Nyx, Greek Goddess of Night · Female Voice

Let your eyes close.

There is nothing left tonight that needs you.

Nothing that will not still be there in the morning, waiting, exactly as patient as it was today.

You can put it down.

Not solve it. Not finish it. Just put it down, the way you would set a bag on the floor inside your own front door.

Let your breath out. All the way out, further than feels necessary.

And again.

Feel where you are holding. Most people are holding somewhere they have forgotten about. The jaw. The tongue pressed to the roof of the mouth. The small muscles around the eyes.

The shoulders, drawn up toward the ears as though something might be about to fall.

Let those go, one at a time.

There is nothing falling.

Tonight I want to tell you about the oldest woman in the world.

Not old the way a grandmother is old. Old the way the dark is old. Older than the gods. Older than the sky.

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Her name is Nyx.

The Greeks wrote about her more than once, in more than one tradition, and this is the interesting part. They did not agree on much. They agreed on her.

Start with Hesiod, who wrote the family tree of the gods around seven hundred years before the common era.

He says that first there was Chaos. And out of Chaos came Nyx.

Night herself. Not the goddess of night, the way a person might be given charge of a thing. She is the night. There is no version of her that is separate from it.

And then Hesiod does something that should stop you.

He makes her a mother.

Sleep is her son. His name is Hypnos, and he is the reason you are here tonight.

Death is her other son. Thanatos. And Homer calls those two twins, born together, which is not a small thing to say. The Greeks put Sleep and Death in the same womb on purpose. They were not being morbid.

They were being accurate about something we spend a great deal of energy avoiding.

The dreams are hers as well. Hesiod calls them a tribe, as though they arrive in numbers, which anyone who has lain awake will tell you is exactly right. Everything that will visit you tonight, the good and the strange and the ones you will not remember, all of it comes out of the same mother.

Nemesis is hers. The one who notices when the scales have gone crooked and quietly puts them right.

Eris is hers too, the one who starts the argument nobody wanted.

And in one passage Hesiod gives her the Fates themselves, the three who measure a life and decide where to cut it. Though he changes his mind later in the same poem and gives them to Zeus instead, which tells you something about how uncomfortable that idea made even him.

Look at that list again.

Sleep. Death. Dreams. Justice. Discord.

And possibly the length of your life.

Everything a person cannot argue with. Everything that arrives whether you are ready or not. The Greeks traced all of it back to one mother, and that mother is the night you are lying in.

Here is my favourite thing about her, and it is not a story people tell.

The fourteenth book of the Iliad. Hypnos is talking to Hera. She wants him to put Zeus to sleep so that she can interfere in the war while he is not looking, and Hypnos does not want to do it.

He has done it before, he says. It went badly. Zeus woke up furious, threw the other gods around the sky like furniture, and came looking for him specifically.

And then Hypnos says the thing.

I ran to Nyx. I ran to my mother.

And Zeus stopped.

Not because he could not have reached him. He is Zeus. He could have reached him.

He stopped because he did not want to do anything that would displease swift Night.

The king of the gods. The one who throws the lightning. He came to the edge of the dark, and he turned around and went home, because the woman who lived there was not someone you crossed.

And then there is the third telling, which almost nobody knows.

There was a religious tradition in Greece called Orphism. We have a piece of their writing on a scorched roll of papyrus, pulled out of a funeral pyre near Thessaloniki. It is the oldest book in Europe.

In their version Nyx is not just first. She is an oracle.

She sits in an inner chamber, and she speaks from there, and in their telling of how the world got organised, Zeus does not simply avoid her.

He goes to her, and he asks her how to do it.

He asks Night for instructions.

And she answers him. That is the part I keep returning to. The most powerful thing in existence arrives at the edge of the dark with a question, and the dark has an answer ready.

So consider the pattern. Three separate groups of people, writing in different centuries, with different agendas, all landed in the same place.

Hesiod said she was first, and everything final came out of her.

Homer said the strongest god alive would not cross her threshold.

The Orphics said he came and asked her what to do.

Nobody in the ancient world thought the night was the frightening part.

And you have been lying here treating it as something to survive.

The dark is not the danger.

The dark is the house that even Zeus would not enter.

So consider what it means that you are inside it.

Not exposed. Not caught out in it. Inside.

The oldest thing there is has closed the door behind you, and the loudest thing there is has decided not to knock.

Everything you were carrying today belongs to the daylight. All of it.

The message you did not answer. The thing you said and immediately wanted back. The number in the account. The conversation you have been rehearsing for a week that will probably never happen.

Those are all Hemera's. Day's. Her sister's.

And here is the part Hesiod was precise about, because he was a precise man.

Nyx and Hemera share one house. And they are never inside it at the same time.

One is always going out as the other is coming in. They meet on the bronze threshold and they greet each other, and then they pass, and the house never holds them both.

Which means the day cannot follow you in here.

It is not allowed. It has never been allowed. Not once, in the whole of the telling.

Whatever is waiting for you is waiting on the other side of that threshold, with her sister, in the daylight where it belongs.

So let it go now, one piece at a time.

Feel the weight of your head. Let the pillow take all of it. Your head is heavier than you usually let it be, because part of you has been holding it up all day.

Let your forehead smooth. The space between your eyebrows, where the day collects.

Let your eyes rest back into their sockets. Nothing to look at. Nothing to check.

Let the hinge of your jaw come apart. Most people hold a whole day in that one small joint.

The tongue, heavy, resting on the floor of the mouth.

Your throat, open and soft.

Your shoulders, further down than they were a moment ago. And further than that.

Your arms going loose. From the shoulder to the elbow. From the elbow to the wrist. From the wrist all the way out through the fingers, until your hands are just resting there, holding nothing.

Your chest, rising and falling without you managing it. You have not had to think about a single breath tonight and every one of them arrived anyway.

Your belly, soft. You do not have to hold it in. No one is looking, and she would not care if they were.

Your lower back, letting go into the bed.

Your hips, releasing.

Your legs, heavy. The long muscles of your thighs. Your knees. Your calves.

Your ankles. Your feet, finally still, after carrying you all day without once being thanked for it.

And now her son comes.

Hesiod puts him in his mother's house, which means he has never been far from here. He does not travel to reach you. He was already home.

He does not arrive the way people think. He does not knock you out. He comes in slowly, the way water comes into sand.

He is already here. He has been here since the first breath you let all the way out.

You do not have to reach for him. That is the mistake. That is the thing that keeps people awake, the reaching.

You only have to stop holding the door shut.

So let the room go.

Let the walls go soft and far away.

Let the ceiling go.

Let the sounds outside become weather. Nothing to do with you. A car is just a sound. A voice is just a sound. None of it is asking anything of you.

Let the thoughts keep arriving if they want to. They are allowed to arrive. You just do not have to go with them anymore.

Let them come to the threshold, and greet you, and pass. The way the sister passes at the door without ever sitting down.

You are somewhere older than all of this.

Older than the house you are lying in. Older than the city. Older than the country. Older than the language you are thinking in.

Older than the people who first wrote her name down, and they have been gone a very long time, and the night they wrote about is the same night that is in your room right now. It did not change. It has not aged. It is the one thing that never has.

She was here before any of it.

She will be here after.

And for the next few hours she is holding the whole dark open around you, like a room, the way she has done every night since there were nights.

Her son is already in the house.

Her daughters, the dreams, are somewhere just past the edge of your thinking, waiting to be let in.

And nothing at all is required of you.

Nothing needs you now.

Not until morning. And morning belongs to her sister.

Rest is a practice.

You practised tonight.

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