I just learned for the first time that the Ancient Greeks had a god of criticism: Momus. He was eventually expelled from Olympus (no surprise there), but when I looked up his genealogy, I noticed something I also hadn’t realized before: that Nyx and Erebus gave birth to so many emotions, both good and bad. They are the parents of blame (Momus), distress (Oizys), retribution (Nemesis), deceit (Apate), and friendship (Philotes). In the same way, they gave birth to both brightness and day (Aether and Hemera) but also death and strife (Thanatos and Eris), the Night (Nyx), and the Darkness (Erebus), birthed positive and negative experience.
If we assume that the Greek myths, like any cultural zeitgeist, represent a collective unconscious understanding of the forces driving our existence, there are interesting lessons to learn from this. Of course, one of them is that the unknown is not, necessarily, to be feared. It can bring the light of day and friendship as easily as retribution and distress. But, more significantly perhaps, it is the beginning of things, not the end. We think of ourselves as hurtling into the unknown, “the future is dark.” But the Greek mythological conception turns this paradigm on its head. Instead, the unknown is birthing tomorrow. Rather than a space we enter with each passing second, it is the mother of those seconds, the birth of existence and consciousness. It is true that those next seconds might bring death, but they may also bring friendship or daylight.
This may seem like a trivial reframing – that rather than heading into the unknown, we are arriving from the darkness into the present, that it is giving birth to the us in the now. But it is an essentially positive conception of the passage of time whereas the more traditional framework is essentially negative. Rather than “not going gentle into that good night,” we are arriving from her. Night is the mother of all our beginnings, not the eternal shroud of all our ends.
Image Credit: Nyx goddess of the night, Athenian red-figure pyxis lid fragment C4th B.C., Ashmolean Museum