In celebration of this 45th
Earth Day, I would like to acknowledge the ancient Greek Goddess of the Earth,
Gaia.
The Greeks saw her this way:
The Mother of us all
the oldest of all
hard,
splendid as rock
Whatever there is that is of
the land
it is she
who nourishes it,
It is the Earth
that I sing.
Hesiod's Theogony is an ancient
story about the creation of the world by the Greek Earth Mother, Gaia. First there was Chaos, and then appeared
"broad-bosomed" Earth, who bore, first of all and as her equal, the
starry Sky, Ouranos. Then She bore the
great mountains, valleys, plains and the Sea, and after that She mated with
Ouranos and bore many children, among whom were the Titans and Titanesses, the
ancestors of the Olympian divinities, who represented the 'titanic' forces of
the earth. Yet, although Ouranos came
every night to mate with his wife, Gaia, from the very beginning he hated the
children whom Gaia bore him. As soon as
they were born, he hid them and would not let them come out into the
light. He hid them in the inward hollows
of the Earth, and it is said that he took pleasure in this wicked deed.
The
goddess Gaia groaned under this affliction, and felt herself oppressed by her
inner burden. Therefore she devised a
stratagem. She brought forth gray iron
and made a mighty sickle with sharp teeth.
Then she took counsel with her sons and daughters, asking who would
avenge her for this wicked deed. Only
Kronos (Saturn) took courage and agreed to act on her behalf. So Gaia rejoiced, and hid Kronos in the place
appointed for the ambush, giving him the sickle and telling him her plan. And when Ouranos came at nightfall, inflamed
with love and covering all the Earth, his son thrust out his left hand and
seized his father. With his right hand
he took the huge sickle, quickly cutting off his father's manhood, and cast it
behind his back into the sea.
Gaia
received in her womb the blood shed by her spouse, and gave birth to the
Erinyes - the strong ones - and to other creatures. The father's genitals fell into the sea, and
it mixed with the foam and gave birth to Aphrodite. Since that time, the sky has no longer
approached the earth for nightly mating.
As with any story, let this one work
on your heart and your imagination. The
world is recreated in each moment. That’s
amazing. So it stands to reason that we
too go through times when our whole world is created anew. That’s when Gaia can be our guide. This is a
perfect time to understand how creation works, because with the strong
astrological aspects going on for the past few years, we are ready for a new
story. We are all in the process of
creating a new life for ourselves.
So with Gaia’s help, let’s look at
what she has to teach us about the process of creation. Just as the Earth gives birth to the whole
world, our experience of the Earth and our personal relationship with nature
gives birth to our own world-view. Gaia’s
myth says that first there is chaos, or
nothingness, and then there is Earth, or form. This implies that within chaos there are
inherent forms. Each moment of chaos has
shapes within it.
Admittedly, it is very hard for most
of us to imagine living within the chaos, for we are troubled by any confusion
in our lives. But this image also warns us that there is a need to allow some
chaos, for there is always the danger that we will try to get rid of the
confusion too quickly, thereby losing whatever new forms are about to emerge
from it. The very nature of creativity
entails chaos and times of daydreaming, as any artist will tell you. Joseph Campbell said that "Until you are
willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never
grow bigger, better, or more useful."
There are fallow periods in our
lives and in our days when nothing much seems to happen. (Oh, how hard that is on our masculine,
left-brain consciousness!) What do we do
with the fact that the very nature of our being is chaotic? We create ourselves and our reality each
moment! Those moments do contain the
chaos of imminent creation, because each moment asks us to make choices out of
our free will.
Ouranos, Gaia’s lover and father of her
children, symbolizes the Divine Plan before manifestation, the cosmic laws that
order the Universe, the urge for perfection, the ideal vision of life. It’s very hard for the Ideal to manifest in
all its perfection. Therefore, like
Ouranos, that first masculine consciousness who takes pleasure in the feminine
but rejects the fruits of their union, we may too quickly impose a form, an
agenda on our chaos; the 'shoulds' and 'oughts' of our lives are imposed too
readily onto our inner and outer chaos and children. Perhaps this myth explains why our modern
masculine consciousness has such a hard time giving over power to feminine
consciousness: the masculine likes order and control and loses itself too
readily in the chaotic processes of creation, which is the work of right-brain
feminine consciousness.
