The French like to say that God created women, 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.

We tend to think of Mother Earth mostly as warm, voluptuous, nurturing and green. But as Stephen Fry warns in ‘Mythos’: she can be ‘crueler, harsher and more terrifying than even the wildest sea’. Just think of all the fire she literally harbors inside, waiting to erupt! Not surprisingly, Gaia’s revenge on Uranus was gruesome, resulting in Kronos castrating his father with a sickle Gaia had forged and throwing the genitals in the sea (goddess Aphrodite was born from the resulting seafoam). Seen through modern eyes, the message is clear: when you upset the equilibrium of the earth, destruction follows. No wonder modern–day Gaias like Greta Thunberg are urging us to restore our relationship with Mother Earth, while scientists like James Lovelock use the ancient, all-encompassing goddess to explain to us that the earth is not many isolated parts but one interdependent super organism*. And so, Gaia the original Superwoman lives on; a fierce and eternal reminder of the miracle of life.

* A theory known as the Gaia Hypothesis