The ominous goddess of the night, Nykt (also Nykta and, less often, Nyx) rightfully occupies one of the central places in the vast pantheon of Greek gods. She was born by Chaos and Mist, later became, in turn, the mother of the deities of death, sleep, fate, old age and others, personifying the mysteries of eternal movement from birth to decay and death. The most famous of her descendants can be called the guide to the world of the dead, Charon, Thanatos - the god of death and his brother Hypnos, the embodiment of sleep. It is noteworthy that she gave birth to her two children, Ether, the sky god and Hemera, the goddess of daylight, from her own brother Erebus, the personification of eternal darkness. Such unions, apparently, were not considered something unnatural in ancient Greek culture, because There are a lot of similar subjects in the study of the mythology of that time.
One of the earliest mentions of Nikta is considered "Theogony", the work of the ancient Greek poet and philosopher Hesiod, in which he tries to streamline contradictory ideas about the divine pantheon and build a kind of family tree showing the origin and relationship of the gods with each other. In this work, Nikta is called the daughter of the primordial Chaos, from which the material world arose, i.e. it is one of the fundamental elements of the universe, without which nothing living can exist. In this regard, the rest of the ancient Greek gods, including Zeus, treated Nikta with respect and did not dare to enter into any disputes with her. Later, the Roman thinker and writer Gaius Julius Giginus, in his works, argued that, according to his information, the mother of Nikta is the Mist, which appeared, apparently, at the same time as Chaos.
The abode of this gloomy goddess is located in an equally gloomy place - in the abyss of Tartarus, located under the kingdom of the dead, Hades. Two goddesses, Nikta and Hemera, meet here, and then alternately go around the Earth. It is logical to assume that Hemera, who carried sunlight and the joy of life, enjoyed much greater love among the ancient Greeks than her dark mother, who covered the world with veils of darkness and mystery. At the same time, Nikta was not perceived as a kind of embodiment of evil, but rather served as a symbol of universal harmony, the balance of natural forces.
Temples and other structures in honor of the goddess of the night, apparently, were not erected. Its image is rarely found on funeral urns, more often on vases and other objects that have no ritual purpose. According to the versions of modern researchers, in the view of the ancient Greeks, Nikta had the appearance of a young woman in black clothes, with a closed face, as a rule. In some Greek tragedies, the authors portrayed the goddess of the night in the form of a girl flying in a chariot with her hair down, dressed in a black cloak studded with stars.