There is always a tension and
antagonism between the creative idea and its manifestation. Overwhelmed by the power of our ideal
vision, our own creativity (which is of the Earth) rebels and might retaliate –
because of time constraints, day to day pressures or just plain giving up under
the pressure (Saturn/Kronos as worldly authority and time and constriction) –
by cutting off the source of inspiration, our creative imagination.
There is also the new life that
grows spontaneously from within our inner chaos. This is the mystery of continuous creation we
need to open ourselves to. This is the
mystery of Spring, of new life that comes out of seeming death. Our directed, goal-oriented, reasonable
ego-consciousness hates mystery, and is afraid of the creativity of feminine
consciousness because it is wild and passionate, unpredictable and chaotic, and
often demands the death of old, worn-out ego ideals before it can create
something new. Perhaps this is why
Ouranos feared to let his children out, for then he would have had to change
and adapt, and not live in absolutes. We all need to face our fears as well as our
creativity and our desires. Can we let
the forms and the images that are inherent within us come into the light of
day? Can we allow them a place in our
lives so we can be co-creators of our lives?
There is so much potential within each one of us if we can only allow it
to gestate in the chaos.
To begin to do this, let’s re-learn
how to mother ourselves, which is essentially to give birth to ourselves. If we can accept the instinct to mother as a grounding
and nurturing instinct, we need to also accept that sometimes the instinct will
be to jump into the dark abyss of Chaos.
If we can do this, we might discover a more fulfilling and creative way
to live life.
Here is a dream of the Goddess as
Mother, a dream that asks the dreamer to accept deep love and mothering from
her inner dark Goddess. When she accepts
this nurturing, she is restored. She is
a beautiful woman and the whole universe is hers!
I am an infant, lying
alone in the grass. A great Being picks
me up. She is huge and black skinned. She has a beautiful face and
large soft breasts. She has the kindest smile I have ever seen. She
holds me and sits down on the great stone steps of an alabaster temple.
She nurses me with the milk of human kindness. I grow into a woman. We are dressed in the most beautiful
garments. I have on a rose madder color robe and she has on an
ultramarine robe with small silver stars on it. It is the entire
universe.
The Great Goddess Gaia will nurture us
if we honor her every day. This is the
most important thing we can do this Earth Day.
Most ancient cultures that lived close
to the Earth - the Celts, the Aborigines, the Native Americans, and Western
culture itself until the sixteenth century - revered Earth as the Mother. They knew they were made from the dust of
this Earth, that they shared this Earth with the other animals, the trees, the
rivers and seas. They knew that they
were part of the Great Round of Nature, one with all the other works of the
Mother. They knew that just as the
animals gave up their lives to feed and nourish human beings, so too, human
beings gave back their lives to the Great Mother when death took us. They understood the wisdom and necessity of
the cyclic processes of Her mysteries, and they lived within that cycle of
gestation, birth, death and regeneration as in the protective circle of a
mother's arms. For them, the Earth was
animate and divine; She set the rhythms of life for all Her children. She was the Divine Nourisher and Sustainer,
giving humans beautiful children and plentiful harvests; She was also the Divine
Destroyer, taking back Her own. She was,
and is, the bedrock and foundation of all that draw their life from Her.
We modern people need to honor our
Mother Earth. We need to consciously
live in tune with her cycles and in connection with all her children. We need to come back into resonance with her
pulse. And then we will be willing to
listen to her wisdom.
The Native Americans treasured the
wisdom of the Earth. Luther Standing
Bear, a Lakota (Sioux) medicine man, wrote:
The
Lakota was a true Naturist - a Lover of Nature.
He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing
with age. The old people came literally
to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being
close to a mothering power. It was good
for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their
moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and
their altars were made of earth. The
birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final
abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing
and healing.
That is why the old Indian still
sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its
life-giving forces. For him, to sit or
lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly;
he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship
to other lives about him. . . .
Kinship with all creatures of the
earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a
brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of
the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood
they spoke a common tongue.
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature
becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led
to lack of respect for humans too. So he
kept his youth close to its softening influence.
Blessed
Be!
Cathy
