Mother of Monsters, and a Modern Namesake

In the succession myth Gaia is the prime mover: it is she who arms Cronus against Uranus and later, angered by the imprisonment of her children, brings forth the Giants and the monster Typhon to challenge Zeus, so that Earth is both the source of order and its most dangerous adversary. Her Roman counterpart is Terra or Tellus. In the twentieth century her name was revived in an unrelated scientific context when James Lovelock, at a neighbour's suggestion, called his proposal that the biosphere self-regulates the Gaia hypothesis; the borrowing is modern and metaphorical, and should not be read back into ancient belief, but it has made the old earth-goddess's name current again.

Rome's counterpart Tellus received one of the more striking rites of the Roman agricultural calendar, the Fordicidia, held on 15 April, at which pregnant cows were sacrificed to her in each of Rome's thirty ancient wards, their unborn calves burned to ash by the Vestal Virgins and the ash later mixed into the purifying fire of the Parilia, the festival of Rome's legendary founding; the rite, recorded by Ovid in the Fasti, sought fertility for the coming year's crops and herds through a sacrifice that visibly doubled the earth's own pregnant fruitfulness, one of the clearer surviving examples of Roman religion using sympathetic ritual logic to address an earth-goddess directly.