Aspiring to a lower principle
By Mark-Alec Mellor
Violence out of order
Among cultures that feature chaos in their creation stories, the primordial disorder is not violent, but formless, with all its energy undirected. When order emerges, it comes at the price of conflict: a chaoskampf of rival forces fighting for ascendency. And then, at last, when some degree of cosmic stability has been established—the Heraclitean bow bent back on itself—order takes on a moral and thus human sense: we become implicated in preserving or imperilling it. Into gigantomachies, into the vault of cosmic violence are then carved the first marks of our own transgression.
