Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Gaia, mother of all,
the foundation, the oldest one,
I shall sing to Earth.
She feeds everything in the world.
Whoever you are,
whether you move upon her sacred ground,
or whether you go along the paths of the sea,
you that fly, it is she who nourishes you from her treasure store.
In fact, long before Hesiod and Homer, Gaia was considered to be the most powerful of
all deities, far more important even than Zeus and his Olympian pantheon. Here is how
Charlene Spretnak re-tells the pre-Homeric myth of Gaia:
From the eternal void, Gaia danced forth and rolled herself into a spinning ball. She moulded mountains
along her spine, valleys in the hollows of her flesh. A rhythm of hills and stretching plains followed her
contours. From her warm moisture She bore a flow of gentle rain that fed her surface and bore life.
We have already seen that the experience of Gaia as a living presence was gradually
buried in the West under the accumulating sediments of otherworldly religiosity and of
an exceedingly dualistic science, which saw the Earth as no more than a dead machine
obedient to the blind laws of physics and chemistry. Nonetheless, despite the almost
total oblivion to which the awareness of Gaia was consigned, faint traces of her pres-
ence can still be found in words very much used today, such as
ge
-ology,
ge
ometry
and
ge
-ography, which incorporate, unbeknownst to almost everyone, the seed-syllable
Ge
—which is none other than the ancient and original form of the name Gaia.
I think it reasonable to propose a simple hypothesis—that throughout Gaia's almost
4,000-year long period of exile, Gaian awareness has continued to appear in the minds
of certain receptive individuals via the gateways of intuition, sensing, feeling and think-
ing; the four cardinal points of Jung's mandala of the psyche, and that this is happening
with ever more urgency and intensity in our own time of profound ecological crisis. We
will now look at how Gaian awareness has manifested through each of the four func-
tions (or ways of knowing) in certain key individuals.
Intuition:
Aldo Leopold and the Dying Wolf
Intuitive experience of Gaia can break thorough into consciousness quite unexpectedly,
sometimes so powerfully that our outlook on life can be permanently changed. The fam-
