any anomalous condition, event, or entity outside conventionally sanctioned codes of order. The meaning and significance of chaos in world mythology has, moreover, a special thematic relationship with the idea of the beginnings of the world, or of any structured condition. The word beginning is, in fact, etymologically connected with the Old English on-ginnan and the Old Norse gina, in both of which lurks the mythological image of the cosmogonic Ginnungagap, the primordial void that spawned the giant Ymir (the Primordial Man) in ancient Norse tradition. From a cross-cultural perspective, the image of chaos is therefore especially prominent in cosmogonic and anthropogonic myths, as well as in many types of origin myths and passage rituals concerned with some transitional situation in human life or with some significantly altered state of affairs, whether for well or ill. Chaos appears, for example, within the context of the condition of death or the dream time of sleep, flood mythology, apocalyptic imagery in general, or foundational legends and rites pertaining to a new sociopolitical tradition.

The English word chaos derives directly from the Greek chaos, which in Hesiod's Theogony (c. eighth century bce) denoted a cosmogonic "yawning gap, chasm, or void," from which generated the successive worlds of the gods and mankind. Hesiod, who drew upon earlier mythological sources, rather neutrally depicted the original chaos as merely the empty, dark space that allowed for the penetrating movement of erotic desire and for the appearance of Earth (Gaia) as the secure home for all subsequent created forms and beings. But the Theogony also displays the mythological premise for a more negative evaluation of chaos, since the earliest generations of Titanic gods, most closely identified with the untrammeled passion and anarachy of the primitive chaos condition, must be violently defeated by Zeus to insure the permanence and universality of the Olympian order. The primal chaos is itself only the blind abyss necessary for the creation of the physical world, but chaos here also refers to the mythic period—and, by implication, to a kind of "chaos-order" or condition—of the pre-Olympian gods who struggle against the imposition of Zeus's all-encompassing rule.

Because of their general impact on the colorations of meaning popularly conjured up by the modern use of the term chaos, it is worth citing two other ancient Western documents. In the priestly tale of Genesis (c. fourth century bce) found in the Hebrew scriptures, chaos is reduplicatively called tohu va-vohu, a dark, watery, formless waste or "limbo-akimbo" that must be wrested into order by the willful fiat of a god completely separate from the stuff of creation. In a somewhat similiar vein, although more somberly stressing a hostile jumble of primal matter over blank vacuity, Ovid (43 bce–18 ce), in his poetic compendium of mythology known as the Metamorphosis, describes chaos as "all ruse and lumpy matter … in whose confusion discordant atoms warred." As in the biblical version, Ovid's creation requires a nameless god, or "Kindlier Nature," who brings order out of the formless chaos.

The above-mentioned accounts serve to exemplify the commonplace tendency to dichotomize the meaning of existence into the negative-positive polarities of chaos and cosmos, confusion and order, death and life, evil and good, or, more theologically, into some dualistic distinction between the absolutely sacred and creative being of a transcendent "kindlier" God, on the one hand, and the utterly profane nothingness and nonbeing of a passively neutral or actively belligerent chaos. Clearly, these distinctions have both ontological and moral implications, so that it may also be said that the polarized evaluation of the mythic chaos is the backdrop for the theological and philosophical elaborations on such problems as creatio ex nihilo and theodicy. Indeed, the overall issue here directly affects the modern academic understanding of religion, since a whole tradition of Western scholarship defines religion as the contrast between the sacred and the profane, or, to use Peter Berger's more straightforward sociological formulation, as the "establishment through human activity of … a sacred cosmos that will be capable of maintaining itself in the ever-present face of chaos" (The Sacred Canopy, New York, 1967, p. 51).

A comparative assessment of world mythology shows, however, that such pat divisions are not always warranted, so that, for instance, the apparently fundamental contrast between chaos and cosmos may reveal more of a dialectical relationship. This ambivalence is at least suggested by the observation that the Greek root of the term kosmos does not so much refer to the creation of an absolute, universal, and final world order (although with Pythagoras in the sixth century bce it will take on this sense as its basic meaning) as to the more relative and transitive idea of the "cosmetic" alteration of some more natural, plain, and primitive condition. Cosmos in this sense is the differentiated, deferential, and ornamental order; it is the painted and tattooed body of chaos—pretty and pleasing primarily to the eye of the beholder. One tradition's chaos, in other words, is another's cosmos, and vice versa. It depends on the vantage point, or, at least, on whether the original cosmogonic chaos is conceived advantageously. In the broadest sense, chaos stands for the root "otherness" and "strangeness" of existence and the ironic indeterminacy of all human constructs.

