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Wellsprings
cosmology

The Cosmic Vortex (Dinē)

δίνη

No god spun the heavens — a blind whirl did, sorting atoms like grain on a threshing floor until worlds settled out.

For the early atomists Leucippus and Democritus, the cosmos needs no divine hand: a great rotatory motion, the dinē or "whirl," catches atoms tumbling through the void and spins them into order, flinging the heavy to the center and the light to the edges until a world coheres. Anaxagoras too made a cosmic rotation the engine that separates the mingled stuff of the universe. Aristotle preserved and criticized these whirl-cosmogonies, while Aristophanes mocked them on the comic stage, having a character declare that "Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus" — divine providence replaced by mindless spin.

Where this idea shows up

4 Greek sources·1 Jewish-canon citation

Where to read it