Chaos in the Theogony and the elder woman in the Story of Asdiwal function as women, but asexually. They furnish the creation of the world with certain conditions for life but not its substance. Thus the mother in the Tsimshian story determines the upriver location for the events of regeneration, and the economic technique (women's autumnal gathering of stationary, vegetable food) which her daughter uses to obtain both food and progeny. Moreover, the mother provides important social and legal sanctions for her daughter's marriage to Hatsenas.

    The marriage of the chieftainess's daughter to Hatsenas is the social catalyst that transforms the women's temporary camp into a new permanent homesite and a center of commerce.

    All the physical effort and material creativity in this Tsimshian myth of regeneration fall to the lot of the younger woman, who obtains a sexual mate from heaven to help her. Meanwhile, her mother supplies intangible rules of procedure and form to control and regulate the younger woman's physical creativity.

    The role of Chaos in the Theogony is essentially the same. All her offspring are incorporeal qualities or conditions of life in the new cosmos and not material creatures, i.e., not the substance of any individual form of life or other physical being. Chaos gives birth to two kinds of darkness, Erebos and Night (Nyx), who are personifications of subterranean and aerial darkness respectively. But like the Tsimshian chieftainess, Chaos has only a slight procreative capacity compared to the younger woman's, and her brief fertility ends before Gaia's begins, just as the Tsimshian mother remains sterile once her daughter's motherhood has begun. Chaos's children Erebos and Night assume responsibility for generating further states of being (Aither and Day), and Night becomes a prolific mother of further abstractions and conditions (but not substance) of being:10

Νὺξ δ᾿ ἔτεκε στυγερόν τε Μόρον καὶ Κῆρα μέλαιναν     211
καὶ Θάνατον, τέκε δ᾿ Ὕπνον, ἔτικτε δὲ φῦλον Ὀνείρων.
δεύτερον αὖ Μῶμον καὶ Ὀιζὺν ἀλγινόεσσαν
οὔ τινι κοιμηθείσα θεὰ τέκε Νὺξ ἐρεβεννή,
Ἐσπερίδας θ᾿, αἷς μῆλα πέρην κλυτοῦ Ὠκεανοῖο
χρύσεα καλὰ μέλουσι φέροντά τε δένδρεα καρπόν·
καὶ Μοίρας καὶ Κῆρας ἐγείνατο νηλεοποίνους,
[Κλωθώ τε Λάχεσίν τε καὶ Ἄτροπον, αἵ τε βροτοῖσι
γεινομένοισι διδοῦσιν ἔχειν ἀγαθόν τε κακόν τε ,]
αἵ τ᾿ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε παραιβασίας ἐφέπουσιν,
οὐδέ ποτε λήγουσι θεαὶ δεινοῖο χόλοιο,
πρίν γ᾿ ἀπὸ τῷ δώωσι κακὴν ὄπιν, ὅστις ἁμάρτῃ.
τίκτε δὲ καὶ Νέμεσιν πῆμα θνητοῖσι βροτοῖσι
Νὺξ ὀλοή· μετὰ τὴν δ᾿ Ἀπάτην τέκε καὶ Φιλότητα
Γῆράς τ᾿ οὐλόμενον, καὶ Ἔριν τέκε καρτερόθυμον.

Night engendered loathsome Doom, and black
    Death-Daemon,
and Thanatos, and she brought forth Slumber,
    and bare also the swarm of Dreams.
Next, Disgrace and agonizing Misery
the goddess dismal Night bare without mating,
and the Hesperides, who on the far side of famous Okeanos
tend the splendid golden apple(tree)s and (other) trees
    bearing fruit.
And she brought forth the fatal Destinies and deadly Fates,
    relentless punishers
[Klotho, and Lachesis, and Atropos too, who apportion
    to mortals
at the time of their birth what they shall have
    of good and of evil]
who beset whatsoever men or gods overstep the bounds
    of their appointed ways,
and never at all do these goddesses abate their
    harsh anger
until they have exacted of the sinner the bitter
    penalty which is due the gods for such a fault.
Deadly Night brought forth Nemesis also, the bane
    of mortal men;
after these she bare Guile and Lust,
and vile Senectitude, and strong-hearted Strife.

    Gaia's first act of cosmogony is to give birth to Mountains and Pontos, personified high land and deep sea. Gaia does this singly, before coition with her heavenly paramour Ouranos. These asexually gotten progeny embody two contrasts:

    Pontos and Mountains are Gaia's counterparts to Chaos's parthenogenetically conceived children Night and Erebos, who are also composed of two contrasts:

    So at the very beginning of cosmogony, before the first acts of sexual procreation, Chaos and Gaia share (the one abstractly and the other concretely) in establishing distinctions of above/below and mobility/imobility. The two women in the story of Asdiwal follow the same pattern in their first joint efforts to reconstruct their world at the beginning of paragraph seven.