"Creation out of chaos," in like manner, may not just refer to the appearance of order and reality out of the void, but the creative possibility of many different orders and worlds. As the hidden sum of all potential kosmoi, chaos is intrinsically linked to the transformative nature of phenomenal and cultural existence. The tensed relationship of "chaos and cosmos," then, usually has sociopolitical as well as metaphysical implications, and this, it would seem, has much to do with the interpretation of chaos seen in particular myths and cultural traditions. This, of course, begs the question as to the ultimate premise of world construction, but it is exactly the fundamental existential puzzles of "something from nothing" and the interrelationship of unity and multiplicity, plenitude and limitation, that give rise to a moot diversity of possible answers and that are always addressed to some extent in chaos mythology.

Images of Chaos

Any excessive or transitional aspect of the natural world (e.g., the untamed vegetation of a jungle, the blurring of light and dark at twilight, the frenzied winds of a storm, and so on) may be taken as a cipher for the mythological chaos; but, as already suggested by the biblical allusions, the most prevalent natural metaphor for chaos is water. Given water's infinite fluidity, its protoplasmic vitality, as well as its lethal and regenerative potencies, it is hardly surprising that images of a vast ocean, a turbulent sea, or some other murky, cloudy, frothy, and misty mixture of air and water is used in many myths to depict the original broth of creation.

Common also are references to the moist darkness and foggy gloom of the precosmic condition, along with various depictions of a swirling vortex or whirlpool that links the water imagery with the more abstract ideas of the abysmal void. Other traditions speak of a primal muddle of earth and water, as in the "earth diver" myths that tell of a fragment of muddy soil (often imagined as a central hillock or mountain) rescued from the depths by some animal god or sky deity. Both in tribal cultures and in ancient civilizations there are descriptions of a watery, labyrinthine underworld of the dead, and accounts of limitless seas and rivers surrounding and penetrating the inhabited world; these imply that the dark waters of creation continue to flow around, through, and beneath the hollows of the established cosmos. Finally, there are the worldwide myths of a great flood (or of excessive heat and drought) in the distant past or apocalyptic future that are clearly charged with the cosmogonic idea of a regression to an initial state of total solvency. In these myths, the twin potency of chaos comes to the fore, since the deluge is devastating to the existing world yet simultaneously establishes the necessary precondition for a new creation.

Another important category of chaos symbolism concerns the universal imagery of an embryonic condition or womblike form. This is especially exemplified in the so-called cosmic egg myths (along with the analogous myths involving a bloody lump of flesh or a creatively fertile yet "empty" vessel, such as a pot, sack, gourd, cocoon, or drum), that stress the preexistence of some ovarian matrix within which is mysteriously harbored the structured multiplicity of all cosmic forms. While they sometimes involve an external agent of creation responsible for the production and development of the cosmic zygote, these myths often emphasize the organic conjunction of cosmogonic unity and phenomenal duality as well as the spontaneous self-sufficiency of the creation. It is in this way that the undifferentiated unity and implicate order of the cosmic egg can be said to come before any divine chicken, or, in the words of Samuel Butler, "a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg."

Theriomorphic and anthropomorphic personifications of chaos are often imagined as the gigantic and misshapen offspring of the primal waters, embryonic condition, or dark void. Recalling Hesiod's portrait, such creatures represent the individualized embodiments of chaos within the differentiated world. The actions of these creatures, moreover, show that chaos has a "history" that continuously impinges upon human history. The primary denizens of the chaos time can be categorized as: (1) dragon-serpent figures, often having composite avian-aquatic features (e.g., Vṛtra in Vedic mythology); (2) animal or hybrid man-animal trickster figures (e.g., Raven and Crow in North American Indian tradition); (3) a female demoness, a terrible mother, or chaos hag who has associations with the primal waters and "mother earth" imagery (e.g., Tiamat in Babylonian myth); (4) cosmic giant figures who, while theoretically androgynous, are often more male than female (e.g., Pangu in Chinese tradition); and (5) an incestuous brother and sister couple or a set of divine twins of ambiguous sexuality (e.g., Izanagi and Izanami in Japanese mythology). All of these chaos creatures are particularly related to cosmogonic and other origin myths, are often combined within a single mythic tradition, and are frequently portrayed in rituals concerned with significant seasonal and social transitions (e.g., worldwide celebrations of the New Year). While they may be suppressed, hidden, and transformed in various ways, all of them have popular folkloric surrogates (e.g., the revenant, demon, witch, and fool) and continue their ambivalent careers at the margins of the human world.

