Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to see if anyone ever managed to escape from Tartarus.Let's get into it.Tartarus was one of the first-generation primordial deities, the five primeval gods to first emerge from Chaos, the great void that existed before all else. These primordial deities were Gaia, the personification of the earth, Tartarus, the personification of the abyss beneath the earth, Eros, the personification of love and desire, Erebus, the personification of darkness, and Nyx, the personification of night.Tartarus was the vast cavernous plane that existed deep within the earth. It was said that an anvil took nine days and nine nights to plummet from the heavens to the earth; at which point, it would take yet another nine days and nine nights to plunge through the earth to the pit of Tartarus. This way, creation, as conceptualized by the ancient Greeks, existed as a cosmic oval, the flat earth sandwiched between the dome of the heavens and the inverted dome of Tartarus.While Tartarus was characterized by the duality common to all primordial deities, existing as both place and person, he was barely anthropomorphized, almost exclusively existing as the deep dark that functioned as the antithesis of the celestial vault that made up the heavens. Aside from coupling with Gaia on one occasion and siring the monster Typhon, Tartarus, really only featured in Greek mythology as prison, the ultimate prison.