    By these acts, the Tsimshian widows together reassert the two geographic distinctions which were abolished earlier in the cosmodialytic portion of the tale.

    They leave the movement of their convergent journeys on the frozen water behind them and choose a fixed location on land for their campsite. The place they select is beneath a large tree, a new axis of up and down to replace the Skeena river, whose directional contrasts of economic utility have temporarily (seasonally) failed. So, like Chaos and Gaia, the Tsimshian mother and daughter act jointly to polarize contrasts of direction and motion before the younger woman submits to male influence and begins the work of physically (re)populating the cosmos and providing food.

    Chaos's and Gaia's first pairs of asexually conceived children in the Theogony are opposed to each other not only as intangible abstractions vs. concrete instantiations, but also by inversion:

    In a time of cosmic desolation the Greek and Tsimshian stories both depict the upper world as fruitful. After helping to establish the polarity of up and down, the elder primordial females retire in both stories while the younger unite with male representatives of upper cosmic regions. By her union with Heaven, Gaia peoples the universe with Titans, monsters, gods, plant life, and men.11 Asdiwal's mother correspondingly peoples the Tsimshian world by commerce and childbearing through her union with Hatsenas, messenger of Heaven. Standing beneath the sycamore tree from which all manner of food animals fall at the command of Hatsenas, the little Tsimshian noble woman exploits the masculine fecundity of the upper world from a feminine position in the lower world, just as Gaia does in the Theogony.

    In both her presexual and sexual phases, the daughter in the Tsimshian story rapidly restores the normal contrasts of her world which were compromised by winter famine:

    Hatsenas's desire to formalize his arrangement with the Tsimshian woman and the willingness of her mother to grant the necessary sanction complement each other to redress the opposition:

    The most spectacular feat of cosmogony in both the ancient Greek and modern Tsimshian narration is the generation of male presence and power in a world where only female forces are previously active. The introduction of an active male is the focus of fiction and miracle in narratives of this pattern wherever they are found. The male interloper everywhere makes his entry into the fable with the same dramatic, unlikely suddenness; as well he may, for he is the original deus ex machina, the praeternatural agent who completes the work of cosmogony by stimulating population of the world and providing food. It is he who finally terminates the ‘primordial condition.’

    In the direst circumstances, Hatsenas enters the widows' crude shelter and comforts the younger, fertile woman as though in a dream. The order of his actions is as strange as Hatsenas himself. Since he had that power, he might more considerately have fed the hungry young widow before he dallied with her beside her lonely fire. But Hatsenas could hardly choose other than to be coarse; the universal pattern in this cosmogonic tale requires the female to get progeny first and only afterwards to be fed.

    The old chieftainess and her daughter have had nothing to eat but a single rotten hawberry between them, when the daughter begins to manipulate hewn wood.

    Like Hatsenas the Messenger of Heaven descending to earth for a midnight visit to the Tsimshian woman, Heaven descended to Earth by night in the Theogony:

ἦλθε δὲ νύκτ᾿ ἐπάγων μέγας Οὐρανός, ἀμφὶ δὲ Γαίῃ     176
ἱμείρων φιλότητος ἐπέσχετο, καὶ ῥ᾿ ἐτανύσθη
πάντῃ·

Then great Heaven descended bringing night with him, and spread himself out delighting in love-making all over the Earth, and he stretched himself to cover her up completely.

1.   Okeanos (=the waters around Earth)
2.   Koios (husband of Phoibe, father of stars and wind)
3.   Krios
4.   Hyperion (‘He Above’)
5.   Iapetos (inventor of mortality)
6.   Theia (wife of Hyperion)
7.   Rhea (wife of Kronos, mother of Olympian gods)
8.   Themis
9.   Mnemosyne (‘Remembrance,’ mother of the Muses)
10.   Phoibe
11.   Tethys (wife of Okeanos, mother of 3,000 river-gods
         and the Oceanids; nurse of Hera)
    ------------------
    
12.   Kronos, father of Zeus
    

    In a corresponding manner, the little noble Tsimshian woman after her initial union with the Messenger of Heaven gets a series of creatures nine in number ending with Hatsenas himself, the father of Asdiwal. As in an advancing pregnancy, the bulk and importance of what is attained increases at each of the nine steps:

1.   Squirrel
2.   Grouse
3.   Porcupine
4.   Beaver
5.   Mountain Goat
6.   Black Bear
7.   Grizzly Bear
8.   Caribou
   ------------------
   
9.   Hatsenas, father of Asdiwal

Then two large grizzly bears fell down, and two black bears, and two large mountain-goats came down... .

1. Descent of heaven and union with fertile younger of two females.

2. Getting of 12/9 creatures representing the diversity of useful beings in the cosmos, including father of future cosmotact.

3. Getting of dangerous brutes.

4. Emergence of the unstable aerial male progenitor's heir.