- Looks after
- Earth, and the mother of the first generations
- Roman name
- Terra
- Often shown with
- Mountains, caves and fertile ground.
Gaia
Γαῖα
Gaia is the Earth, born after Chaos, and the mother of the sky, the mountains, the sea and the Titans.
Gaia, whose name means earth, comes into being right after Chaos. Hesiod calls her the firm seat of all the immortals who hold the peaks of Olympus. She needs no partner to begin: without a father she bears Uranus (the sky), the Ourea (the mountains) and Pontus (the sea).
She then takes Uranus as her partner and bears the twelve Titans, the Cyclopes and the three hundred-handed giants, the Hecatoncheires. Uranus hides the children away inside her, and in pain she plots against him. She makes a flint sickle and her youngest Titan, Cronus, uses it to overthrow his father.
Gaia keeps appearing as an adviser and prophet. She tells Rhea how to save the infant Zeus from Cronus, and she later bears the monster Typhon in her anger at the gods' victory. Her shrine at Delphi was, in some accounts, held before Apollo came; the Pythia's oracle is said to have passed from Gaia through Themis to Phoebe and then to Apollo.
In later art and language
Gaia is the name James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis gave to their 1970s hypothesis that the living Earth regulates itself as one system.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 116-210, 453-506
- Aeschylus, Eumenides 1-8