Gaia

Earth at the beginning

Gaia is Earth itself as a goddess. The early Greek poet Hesiod tells how the world began in his Theogony, a poem about the birth of the gods. In it, Gaia comes right after Chaos. Hesiod calls her broad-bosomed, the secure foundation of the immortals who live on snowy Olympus. She is more than the soil under later events. She produces the structure of the world.

Without a partner, Gaia gives birth to starry Uranus, the sky, to cover her. She also bears the mountains, as homes for nymphs, the spirits of nature, and Pontus, the sea. With Uranus she then bears the 12 Titans, followed by the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers. Her children are both persons and parts of the ordered world. Sky, sea, mountains and the generations of gods all come from Earth.

So her name is unusually exact. Gaia is both the goddess and the ground. Ancient writers can speak of her as a mother who plans and suffers, and then turn without difficulty to Earth as the place where an altar stands.

The sickle made inside the earth

Uranus pushes each newborn child back into the hidden places of Gaia as soon as it appears. Hesiod does not describe a prison somewhere under the earth. The prison is Gaia herself. She groans under the weight, and she makes an answer from the same body that is being forced to hold them.

She turns grey adamant, an unbreakable metal, into a great sickle and asks her children to punish their father. All of them are afraid except Cronus, the youngest Titan. Gaia hides him in ambush and puts the blade in his hands. At night Uranus spreads himself over the earth, and Cronus reaches out and cuts him.

The blood falls on Gaia. From it come the Erinyes, the Giants and the nymphs of the ash trees. The severed part falls into the sea. Foam gathers around it, and from the foam the goddess Aphrodite is born.

So the first handover of power among the gods begins inside Gaia and by her plan. Cronus strikes the blow, but the plan, the hiding place and the weapon are hers.

The first prophet at Delphi

Delphi was the home of Apollo’s oracle, a place where a god answered questions through a priestess. The playwright Aeschylus opens his play the Eumenides inside Apollo’s sanctuary there. In the first lines, the Pythian priestess names Earth before any other prophet. Themis, Earth’s daughter, receives the prophet’s seat from her. Then Phoebe takes it, with the consent of Themis, and gives it to Apollo as a birth gift. Apollo is fourth in that line.

The Greek traveller Pausanias records another version. In the earliest times, he says, the oracle belonged to Earth, and she made the mountain nymph Daphnis her prophetess. He then cites a poem in which Earth and the god Poseidon share the oracle. Earth speaks for herself, and Poseidon answers through Pyrcon. Later Earth gives her share to Themis. Apollo gets Poseidon’s share by giving him the island of Calaureia in exchange.

The two accounts disagree on whether Earth held Delphi alone or with Poseidon. They agree on the point that matters for Gaia. Apollo’s sanctuary remembered a prophet before Apollo, and that prophet was Earth.

The ash altar at Olympia

At Olympia, Pausanias lists the altars in the order in which they received their rites. Among them he finds another trace of Earth. On the place called the Gaeum stands an altar of Earth made of ashes. The Eleans also say that an oracle of Earth once worked there. Nearby, on the place called the Mouth, stands an altar of Themis.

Nothing in his account says the oracle at Olympia was still working in his own day. What survives is an altar, a place name and a report of an older practice. Together they show, on a smaller scale, the same order kept at Delphi: Earth comes first, and Themis follows her.

Gaia begins Hesiod’s world as the ground that can bear gods. At Delphi and Olympia, the ancient evidence also remembers her as a prophet who spoke.