Nyx, primordial Night, is one of the great powers of the Orphic cosmogony. In the Rhapsodic succession she receives the royal scepter from the firstborn Phanes and rules as the second sovereign of the gods; she is at once his daughter, his consort and his nurse, and from her union springs the further generation of Ouranos and Gaia. Night keeps an oracular seat from which she prophesies, and in the theogony expounded by the Derveni commentator it is her counsel that instructs Zeus to swallow the firstborn god and so make himself the source of all things. The Orphic Hymn to Night invokes her as mother of gods and men and origin of all. Sources differ on whether Night or Phanes is the earlier ruler, some Orphic poems opening the whole cosmogony with Night herself.