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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture John Dillon wrote: > medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture > > On Tuesday, August 5, 2008, at 3:51 pm, Diana Wright wrote: > > >> Chaos is a yawning gap -- Gk verb, chanein, to yawn. For a place >> named >> Chaos or some variant, I would look for a ravine in the vicinity. >> Certainly a ravine could have a spring. The early Gk idea of Chaos >> implies neither disorder nor emptiness, per se. >> > > Thanks for this. It's one of the accidents of survival that this word's earliest occurrence is the personification Chaos at Hesiod, _Theogony_, v. 116 and that subsequent uses in theological and cosmological discourse by early poets and philosophers so dominate the early record that its ordinary meanings of "gape" and "chasm" don't begin to show up in its entry in LSJ until meaning number 4, with citations from the Septuagint. > > I'd also forgotten the Chaos at Mycenae, which I gather is the name both of a ravine and of the torrent that flows through it. > > Contemporary Greek for that at Mycenae is Charadros [main noun f. charadra]. Rare is the torrent in modern times. I wonder how Chaos/ravine-gap ties in with the development of images of Hell? DW ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html