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*Barbara Walker, in her book: ‘The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets’ did an excellent expose’ on Mother Earth. I’d like to share that in this article. In her words:

Herodotus said, “Three different names have been given to the earth, which is but one, and those derived from the names of women.” Herodotus miscounted. Thousands of feminine names have been given to the earth. Continents – Asia, Africa, Europe – were named after manifestations of the Goddess. Countries bore the names of female ancestors or of other manifestations of the Goddess: Libya, Lydia, Russia, Anatolia, Latium, Holland, China, Ionia, Akkad, Chaldea, Scotland (Scotia), Ireland (Eriu, Hera) were but a few. Every nation gave its own territory the name of it’s own Mother Earth.

Mother Earth received universal worship because she was the universal parent. American Indians still relate how all peoples and animals in the beginning emerged from Earth’s yonic hole, and “it was just like a child being born from its mother. The place of emergence is the womb of the earth.” Siberian reindeer hunters say the human race emerged from a Goddess, whose carved figurines protect the hunter’s hut, when given offerings and prayers: “Help us to keep healthy! Help us to kill much game!”

The central doctrine of Amerindian religion was reincarnation in a new body from Earth Mother’s womb, the ancient meaning of “born again.” A chief named Smohalla spoke of his moral obligations formed by this doctrine: “It is a sin to wound or cut, to tear or scratch our common mother by working at agriculture. You ask me to dig in the earth? Am I to take a knife and plunge it into the breast of my mother? But then, when I die, she will not gather me again to her bosom. You tell me to dig up and take away the stones. Must I mutilate her flesh so as to get at her bones? Then I can never again enter into her body and be born again.”

Oriental Indians had much the same idea about entering the earth. Hindu priests told a dead man: “Go, seek the earth, that wise and kind mother of all. O Earth, rise up and do not hurt his bones; be kind and gentle to him. O Earth, cover him as a mother covers her infant with the skirts of her garment.”

Ancient Roman philosophers had the same idea too. “The Earth Mother is the mysterious power that awakes everything to life….All comes from the earth and all ends in the earth…the earth produces all things and then enfolds them again…the Goddess is the beginning and end of all life.” A Roman writer of the 3rd century A.D. prayed to “Holy Goddess Earth, Nature’s mother, who bringeth all to life, and revives all from day to day. The food of life Thou grantest in eternal fidelity. And when the soul hath retired we take refuge in Thee. All that Thou grantest falls back somewhere into Thy womb.:

Patriarchal Christians might have been expected to speak of Father Heaven rather than Mother Earth, yet they found it impossible to give up the older deity. The epitaph of Pope Gregory the Great said: “Suscipe Terra Tuo de corpore sumptum: “Receive O Earth, what was taken from thy body.” Even up to the 20th century, tombstones of German Christians bore the formula: Hier ruht im Mutterschoss der Erde…., “Here rests in Earth’s maternal womb…” In Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale an old man pleaded with the Goddess: “…I walk alone and wait About the earth, which is my mother’s gate, Knock-knocking with my staff from night to noon And crying, “Mother, open to me soon! Look at me, Mother, won’t you let me in? See how I wither, flesh and bones and skin! Alas! When will these bones be laid to rest?”

This was more than a poetic metaphor. As late as the 12th century, many Europeans still recognized Mother Earth as a Goddess, perhaps their only supreme divinity. She was described in an English herbal of the period with no mention of God at all: “Earth, divine goddess, Mother Nature, who doest generate all things and bringest forth ever anew the sun which thou hast given to the nations; Guardian of sky and sea and of all Gods and powers; through thy influence all nature is hushed and sinks to sleep…Again, when it pleases thee, thou sendest forth the glad daylight and nurturest life with thine eternal surety; and when the spirit of man passes, to thee it returns. Thou are indeed rightly named Great Mother of the Gods; Victory is thy divine name. Thou art the source of the strength of peoples and gods; without thee nothing can either be born or made perfect; thou are mighty, Queen of the Gods. Goddess, I adore thee as divine, I invoke thy name; vouchsafe to grant that which I ask of thee, so shall I return thanks to thy godhead.”

Up to the Renaissance, English farmers continued to call upon Erce, eorthan modor (Earth, mother of earth) when planting. Similarly, up to the 20th century, Russian farmers continued to call upon Mati-Syra-Zemlya (Moist Mother Earth) for almost everything. Instead of touching a Bible when taking an oath, a Russian peasant would put a clod of earth on his forehead, invoking the Mother’s curse if he broke his word. This perpetuated an ancient Greek habit. Even the patriarchal Olympian gods swore their binding oaths by Mother Earth: Gaea, or Rhea, called Universal Mother, Deep-Breasted One, firmly founded, oldest of divinities. Hesiod admitted that she ruled Olympus before the coming of the Hellenic deities. She ruled Russia too. The country bore her ancient name, Rha (Rhea), the Red One, mother of the Volga and all its tribes.

