Menu Odigos Gaia Thesis Mother Dear Far & Wide Honour Thy Mother What Went Wrong? Please Come Back! Witches Salem Witches Ask Odi Whyte Bard Stories Aesop's Fables Follow The Frog            The Gaia Thesis In order to understand the nature of the Earth Mother, we must first understand our own origins. Biologically, unisexual organisms are always considered to be female, since only the female brings forth life from her own body; in the act of reproduction single cells are referred to as mothers and their offspring as daughters. Each of us began our individual life as a single fertilized cell, or zygote. In the process of its innumerable divisions and multiplications, that cell kept dividing up and redistributing the very same protoplasm. That protoplasm which now courses through all of the several trillion cells of your adult body is the very same substance which once coursed through the body of that original zygote. For when a cell reproduces, the mother cell does not remain intact, but actually becomes the two new daughter cells. And this is why, no matter how many times a cell divides in the process of embryological development, all the daughter cells collectively continue to comprise but one single organism. If we regard these cells as independent entities, they would just live and die in a seemingly inanimate environment. Blood cells travel along our arterial highways, but we know them to be minute components of the far vaster living beings, eg. humans. Over three billion years ago, life on Earth began, as do we all, with a single living cell containing a replicating molecule of DNA. From that point on, that original cell, divided and re-divided and subdivided its protoplasm into the myriad of plants and animals, including ourselves, which now inhabit the planet. But no matter how many times a cell divides in the process of embryological development, all the daughter cells collectively continue to comprise but one single organism. All life on Earth comprises the body of a single vast living being: Mother Earth Herself. The Moon is Her radiant heart, and in the tides beats the pulse of Her blood. The protoplasm which coursed through the body of that first primeval ancestral cell is the very protoplasm which now courses through every cell of every living organism, plant or animal, of our planet. And as in our own bodies, Earthly life was biologically female for the first 3 billion years, before sexual reproduction, complete with males, evolved around 600 million years ago. In evolutionary theory they say "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (the development of the individual repeats the development of the ancestry); ancient people said the same thing when reasoning our our planetary Divinity, like that first single cell, as feminine: our Mother Earth. The soul of our planetary biosphere is She whom we call Goddess. 'First life on my sources first drifted and swam. Out of me are the forces which save it or damn. Out of me man and woman, and wild-beast and bird. Before God was, I am. (Algernon Charles Swinburne - Hertha).