Myth 101: Good-Enough Mother Earth

“I have wanted, also, to keep in our minds the common language about the ‘good’ earth’s shadows: soil and dirt; fears of being buried alive; quicksand, sinkholes, and dust bowls; earthquakes and avalanches; dust to dust… the unfathomable autonomous depths. Of these shadows, the figure of Mother Earth herself is the deepest. As Sam Gill contends, the collapsing of many female goddess figures into a single goddess named Earth Mother ‘at least for North America would seem to be historically and ethnographically an error….’  My main aim is to draw us away from imagining the earth as a good mother, passive, nurturing, and supportive, and to recognize the idea of earth to be a complex phenomenon requiring efforts of thoughts and imagination.” (James Hillman, Mythic Figures, pp. 308-319)