Home and Mother were literally identical to people who combined both in their image of the earth-goddess. Many believed they must be buried in the same soil that supported them in childhood. Threatened by invaders, the matriarchal Cimmerians could have saved themselves by moving away from their homeland; but they chose to face superior numbers of enemies, and die where they were, believing their lives valueless if they couldn’t re-unite with the same Earth that gave them birth. The Egyptian traveler Sinuhe felt the approach of death and hurried home to his motherland “to follow the Lady of All,” hoping that she would “spend eternity by my side.”

Post-mortem reunion with the Mother always overlapped with the idea of marrying her. Man seldom distinguished clearly between his three roles as the Goddess’s child, corpse, and bridegroom. Balkan peasants still view death as a sacred marriage, and dress corpses as for a wedding. Formal dirges say: “The black earth for my wife I took.” Ancient Greek epitaphs similarly proclaimed the dead man “admitted to the bridal chamber of Persephone.” Artemidorus wrote: “All the accompaniments of marriage are exactly the same as those of death.”

The archetypal image of the marriage-with-Earth had a curious revival in the special mid-Victorian pornography known as porntopia, in which the femal body was a landscape, and man correspongingly reduced in fantasy about the size of a fly: “In the middle distance there looms a large irregular shape. On the horizon swell two immense snowy white hillocks; these are capped by great, pink, and as it were prehensile peaks or tips—as if the rosy-fingered dawn itself were playing just behind them. The landscape undulates gently down to a broad, smooth, swelling plain, its soft rolling curves broken only in the lower center by a small volcanic crater or omphalos. Farther down, the scene narrows and changes in perspective. Off to the right and left jut two snowy ridges. Between them, at their point of juncture, is a dark wood…sometimes it is called a thicket…triangular in shape. It is also like a cedarn cover, and in its midst is a dark romantic chasm. In this chasm the wonders of nature abound. From its top there depends a large, pink stalactite, which changes shape, size and color in accord with the movement of tides below and within. Within the chasm—which is roughly pear-shaped—there are caverns measureless to man, grottoes, hermits’ caves, underground streams—a whole internal and subterranean landscape. The climate is warm but wet. Thunderstorms are frequent in this region, as are tremors and quakings of the earth. The walls of the cavern often heave and contract in rhythmic violence, and when they do the salty streams that run through it double their flow. The whole place is dark yet visible. This is the center of the earth and the home of man.”

Marcus attributes these images of pronotopia to a spiritual loss, possibly related in a direct way to contemporary denial of the earth-mother figure in a religious symbolism, as well as Victorian society’s suppression of sexuality: “One gets the distinct impression, after reading a good deal of this literature, that it could only have been written by men who at some point in their lives had been starved…Inside of every pornographer there is an infant screaming for the breast from which he has been torn. Pornography represents an endless and infinitely repeated effort to recapture that breast, and the bliss it offered.”

Acquisitiveness seems to have been another manifestation of the hidden psychic hunger for possession of Mother Earth. Her European names Urth, Hertha, Eortha, Erda, Hretha, etc. stemmed from Sanskrit Artha, “mater-ial wealth.” Among the Hindu-rooted gypsies, “earth” meant good luck, fortune, money. Latin Mater (Mother) became English “matter,” of which Plutarch said, “Matter hath the function of mother and nurse…and containeth the elements from which everything is produced.” Tibetans still say the elements are produced by the Old Mother. The material body has the special name of Nanna-Maya, variations of which appeared everywhere in the ancient Mediterranean world as names of the Great Goddess. The “soul manifested in matter” is defined as the Anna-Maya self. The sages say, “mind and matter are at base one as modes of the same Power…Mind is the subjective and Matter the objective aspect of the one polarized Consciousness.”

Western theology split this former unity into duality, regarding matter (or flesh) and mind (or spirit) as intrinsically different from, and opposed to, one another. Thus, says Jung, “the word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept, without any psychic significance for us. How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of Mother Earth.

After the image of Mother Earth as birth-giver, perhaps that of Mother Earth as receiver of the dead aroused the most profound emotional responses. When death was viewed as a return to the infantile state of sleep in the Mother’s bosom, it seemed less terrifying. The Rig Veda says, “Crawl into your Mother Earth. She will save you from the void.” In medieval ballads, the hero’s lady-love sometimes impersonated Mother Earth by covering her lover with her green mantle, to put him “out of sight” as if buried. Greek peasants thought the worst kind of curse on an enemy was to wish Mother Earth would not accept him: “May the earth not digest thee! May the black earth spew thee up! May the ground not consume thee!” Such a one rejected by the earth would be a revernant or a restless ghost.

In France during the 12th century, a sect of heretics were sent to the stake by the Archbishop of Reims, apparently for worshipping Mother Earth, among other offenses. Led to execution, one of them “cried again and again, ‘O Earth, cleave asunder!’” His hearers thought he was trying to get the earth to swallow his enemies, but he may have believed the earth could open and swallow him to save him from the stake. Like the original death aspect of Rhea or Cerridwen, Mother Earth was still supposed to devour her children.