Which deity personified the primordial void in Greek mythology? Chaos is the answer.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos is the first entity to exist. The Greek word khaos originally suggested a gap, chasm, or vast opening rather than the modern idea of noisy disorder. Chaos was therefore imagined as the primordial space from which the ordered cosmos could emerge.
Chaos is described as sufficiently personified to produce offspring. Erebus, the darkness of the underworld, and Nyx, the goddess of night, emerge from Chaos. Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros appear immediately afterward, although ancient sources differ on whether they were born from Chaos or arose alongside it.
A common mistake is to treat Chaos as a later villain or as a mass of random destruction. In Greek cosmogony, it is primarily a primordial condition or cosmic chasm. Ovid later presented Chaos as an unformed mixture of elements, helping shape the modern meaning of the word. Tartarus, by contrast, is a separate deep region beneath the world.