Gaia goes back to the beginning, so said the Greeks, who probably adopted this earth goddess from the people who lived in Attica before they migrated there. She owned a great mountain shrine, where a serpent named Python lived. At that prophetic site, the sybil..named Pythia after the great snake..inhaled sulphurous fumes before speaking in magical phrases about the future. The most famous oracle of the ancient world, Dlphi was Gaia's long before it was overtaken by the interloping god Apollo.
The might overtake her santuary, but the Greeks could not eliminate Gaia nor her worship. And so they did what conquerors usually do with unconquerable supreme gods and goddesses: they incorporated her into their own mythology, naming her as the most ancient of goddesses, the one who existed before anything or anyone else. Gaia was thus praised by the singer of the Homeric Hymns, source of the first invovation, and hundreds of years later by the dramatist Aeschylus, from whose otherwise lost drama THE DAIANADS the second invocation survives. In Rome, Gaia was assimilated to a native earth Goddess, Tellus Mater; the third prayer was offered to her there.
It is important to say what Gaia's original worshippers believed, but here is her myth as the Greeks told it.
In the beginning, they say, there was only formless chaos: light and dark, sea and land, blended in a shapeless pudding. The chaos settled into form, and that form was huge Gaia, the deep.breasted one, the earth.
She existed before time began, for Time was one of her children. In the timeless spans before creation, Gaia existed, to herself and of herself, alone.
But finally Gaia desired love, and for this purpose she made herself a son: Uranus, the heaven, who arched over his mother and satisfied her desire. Thei mating released Gaia's creative force, and she began to produce inumerable creatures, both marvelous and monstrous. The jelous Uranus hated Gaia's other children, so the primeval mother kept them hidden from his destructiveness by keeping them inside her.
Eventually, however, her dark and crowded womb grew too heavy to endure. So Gaia created a new element: gray adament. And from it she fashioned a new tool, never known before: a jagged.toothed sickle. With this Gaia armed her son Chronos (Time), who took the weapon from his mother's hand and hid himself.
Uranus came, drawing a drak sky.blanket over himself as he approached to mount his mother/lover. His brother/son Chronos sprang into action, grasping Uranus's gentitals and sawing them off with the rough blade. Blood rained down on Mother Gaia. So fertile was she that the ash.tree nymths. the Meliae who were humanity's ancestors, sprang up from that blood. Thus we ourselves are grandchildren of earth and sky, according to the Greeks.
After Chrono's success against Uranus had ended the heaven's role as earth's husband, Gaia did not cease in her prodigious productivity. She had dozens of children by as many fathers. She birthed the Giants after mating with Tartarus, her son and ruler of hell; she was mother of the fates, those spinning goddesses who control our destiny, by her son the ocean. And even without mating, she bore other children, including the Python, and another dragon named Ladon. Gaia was stupendously fertile, even managing to carry to term a child conceived when an eager god ejaculated on the goddess Athena's thigh and she, ever the virginal one brushed it off onto the earth.
Gaia was a powerful creator goddess, a parthenogenetic mother who could create the entire world without assistance. She was all knowing, as her temple at Dephi attests, for she knew the future as well as the past. There is perhaps no goddess in Greek literature with the sheer raw power of Gaia, who stands equivalent to the Hebrew Jehovah, from whom the Christian high god descends. Although we cannot know how much of her myth, as recorded by the Greeks reflects the beliefs of her earlier followers, it is likely that Gaia was a strong and fertile force to them as well.
In contemporary science, there is a theory that the earth..soil, water, atmosphere, and living creatures, all together..is a system so intricate and self.regulating that it can be seen as an enormouse, conscious, living entity. The srticulator of the theory, James Lovelock, has called it the Gaia Hypothesis. How fitting that, three thousand years after her worship was suppressed in her homeland, this goddess's name should re.emerge to indicate an intuition that the earth is alive. Alive, and full of enormous generative energy. Alive, and still as creatively productive as in her primeval youth.
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