![]() Still other myths contend that he’s the son of Chaos alone, and that Aether is a part of her essence. In others, he’s considered to be the son of Erebos alone and have no mother. In some, he’s considered to be the son of Nyx and Erebos. She was considered to be the mother of the moon and sun as well as the Titaness who governed clear skies.ĭifferent sources have different myths regarding Aether’s parentage. All of these areas were Aether’s domain, while other parts of the Earth fell to Chaos.Īether did have a female counterpart, referred to as Aethra or Aithre in ancient Greek myths. Aether’s DomainĪether was thought to envelop the moon, sun, stars, clouds, and peaks of the mountains. The final air was governed by Erebos, and it was considered to be the mists that existed in the underworld. The air directly below him, dispersed over the Earth, was the domain of Chaos. He represented all of the air at the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere. This means that all of the air between the sky and Earth’s air was considered to literally be Aether.Īether was one of three primordial air gods. Instead, Aether was considered to literally be that element. Gods of the sun were regarded differently from gods of the day.Īs a primordial god, Aether wasn’t depicted as a humanoid personification of an element. In the ancient Greek tradition, day and night were separate from the sun and the moon. Hemera was both Aether’s sister and his wife. In the morning, Hemera would disperse the mists of the night to reveal Aether’s blue ether again. This also blocked Aether’s domain from the reach of the ancient Greeks. At night, Nyx was drawing her veil across this dome to obscure the light. The ancient Greeks believed that the sky was a dome that encased the entirety of the Earth. Nyx, the goddess of night, was the mother of Aether. Air on the earth was governed by the primordial goddess Chaos, but all of the air above this was Aether’s domain. Aether’s mists were able to fill the space between the transparent mists on the ground and the solid dome that made up the sky. He was also the god of the sky, which the ancient Greeks considered to be “blue ether” that represented heaven. (“The major zeitgeber for our sleep and wake cycle is the nychthemeral alternation of dark and light that occurs on the planet we inhabit.” - William H Moorcroft, Understanding Sleep and Dreaming, 2005.Aether, sometimes also spelled Aither, was a primordial god of light. We suffer jet lag because the two cycles get out of step. ![]() Those scientists who study the ways in which the body’s physiological activity varies hour by hour, as in sleep research, make a distinction between nychthemeral and the more common Latin-derived circadian (from circa, about, + dies, a day).Ĭircadian refers to daily cycles that are driven by an internal body clock, while nychthemeral rhythms are imposed by the external environment. Though nychthemeron seems terminally obscure, it is still around, as is its adjective, nychthemeral. It was written that way round because in classical times a new day began at sunset, a rule perpetuated in some religions today. ![]() It’s not infrequently spelled nycthemeron instead and the usual pronunciation, with a th in the middle (as in thin), blurs the join between the two Greek elements. Most dictionaries define it as a day and a night, a period of 24 hours, but they ought strictly to say that it’s a night and a day, because the Greek roots of the word are nyktos (night) and hemera (day).
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