5.2: Gaea--the Greek Great Mother Goddess

Beyond the three duties of life, death and rebirth the most formidable power of the Great Mother Goddess is parthenogenesis, the ability to procreate without a male and without intercourse. Within the Greek pantheon, Gaea and Hera both reproduce through parthenogenesis; though in some versions, Hera’s son Hephastus is said to be Zeus’ son. In the Theogony, Gaea and Eros–divine love–precede all other gods. But Hesiod’s focus is on Gaea, who embodies the complex mysteries of the universe including the upper and lower levels of the earth, the tension of light and darkness, and the spark of life and the silence of death. The Divine Creation embodies fear because the cosmic womb captures both birth and death.

Similar to other creation stories, Gaea’s parthenogenetic creation begins with division and differentiation, much like the early stage of human conception, but on a much grander stage. Inspired by the life force of Eros, she employs her divine Creatrix ability to birth Ouranos, the Sky God of the Greeks and in doing so, sheds the masculine elements of her primordial self. His birth is followed by more spectacular births: the mountains and the sea and other varieties of life until her lands are filled with the noisy and colorful sentience of her unaided labor. Each of these births offers a benefit to the world, laying the essential natural elements for the coming human race. Hesiod, like other tellers of creation myths, speaks in broad and brief language about the act for there were no human witnesses to: the original genesis. But who amongst us has not stood on a mountain top, or at the edge of the ocean, or over a spectacular vista unmarred by the interruption of human structures and not felt awe. Within that awe, we’re struck by the miraculous energy that created and ordered such landscapes. Further, witnessing the devastation caused by a fire, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption reminds us that the very powerful cosmic energy that grants glorious life can just as quickly annihilate it. Questions about the autonomy and the will of such forces plagued early people–as with moderns who still wrestle with these questions–as they sought to understand the nature of Gaea.

Jungian psychologists would identify the Collective Unconscious at work during the composition of creation myths, citing the parallels between differing cultures’ envisioned genesis. Freud, Jung’s early mentor, identified the tensity between life and death as Eros, “life force” and Thanatos, “death drive.” The human condition is to be constantly at war between the pull of life-affirming choices and life-destroying choices, those manifested as mindless aggression, compulsivity, and reckless self-destruction. Naming this drive after the god of death, Thanatos, is apt. Humans, separated from the life-affirming influence of Eros, seek to return to the comfort of the womb within the stillness of the grave. Archeological evidence from graves of numerous primitive cultures, where bodies are placed into the fetal position, confirms the belief between death and the return to the womb.

To early Greeks, Gaea’s power encompassed the uncontrolled, unmanageable womb that could both grant and extract life. Yet, the influence of Eros, the life force that accompanied Gaea’s original creations, tempers the philosophical fears of nihilistic destruction by directing divine, and human, energy toward sexual union. Her inexorable separation from her maleness then transfers the creative act, which previously was absent of sexual or pleasurable impulse, toward the erotic.

This new erotic tension between masculine and feminine forces mirrors that between the life force of Eros and the death drive of Thanatos and features thematically, not only in mythology, but in the wider body of literature that examines the human experience; ultimately, there are only two subjects at the core of literature: sex and death.

Like the planets in our solar system are held in the gravitational thrall of the Sun, so too is the dynamic of male and female energies, and the continuum of creation and destruction they enact. The cycle plays out in the subsequent heroic episodes of myth, "as god or heroes who desire erotic reunion with the feminine force while pursuing ego-preserving or power-enhancing goals, often at the expense of the women and children in their lives; or as heroes who strive to attain the immortal condition of the male sky gods only to find that they must descend to the (feminine) Underworld in order to make the attempt" (Harris and Platzner 145).

The orchestration of Gaea’s universe unleashes the various tensions and attractions that make human and immortal existence interesting and frightening, beguiling and repellent. It underscores the challenges between light and darkness, good and evil, divine and mortal, progenitor and offspring, and male and female.