Pre-Olympian Greek earth goddess, worshiped as mother of all. She mated with her son Uranus and bore Titans, the Cyclops, and Hectoncheires. Worship of Gaia continued after the rise of the Olympians, and she was regarded as a powerful influence in marriage, healing the sick, and divination. She was represented as a gigantic female form. Earlier cultures also had religious concepts of a great earth goddess.
The concept of Gaia as earth goddess has been revived in New Age ecological and mystical beliefs. On September 6, 1970, Otter G'Zell, founder of the Church of All Worlds, one of the early modern Neo-Pagan organizations, had a vision of the unity of the Earth's planetary biosphere—a single organism. He shared the vision with other church members and wrote about it in 1971 in the periodical he edited, The Green Egg.
Atmospheric biochemist James E. Lovelock had a very similar idea at somewhat the same time and through his books Gaia (1979) and The Ages of Gaia (1988) emerged as the leading proponent of this modern Gaia hypothesis of the earth as a living organism. His books propose a dynamic interaction between life and environment, with earth regulating life, and life regulating earth, virtually a single self-regulating entity.
The controversial aspect of Lovelock's concept is the extent the earth may be regarded as a living organism in which life and environment form one dynamic interacting whole. Although not unsympathetic to modern environmentalism, Love-lock proposes a broader frame of reference, and in The Ages of Gaia states: "At the risk of having my membership card of the Friends of the Earth withdrawn, I say that only by pollution do we survive. We animals pollute the air with carbon dioxide, and the vegetation pollutes it with oxygen. The pollution of one is the meat of the other." The Gaia hypothesis has stimulated New Age and Neo-Pagan veneration of Gaia as a living earth goddess and become an integral part of the revival of goddess worship in the last two decades.
The modern Gaia hypothesis was earlier prefigured by such writers as Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) and Francis Younghus-band.
Sources:
Derrey, Francois. The Earth is Alive. London: Arlington Books, 1968.
G'Zell, Otter. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. London: Oxford University Press, 1979.
——. "Theogenesis: The Birth of the Goddess." Green Egg 21, 81 (May 1, 1988): 4-7, 27.
Olson, Carl. The Book of the Goddess, Past and Present. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1983.
Pedlar, Kit. Quest for Gaia. UK: Sovereign Press, 1979.
Stein, Diane. The Women's Spirituality Book. St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 1987.
Younghusband, Sir Francis. The Living Universe. London: John Murray, 1933.
