Erebus (Erebos; also Skotos / Scotus, “Darkness”)

Region/Culture: Ancient Greece (Southern Europe)
Mythos: Greek, Roman
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities (primordial protogenos)
Mythical Attributes: The personification of deep darkness, whose dark mist fills the hollows of the earth and is drawn across the sky each evening to make the night.
Role in Mythos: One of the first beings to emerge from Chaos at the dawn of creation, father of Aether and Hemera by his consort Nyx, and the namesake of the gloomy passage through which the dead descend to Hades.
Relation to Humans: Erebus has no cult, no worshippers, and no dealings with individual mortals; he is a condition of the cosmos rather than a god who answers prayers. Yet every human meets him in the end, since “Erebus” is the very darkness the shades cross on their way into the underworld.

Before there was a sun to set, there was already somewhere for the light to go when it failed. It gathered in the low places, in the seams of the not-yet-finished world, a cold that had texture and weight, and it had a name almost before it had anything else to do. The Greeks called that pooled and waiting dark Erebus, and they placed him among the very first things that ever were.

He came out of Chaos, the yawning gap that opened at the start of everything. Hesiod, setting down the oldest tidy account of how the gods began, names two who issued from that emptiness together: Erebus, the nether darkness, and black Nyx, the Night. They were kin and then they were a pair, and from their union came the two children who are their exact opposites. Aether, the bright upper air, the clean high light that the gods breathe. Hemera, the Day. Darkness fathering light is the kind of thing the old cosmogonies do without blinking, and the logic of it is sound enough once you stop expecting it. The light has to come from somewhere, and the only somewhere that exists yet is the dark.

What he does, mostly, is the evening. The picture the early Greeks carried was not of a sun sinking but of darkness rising. Each night Nyx takes her husband’s gloom and draws it across the heavens like a covering, smothering the shine of Aether, and each dawn their daughter Hemera scatters it again and lets the brightness back through. In this older accounting the day is not made by Helios driving his chariot up. It is made by the dark being pulled aside. Erebus is the substance that gets moved, the thing the day has to be cleared of before there can be a day at all.

Trying to describe him as a figure is a fool’s errand, and the sources are honest enough not to try. He is given no limbs, no throne, no chariot, no weapon. The most concrete thing ever said of him is that his mists encircled the world and filled its deep hollows, which makes him less a person than a place, or a weather, or a quality that the universe simply has. This is one of the quiet difficulties of the primordial gods. They are too old and too large to have faces. Erebus is what you would touch if you reached into absolute lightlessness and found that it pushed back.

Other tellings reshuffle his family. In the strange bird-told creation that Aristophanes puts in a comedy, the first things are Chaos, Night, Erebus, and the pit of Tartarus, and it is into the boundless bosom of Erebus that black-winged Nyx lays a wind-egg. The egg waits through ages of that depthless dark, and then it splits, and out of it rises Eros, desire, golden-winged, the force that will start pairing the world into being. So the oldest love in the cosmos is incubated inside the oldest dark. The Orphics went further and made Erebus the child of Chronos, unaging Time, alongside Chaos and Aether, a misty third drawn off from the very beginning. The Roman writers kept his name untranslated, because Latin had no word of its own for what he was, and bred him a vast brood of grim personifications upon Nox: Doom and Old Age, Death and Sleep, the Dreams, Strife, Misery, Deceit, the Fates, and more. Whether or not he literally fathered Death, the association is exactly right. The dark is where all those things live.

And then there is the second life of his name, the one that outlasted his role in the cosmogony. Long after poets stopped caring about who fathered the Day, “Erebus” went on meaning the dim under-region of the earth, the threshold-gloom through which the dead must pass. Homer already uses it that way. Zeus hurls a Titan down into Erebus; the hundred-handed giants are brought up out of Erebus into the light; Hermes goes down to fetch Persephone back from Erebus. Charon poles his ferry across the black water and the souls step off into that shadow, and the shadow has Erebus’s name on it. The god and the gloom became the same word, which is a fitting end for a being who was never really separable from the thing he personified.

His power is simply that he is darkness, and darkness is not optional. It precedes the light and waits to reclaim it, and there is no corner of the made world his mist cannot eventually reach. But a personification is a thin sort of god. Erebus has no will to exert, no schemes, no temper. He does nothing. He is acted upon, drawn across the sky by his wife and torn away again by his daughter, named but never quite present, a god you cannot pray to because there is no one there to listen. He cannot hold the day off forever; Hemera always comes. In the end his most lasting power was the smallest and the surest one, the plain fact that everybody dies, and that when they do, it is into his name that they go down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Erebus in Greek mythology?

Erebus is the primordial Greek god, or protogenos, of darkness. He was one of the first beings to come into existence, emerging from Chaos at the very start of creation, and he personified the deep gloom that filled the hollows of the early world.

Who were the parents and children of Erebus?

In Hesiod’s Theogony, Erebus was born directly from Chaos and had no father. With his consort and sister Nyx (Night), he fathered Aether (the bright upper air) and Hemera (Day). Later Roman writers such as Cicero and Hyginus also credited Erebus and Nyx with a large family of dark personifications, including Death, Sleep, Old Age, Strife, and the Fates.

What is the difference between Erebus the god and Erebus the underworld?

The same name was used for both. Erebus is the primordial god of darkness, but “Erebus” also became a term for the shadowy region of the underworld that the dead pass through on their way to Hades. By Homer’s time the word commonly referred to this gloomy passage rather than to the deity himself.

How did Erebus create day and night?

In the older Greek view, day and night were made by darkness being moved rather than by the sun. Each evening Nyx drew Erebus’s darkness across the sky to bring night, obscuring the light of Aether, and each morning their daughter Hemera scattered that darkness to reveal the light again and bring day.

Was Erebus worshipped by the Greeks?

Erebus had no temples, cult, or worshippers. As a personification of darkness, he was treated as a cosmic condition rather than a god who intervened in human affairs, and he appears in creation accounts and poetry rather than in religious ritual.