Hey Everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video we're going to be discussing Tartarus. Tartarus was the great abyss, the bottomless chasm, the deep dark that existed beneath Gaia. It was one of the primordial deities, which meant that it was both person and place, simultaneously existing as a god and as the manifestation of one of the aspects of creation. As a place, Tartarus was usually featured in Greek mythology as the infernal plane of the underworld, reserved for unforgivable sinners and dangerous enemies, such as the Titans and the monster Typhon. Tartarus was one of the five first-generation primordial deities, which meant that he - along with Gaia, the personification of the earth, Eros, the personification of love and desire, Erebus, the personification of darkness, and Nyx, the personification of night - was one of five deities to emerge from Chaos, the great void that existed before all else. According to Hesiod, earth existed equidistant between the heavens and Tartarus. He said that an anvil dropped from the heavens would take nine days and nine nights to plummet to earth, and that the same anvil would again take nine days and nine nights to plunge through the darkness from Earth to the depths of Tartarus.