The underlying logic that emerges from this rapid cross-cultural survey suggests that chaos is both prior to the world as its cosmogonic source and existentially interstitial to the world as its transformative ground. Because it lies before and between any single order, or always "in relation" to any explicit world, the religious meaning of chaos remains profoundly ambiguous. By its very nature, then, chaos can be variously imagined as simply before and other than, as negatively destructive of, or as creatively challenging to, some ordered world system. Given this queasy multivalence, it is also possible to see why in cultural history any single cosmological tradition will most often seek to deny the relativity of its own vision of order by officially upholding a predominantly negative image of chaos.

Negative and Positive Evaluations

The negative evaluation of chaos commonly takes the form of a mythic and ritual scenario of combat, which was first delineated in relation to ancient Near Eastern and biblical materials. But this pattern is not restricted to the ancient Near East; it is clearly found in many diverse oral and literate traditions. While the combat pattern of myth displays many permutations depending on the particular cultural context, the basic plot is typified by the Babylonian Enuma elish (dating back, in part, to the second millennium bce), which tells of the struggle between a chaos monster associated with the primal waters (i.e., the demoness Tiamat and her forces) and a triumphant sky deity responsible for some significant cultural innovation (the warrior god Marduk, who slays Tiamat, divides her carcass to form the world, and establishes the central temple and righteous rule of the city-state of Babylon).

In the Enuma elish, Tiamat and her monstrous cohorts represent the older, otiose generation of gods that resist the noisy, rambunctious creative activity of the younger gods championed by Marduk. From this perspective—and it is an interpretive judgment found in many other versions of the combat myth—chaos and its first generation of creatures refer to the impotency of a form that, in time, is drained of its initial creative energy. Tiamat, in other words, stands for the dangerous principle of entropy, the negative, polluting force that seeks to dissolve all new life forms back into the silent slumber and amniotic inertia of death.

The law of cosmic life in this sense is the organic rule of chaotic disintegration that is necessary for new life. Such a cyclic return to chaos may be delayed, but even the younger gods, as part of a cosmos connected by origins with the principle of chaos, are still ultimately subject to the cosmic weariness and senility first displayed by Tiamat. One way to resolve this dilemma, which is seen prominently in monotheistic traditions, is to discover the reality of a dualistic separation between chaos and an absolutely transcendent, wholly spiritual or divine order impervious to the inevitable temporal change and collapse of all cosmic forms. Monistic theories asserting the fundamental unreality or illusory nature of chaos/cosmos represent another strategy.

The combat pattern is also witnessed in many tribal traditions, although the intensity of the antagonistic relationship between chaos and the human order (and consequently the dualistic translation of this as the polarity between death and life, evil and good, demon and god) is ordinarily heightened within the context of the classical or historical religions. Thus, such traditions often suggest that ritual remembrances of the mythic skirmish primarily function to celebrate the victory over chaos and the heroic finality of some authoritarian order. There is an emphasis here on the permanent suppression of chaos, or at least a denial that the primordial enemy possesses any positive attributes. The problem, as previously indicated, is that chaos is never completely overcome in ordinary cosmic life, although for some religions a postmortem heavenly existence (as well as a climactic apocalyptic purification of the cosmos) can be interpreted as a final and total victory over chaos.

While it is true that festivals of licensed folly are found in both tribal and classical traditions, the former tend to accept more readily the instrinsic value and positive ambiguity of a periodic ritual return to a chaotic or "liminal" condition. The danger perceived by such peoples is not so much chaos in the sense of the end of order and life but rather the social entropy and tension of too much deadening order. Chaos in this "primitive" sense is the pivot of cosmic and social equilibrium, and refers to the ritual reappearance of unstructured freedom and sheer potentiality. To refresh life, chaos must be disciplined and periodically embraced, not simply defeated.

