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Mircea Eliade - The Earth Mother and Gaia
Identifier
011450
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The earth, as in our planet, has functions and quite complex ones, it rotates, tips on its axis, has layes which do different things.
It is therefore by definition an Entity and by further definition an Intelligence. Intelligences are actually androgynous, but in all archaic thought the earth was our mother, the Intelligence thta nurtured and sustained us, although we are none too good to her in return
A description of the experience
Patterns in Comparative Religion – Mircea Eliade
In all the mythological and ritual patterns we have examined, the earth is primarily honoured for its endless capacity to bear fruit. That is why, with time, the Earth Mother imperceptibly turned into the Corn Mother. But the theophany of the soil never totally disappeared from the picture of 'Mothers' or earth divinities. To give but one example, we can perceive attributes that were originally those of the Earth Mother in all the female figures of the Greek religion – Nemesis, the Furies, Themis. And Aeschylus prays first to the Earth, then to Themis. It is true that Ge or Gaia was eventually replaced by Demeter, but the Hellenes never lost the consciousness of the bond between the goddess of cereals and the Earth Mother. Euripedes speaking of Demeter, says 'She is the Earth... call her what you will!'
Underlying the 'form' of the Great Goddeses, we can still detect the presence of the 'mistress of the place', the Earth Mother. But the newer divinities are clearer in feature, more dynamic in their religious structure. Their history starts to involve emotion – they live the drama of birth, fertility and death. The turning of the Earth Mother into the Great Goddess is the turning of simple existence into living drama......................
One of the first theophanies of the earth as such... was its 'motherhood', its inexhaustible power of fruitfulness. Before becoming a mother goddess, or divinity of fertility, the earth presented itself to men as a Mother, Tellus Mater. The later growth of agricultural cults, forming a gradually clearer and clearer notion of a Great Goddess of vegetation and harvesting, finally destroyed all trace of the Earth Mother. In Greece, the place of Gaia was taken by Demeter, However, certain ancient ethnological documents reveal relics of the old worship of the Earth Mother..........................
The Earth Mother or Great Goddess of Fertility, governs the fate of seeds and that of the dead in the same way. But the dead are sometimes closer to man and it is to them that the husbandman turns to bless and sustain his work. Black is the colour both of earth and of the dead. Hippocrates tells us that the spirits of the dead make seeds grow and germinate and the author of the Geoponica says that the winds – or souls of the dead – give life to plants and everything else