Gaea

The sure foundation of all that is

The goddess called Gaea, is also called Ge, or even Ga. The word means earth in Greek, and in modern usage in European languages, is the core word in words describing the sciences of the earth, of mapping, etc. Gaea is, in the strictest interpretation, the earth itself. The dirt and stone upon which we stand, but that, I think, is too simplistic a way to look at a goddess whose role in the cosmos is so vast and so overwhelmingly important.

Gaea is the power behind matter (as opposed to energy) and the way matter combines and recombines to form life. Gaea is, the very fount from which life in the cosmos emanates, even if it is not she alone who is its genesis, for that all the Gods contribute some of their energies. Gaea is the foundation and in a real way, the cause of what we know as cosmos today. Where Nyx needed to spread her black wings to make space, it was due to Gaea's material presence in the cosmos that she needed to do so. and Eros needed to bend and warp space itself to accomodate her, causing gravity. It is Gaea who, in our mythology, gives birth to the sky and then mates with him to bring forth the Gods themselves.

In science, Gaea is matter. She is the state of energy that is not energetic, but solid and made up of atoms. She is the bender of space-time who intrudes upon the cosmos and brings forth new things and is the medium for the coming of life. If the big bang can be described as the sudden explosion of matter into the cosmos, that matter was Gaea, and therefore she can be said to be the eldest of all Gods, the mother of us all.

But how does that figure? Is Gaea just an anthropomorphic view of the physical form of energy? The answer is that she is the architect of such forces, and it is through her that the works in the cosmos that make matter possible work. But matter is a form of energy, made solid and essentially stored, and to that there is also an analogy to Gaea, for seen as the Earth itself, Gaea also holds within her the Chthonic underworld, Chthon is another of her names, and the underworld is the place where the energies of life go, awaiting their recycling into other life. In other words, life disintegrates thanks to the power of Nyx, and becomes simple organic elements in the earth that feed new life and becomes part of it.

But if this is the way to look at Gaea in the physical sense, what of the spiritual? How does one put to use that power that is Gaea in the spiritual growth that is so important to us?

Well, that is not so simple as one might think. Gaea shares her domain openly. Indeed, all the Gods have chthonic aspects, meaning they interact with her and Nyx in that dark aspect of nature. All Goddesses, in particular, have aspects of natural growth that one generally associates with mother Earth herself. Demeter in particular shares more of these aspects, Goddess of grains and link to the underworld, than almost any other, and in the "Great Goddess" aspects, most Goddesses of the Olympian Pantheon seem to take over for Gaea. Why is that?

Gaea is an immense power, and while all gods are nigh omnipotent, they act upon the universe at different levels, and it is in this interaction that we judge the relative power of a deity on the mortal plane. Gaea's interaction with the universe is so cosmic that it becomes easy for man to ignore or take it for granted. Like the sun rising every morning, we just barely notice the miracle.

Another thing is that Gaea is not just the bountiful earth, but she is also the rocks, the bottom of the sea, the highest peak, the lowest valley, and as such, hers is the entirety of the material world, not just that power that gives us crops, because that is a power of life and of man's inventive capacity to put it to use, and all the Gods have a hand in those.

If Demeter is the power of the growth of plants and the giver of the gift of agriculture to man, then Gaea is the means by which she accomplishes this, and here we see one of the fundamental truths of polytheism, that the Gods do not work alone, they do not work isolated from each other, but work together to accomplish their great works, and among the elder Gods, Gaea is perhaps the most shining example of this for in the myths of cosmogenesis, she works with Kronos to stop the violence of Ouranos, works with Rhea to end the violence of Kronos, and is key to many of the works of the gods.

Gaea, the great earth mother.

As Great Mother Goddess, the Earth Mother, Gaea is the counterpart of the Great Sky Father. The god we call Zeus, but who, in relation to her, is best called Ouranos, the sky father in his most primordial aspect. In these aspects, both of these gods, along with Pontus, the primordial Sea Father, are responsible for the initial formations of organic matter that eventually became life.

Whether these deities have worked this miracle millions of times on other worlds is not something we can speculate on, even if statistically it is logical, but here on earth, the miracle happened, and with the waters of the primordial sea, the carbon compounds of the earth, and the lightning strikes of the sky, the transformation of inert substances into organic ones that could potentially become life was done, and from there other miracles would follow, and to this day, those earthy compounds, that spark of energy, and that miraculous compound we so simply call water are the basis of all life on earth.

We are of them, in this way, and most surely of her, the great earth mother.

The Great Mother and Neo-Paganism

If a goddess is well known in neo-pagan circles, and is venerated by them in many ways, it has got to be the Great Earth Mother herself. We, in neo-Hellenism call her Gaea, but for many neo-pagan traditions she became analogous with all of the goddesses of the many pantheons of the world, and while this is true of many of those goddesses which are venerated by different cultures as the earth, the Hindu Devi, the Norse Frigga, the Chinese Hu-Tu, and the Middle Eastern Tiamat are prime examples of this, but looking at some of the associations we begin to see that they suffer from a dependence on a duo or monotheistic philosophy that tends to reduce things to singularity, or at best, a polarity of two forces, one that can be labelled masculine, and one feminine, yet we know that masculinity and femininity are fluid, and that male and female are only applicable to life as we know it, as it exists here on earth where the roles of the male and the female are not as strictly upheld as we often like to believe.

But leaving the philosophical and cosmological disagreements aside, the Earth Mother, holy Gaea, is perhaps the single most worshipped deity in the Pagan world today, and in that sense, there is a connection between the neo-Pagan and Wiccan communities and us, and that connection is Gaea, who is, after all, the connection between all of us who partake of the gift of life.