The French like to say that God created woman, but the ancient Greeks knew better: it was woman who created the gods. Well, perhaps not exactly a living breathing woman like you and I, but the great mother of gods and people, animals and plants, personified by earth itself. The Greeks liked to describe her as 'broad-bosomed' and 'many-flowered'; an 'all-nourisher' and 'all-destroyer'. To them, she was the ultimate goddess of raw, maternal power. She was worshipped in caves and by springs where her life-giving water burst forth like milk from breasts or menstrual blood. They called her Gaia: the one we are born from and fed by, but also the one we return to when we die. The original Big Mama.

Gaia created and manifested herself out of a nothingness called Chaos. Besides becoming the first 'self-made woman', the formidable goddess conceived and became Earth, birthing all forms of nature. Sadly, her solitude was as vast as the landscapes she had shaped from her womb. Longing for love, she created a mate: the sky, aka Uranus. Their union was explosive - as you can imagine - resulting in the birth of the seas (Oceanus), light (Theia) and even time (Kronos), to name but a few. But Gaia's fertility had a shadow side. Her next children were monstruous; one-eyed Cyclopes and terrifying fifty-headed creatures. Gaia loved them; Uranus hated them so much that he pushed them back into Gaia's womb. And with that, the god of the sky had committed the world's very first crime.