Primordial deity
A god who exists before the generations of gods begin — in Hesiod the four who simply "came to be" (Chaos, Earth, Tartarus, Eros) and the children of Chaos and Night (Erebus, Night, Aether, Day), who have no father. The modern term groups them against the Titans and Olympians, who are born of parents; the Norse Ymir and the Egyptian watery Nu play the same part in their own texts.
Why this wins its question: Separates the modern category from Hesiod's lines and corrects the common placing of Uranus in the first tier.
Key takeaways
- Four came to be without parents — Chaos, Earth, Tartarus, Eros (Theog. 116–122); Uranus is Earth's son, not a primordial.
- Hesiod's Eros is primordial; the Eros who attends Aphrodite (Theog. 201) and Ovid's Cupid are a different figure.
- The tier is Hesiod's; Apollodorus starts with Sky and Homer with Oceanus.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Hesiod's first gods have no parents: "at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth … and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods"; then "from Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day" (Theog. 116–125).
Heaven (Uranus) is of the second step, not the first: "Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side" and then the hills and Pontus, all "without sweet union of love" (Theog. 126–132); he is Earth's child before he is her consort and the Titans' father.
Night continues to bear "though she lay with none": Doom, Fate, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Blame, Woe, the Hesperides, the Fates, Nemesis, Deceit, Friendship, Age and Strife (Theog. 211–225) — a primordial line of personified conditions rather than persons.
Other witnesses start elsewhere: Apollodorus opens with "Sky was the first who ruled over the whole world" (Apollod. 1.1.1) and never mentions Chaos; Homer's Hera names "Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, and mother Tethys" (Il. 14.201).
"Primordial deities" is the modern label for this first tier of Hesiod's genealogy, distinguished from the Titans and Olympians born of parents; the usual list is Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, Eros, Erebus, Nyx and their unfathered children.
The same slot exists elsewhere: in the Norse poems "of old was the age when Ymir lived", before sea, earth or heaven (Voluspo 3), and the Egyptian creation begins with the creator's Eye emerging "from the watery mass (NU)" and the god who "created himself" (Budge Lit. ch. VI; ch. II, "Kheprer, who created himself").