Gaïa

Greek primordial deity, the personification of the Earth

Appears in 5 videos · 6 passages, 2 of them in depth.

Summary

Dominique Pagani mainly discusses Gaia in connection with Hesiod's account of origins. He presents her as the Earth that gives birth to almost everything that follows1. He dwells on the castration of Ouranos: the Earth, violated by Ouranos, has him castrated by Cronus2. He makes her a sorrowful mother who arms her children against their father3. In 2025, in a reading of one of Rimbaud's Illuminations, he takes up the same scene from another angle: the Earth is tired of giving birth4. Elsewhere, he uses this figure to question how nature is represented. He places the nourishing mother earth on the side of the symbolic order and of fantasy. He links the image of a personified nature that "takes revenge" to animism, in a session devoted to Sahelian Africa5. He thus uses Gaia in two ways: as a character of myth, whose episodes he comments on, and as a figure he criticizes when it is used to speak about nature.

Summary produced automatically from 6 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Who is this?

In Greek mythology, Gaia (; Ancient Greek: Γαῖα, romanized: Gaîa, a poetic form of Γῆ (Gê), meaning 'land' or 'earth'), also spelled Gaea (), is the personification of Earth. She is the mother of Uranus (Sky), with whom she conceived the Titans (themselves parents of many of the Olympian gods), the Cyclopes, and the Giants, as well as of Pontus (Sea), from whose union she bore the primordial sea gods. Her equivalent in the Roman pantheon was Terra.

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