The Orphics regard Nyx as a field of unknowability, without personality or consciousness as we understand it. Yet others speak rapturously of her diaphanous veils, stars gleaming through the mists and swirling around her.

Some describe her as a figure of terror, driving a shadowy chariot drawn by raging, inky horses. Like all the Protogenoi, Nyx is viewed with a mixture of caution and reverence by the ancient Greeks. Hemera scatters her mother’s mists with the rising of Helios the sun and allows Aethyr to shine through.

Nyx was envisioned by ancient authors as being the mists that veil the sky at eveningfall and obscure the light of day. The main thing to keep in mind is that she’s one of the very first. One shouldn’t get too hung up on the family trees of the Protogenoi, though, as they get scrambled into all sorts of interesting combinations by various sources. Hypnos (Sleep), Thanatos (Death), Moros (Doom), Oizys (Pain), the Keres (Destroyers), the Moirai (Fates), Eris (Strife), Geras (Old Age) and Hades’ ferryman, Kharon, are just a few of her unsettling offspring. Nyx has a host of other children, most conceived parthenogenetically. Night and Darkness bear within them the seeds of Light.

It is through the union of Night and Darkness that Hemera, the goddess of Day, and Aethyr, the bright upper air, come into being. Modern folk tend to conflate her with her sibling and mate Erebos, or Darkness, but they are not the same being. One of the first children of Kaos from whom everything else flows is Nyx, the goddess of night. At the dawn of creation emerge the Protogenoi, the primordial gods who set in place the very foundations of the cosmos.

Hemera nyx tarot