The contemporary American satirist Peter De Vries has perversely suggested that if "in de beginning was de void, and de void was vit God," then it is probably the case that one "mustn't say de naughty void" (Blood of the Lamb, Boston, 1962, p. 181). In like manner, even when an implacably vile and naughty chaos is portrayed—as in some versions of the combat myth—there is often the contradictory implication that the divine champions are finally congenerous with their primordial foes. The forces of chaos and the watery void are always, it seems, the enemies of righteous order yet originally and simultaneously "vit God."

Chaos, it must be said, is both naughty and nice, or to borrow appropriately enough from Rudolf Otto's classic definition of the sacred (The Idea of the Holy, [1917] 1958), chaos is both repulsive and attractive in its awful appeal to the religious imagination. Its repugnant aspects are clearly seen in the many worldwide adumbrations of the combat scenario, but it remains to indicate the somewhat more muted allure of chaos as a positive and beneficial religious principle. Thus, there are what might be called "pro-chaos" religious traditions that in different ways espouse chaos as a goal. Of these there are, in general, three—sometimes overlapping—possibilities: (1) chaos may symbolize the final attainment of, and fusion with, some perfectly unconditioned unity and bliss totally beyond cosmic existence—a "nothingness that glistens with plentitude" (E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, Chicago, 1968, p. 155); (2) chaos may be experienced as a stage, threshold, or "dark night of the soul" at the ultimate edge of cosmic reality that leads to a distinct and higher vision of the absolutely transcendent Divine; and (3) chaos may represent the experience of a more paradoxical state, or coincidentia oppositorum, merging transcendent unity and cosmic multiplicity and functioning not as an end, but as a healing way station for a more harmonious inner and social life.

Such options obviously relate to "mystical" forms of world religions, but it should be recalled that a positive attitude toward chaos was already forecast by tribal rituals that periodically welcomed a twilight zone back into the human fold. Because of this sympathy, mystical forms of religion (along with other types of shamanistic-ecstatic, individualistic, and revolutionary religious movements) often manifest a kind of "primitive" sentiment toward chaos that contrasts and challenges the more one-sidedly negative evaluations seen in institutionalized religion.

One instance of these contrasting interpretations within a single tradition is found in India, where some radical forms of Upanisadic, Buddhist, and bhakti mysticism seek a supreme integration with the sacred "emptiness" of chaos. These forms can, in turn, be distinguished from the dharmic system of rigidly differentiated castes seen in Vedic and Puranic Hinduism. Within Western tradition—and frequently in tension with mainstream Christian, Jewish, and Islamic institutions—there are also movements that stress the mystical conjugation of the divine and chaos. Conceptions arising from such movements include, in Christianity, the Ungrund (the "unground" or abyss that gives rise to God's self-consciousness), described by Jakob Boehme (1575–1624); the qabbalistic idea of tsimtsum, the creative "gap" within God, in sixteenth-century Judaism; and the alchemical massa confusa (the prime matter, often imagined as an egg or coiled snake) in both Christian and Islamic esoteric circles after the Renaissance. All allude in some degree to the mythological chaos as a strangely positive image.

There are other cases of this pro-chaos persuasion, but one of the more striking examples is found in Chinese tradition. In ancient China during the Eastern Zhou period (c. eighth through second centuries bce) the mythological chaos was called hundun, which connoted the image of a Humpty-Dumpty-like, closed, embryonic condition or creature. Confucian thought and the ancient classics stressed the role of a succession of semidivine Sage-Kings who disciplined the chaotic forces of the natural world and carved the hierarchical order of the Middle Kingdom out of the carcass of the primitive condition of hundun. As a counterpoint to this point of view, the early Daoist texts suggest the existence of a veritable cult of chaos, since for these works the attainment of an authentically spontaneous and harmonious life required the rejection of conventional standards of propriety and recommended a return to an experience of primitive unity by means of the mystical "arts of hundun." Thus, in early Daoist texts (as distinct from the later institutionalized Daoist religion), the mythical hundun can be identified with the ultimate principle of the Dao as the rhythmic source and ground of life. Because of his periodic journeys in mind and heart back to the time of chaos, the Daoist mimics the seasonal regeneration of nature and the ritual regeneration of primitive cultural life and is able, therefore, to remain fresh and whole in the world.

