The essential elements of religion in the Rig Veda were deeply impressed by the great phenomena of nature, which they conceived as alive and usually represented in anthropomorphic form. The Rig Veda calls the Female power ‘Mahimata’, a term which literally means Mother Earth. One of the most important Neolithic sites in world archeology, and a precursor to the Indus Valley Civilization, is Mehargarh, where thousands of female statuettes, dated as early as circa 5500, have been recovered. The earliest Mother Goddess figurine unearthed in India, near Allahabad district of UP, belongs to approximately circa 20,000. In the Indian context, the worship of the Mother entity is traced back to pre-Vedic culture. Interestingly, mother goddesses are viewed as being the embodiment of one singular deity. Throughout history and up to the present day, instances of many different mother goddesses have been found and they include deities like ancient Greek Gaia, ancient Irish Danu and the Hindu Ma in primarily nine forms. The modern concept of nature has returned to its original, pre-Socratic roots, no longer a deity except in a rhetorical sense. For the medieval mind, she was only a personification and not a goddess. However, medieval Christian thinkers perceived Nature to be a creation of God and placed her on Earth, below the Heavens and Moon, somewhere in the middle. With the adoption of Christianity in all the Slavic lands, she was identified with Mary, the mother of Jesus. Oaths were made binding by touching the Earth and sins were confessed to the Earth before death. The Earth Mother, in Greek mythology, has the power to deny humankind fruits of harvest, while in the Slavic world she was one of the most important deities.
Later, Aristotle onwards, Nature became a personified deity. Prior to Socrates, the Greek philosophers are stated to have invented Nature as the entirety of the phenomena of the world into a single name. The first recorded use of earth in its present form began very late in the 17th century, but the deification of Nature can be traced to ancient Greece. In the Incan, Algonquin, Assyrian, Babylonian, Slavinic, Roman, Greek, Indian, and Iroquoian religious practices, women priests played a dominant role prior to the inception of patriarchal traditions. Historically, goddesses were worshipped for their association with fertility, fecundity and agricultural bounty. Mother goddess is a term generally used to refer to the female form of divinity associated with motherhood, creation or is perceived as the bountiful embodiment of earth itself. If we turn back the pages of history and tradition, images of women representing Mother Earth and Mother Nature, appear repeatedly in various cultures. But one does get inquisitive as to how the concept of ‘Mother’ came to be related with Earth and Nature, which merge into each other to become one nurturing entity.
The purpose of Earth Day, perhaps, is towards making an effort to save our mother, who gives us an indispensable platform to carry on with the process of creation. In fact, the scenario has become so alarming that we now find ourselves crying to save Mother Earth in order to save ourselves. And if we extend this analogy to Earth and Nature, which provide human beings with life sustaining elements, we have quite utterly failed to express gratitude in any way. Although we try to repay it through different means, the indebtedness towards mother remains life long. Love for mother comes naturally to a child, perhaps developing in the womb itself.