Gaia as Foundation

In Hesiod’s Theogony, after Chaos has come to be, Gaia “makes her appearance” — and with her, Vernant insists, “a kind of basis, a foundation, is established in the unorganized world. Space acquires the beginnings of an orientation” (Vernant 1982). She is the universal mother who gives birth to all things — “the heavens, the waves, and the mountains to the gods and men” — and she is the first stable thing in a cosmos that until her arrival had no place at which to stand.

Gaia gives birth to Ouranos as her equal — “she bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side” — establishing the first paired structure of the cosmos, the world-parents whose later separation by the act of Kronos’s castrating sickle inaugurates the genealogy of the gods. Read in the world-parents frame Neumann inherits from Bachofen, this is the textual origin of the developmental drama by which differentiated consciousness extracts itself from undifferentiated unity.

For the depth tradition Gaia is therefore not first an “earth goddess” in the popular sense but the figure of foundation as such — the principle that the unstructured can become structured, that Chaos can give way to kosmos, by the appearance of a power that is itself stable and generative. She is the headwater of what the Lineage will later name the Great Mother in her supportive aspect, distinct from her devouring aspect.

Relationships

• hesiodic-cosmogony-chaos
• theogony
• hesiod
• separation-of-the-world-parents
• succession-myth
• neumann-great-mother

Primary sources

• theogony (Hesiod c. 700 BCE)
• vernant-origins-greek-thought (Vernant 1982)