Affirmations of the saving power of chaos have had a significant, although largely unorthodox, role to play in the history of religions; and, as broadly protesting all conventionalized truth, the cult and cultivation of chaos can be said to have inspired a whole spectrum of countercultural irruptions, "interstitial events," or "liminoid phenomena" throughout history. Because it rubs against the customary order of things, the religious, philosophical, artistic, and political "art of chaos" is always a risky enterprise, as indicated by the checkered careers of assorted Daoist mystics, Zen monks, holy fools, clownish alchemists, utopian Ranters, Romantic poets, Nietzschian nihilists, frenzied surrealists, neo-pagan anarchists, the Maoist "Gang of Four," and deconstructionist critics.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most responsible way to end an investigation of chaos is to refuse the temptation to parse a subject so hopelessly ironic. It is, after all, the principle of chaos that opens the abyss of indeterminacy and undecidability in all interpretive endeavors. Suffice it to say that, despite its decidedly negative public reputation, the image of chaos may be found in fact to have positive religious value. Even more important is the recognition that the idea of chaos represents one of the honored ways religions have tried to imagine the ambiguous origins and equivocal nature of existence. For this very reason the meaning of chaos in the history of religions maintains its imaginative integrity by remaining chaotic. Respecting the root topsy-turviness of chaos should not, however, prevent careful reflection on its imaginative history since, even in its most negative guise, the phantomlike shapes of chaos are directly related to the way particular religions have envisioned reality. The nature and significance of chaos, therefore, touches upon a number of issues that are central to the overall interpretive understanding and definition of religion.

See Also

Cosmogony; Dragons; Egg; Water.

Bibliography

Concerning the general theoretical background to the religious and philosophical understanding of chaos and order, see The Concept of Order, edited by Paul G. Kuntz (Seattle and London, 1968), for an eclectic selection of articles—especially pertinent are James K. Feibleman's "Disorder" (pp. 3–13) and, for the religious context, Charles Hartshorne's "Order and Chaos" (pp. 253–267) and Joseph M. Kitagawa's "Chaos, Order, and Freedom in World Religions" (pp. 268–289). See also David L. Hall's Eros and Irony (Albany, 1982), which provocatively analyzes cultural history in relation to varying conceptions of creation, chaos, and cosmology.

Barbara C. Sproul's Primal Myths: Creating the World (San Francisco, 1979) is a convenient sourcebook for the more important creation myths and includes some abbreviated, but helpful, commentary on the different religious images of chaos. More valuable for their discussions of the relation between the ideas of "creation" and "chaos" are Mircea Eliade's Myth and Reality (New York, 1963), which investigates the mythological and ritual meaning of chaos as correlated with the author's theory concerning the "prestige" of cosmogony, and Charles H. Long's Alpha: The Myths of Creation (New York, 1963), which includes some of the important mythological source materials as well as an extensive comparative examination of the structural significance of chaos imagery. For the ritual themes of "liminality" and "pollution" as suggestively analogous to the mythic idea of chaos, especially among tribal traditions, see Victor Turner's The Ritual Process (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977) and Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York, 1966).

The myth and ritual theme of combat that promotes a negative and dualistic evaluation of chaos is classically presented for ancient Near Eastern and biblical materials by Hermann Gunkel's Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Göttingen, 1895). But see also the more recent studies by Bernhard W. Anderson, Creation versus Chaos (New York, 1967), which emphasizes the biblical context; Mary K. Wakeman, God's Battle with the Monster (Leiden, 1973), which comparatively reexamines the ancient Near Eastern documentation; and Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (Berkeley, 1959), which focuses on Greek tradition but draws upon a broad assortment of cross-cultural materials (i.e., Indo-European, ancient Near Eastern, East Asian, American Indian, etc.).

For studies that examine the more positive and ambiguous dimensions of chaos symbolism, along with related imagery, see, for India, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago and London, 1980) and, for the ancient Chinese theme of hundun, my own Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (Berkeley and London, 1983). In addition to their primary subject areas, both of these works comparatively cite a broad range of cross-cultural materials. Finally it is worth noting, among other possibilities, William Willeford's The Fool and His Scepter (London, 1969) and Mircea Eliade's Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol (New York, 1965). The former is a fascinating literary study of the folkloric and popular embodiments of chaos in the Western tradition of the fool or jester, and the latter is a rich comparative study of different symbolic themes touching on the religious ideas of duality and the "coincidence of opposites."

Norman J. Girardot (1987)