Gaia A5 Notebook

Gaia. She is the ancestral mother of all life: the primal Mother Earth goddess. She is the mother of Uranus (the sky), from whose union she bore the Titans (themselves parents of many of the Olympian gods) and the Giants, and of Pontus (the sea), from whose union she bore the primordial sea gods. Uranus wasn't thrilled about the offspring that he and Gaia had produced, so he forced them back inside her. As one might expect, she was less than pleased about this, so she persuaded Cronos to castrate his father. Later, she predicted that Cronos would be overthrown by one of his own children. As a precaution, Cronos devoured all of his own offspring, but his wife Rhea hid the infant Zeus from him. Later, Zeus dethroned his father and became the leader of the gods of Olympus. The concept of an earth mother is not exclusive to Greek myth. In Roman legend, she is personified as Terra. The Sumerians honoured Tiamet, and the Maori people honoured Papatuanuku, the Sky Mother. Today, many NeoPagans honour Gaia as the earth, or as the archetypical embodiment of the Earth's power and energy.