Gaia: The Mother of All Aliens: Part Two

The asexual and sexual reproductive biology of the ancient Greek Mother Goddess Gaia is impossible as related. Her reproductive skills are akin to a human female giving birth not only to humans but to all sorts of other animals and even monstrosities. No writer of mythology (fiction) even back then would make such a fundamental error if he wanted his fiction to be credible. What’s the alternative? - Aliens.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

So how can there exist a whole multitude of species of deities, from those appearing human or humanoid, to the hideously monstrous, and yet are all genetically related to Mother Goddess Gaia?

Now I maintain that if you (or any other animal) produce offspring, while they would not of necessity all be identical, they will be fairly similar in appearance and conform to your own basic body plan. You’re not going to produce one kid that will grow up to be ten feet tall while another attains only four feet. One kid won’t have two eyes, the next three. The odds that your first born will have one head and two arms, but that your second born will have ten heads and twenty arms, is unlikely in the extreme. As this like-begets-like reproductive rule of thumb applies to you, I strongly suggest it should have applied to Mother Goddess Gaia. 

 IMHO, the ancient Greek Hesiod, who wrote up the origins of the Greek deities including Mother Goddess Gaia, and the world in his tome “Theogony” [“the birth of the gods”], should have and would have known better that to invent such outlandish sexual tales producing such an outlandish diversity of offspring. Presumably the people who read all of this also knew better – they knew that like-begets-like – just like the Norse hero Siegfried knew the dwarf Mime was lying to him about being his father because they didn’t look anything remotely alike. Siegfried knew from observations of animals and their babies in the forest that like-begets-like. Mime got his comeuppances! 

I conclude from all of this that Hesiod and whoever else came up with all this mythological reproductive nonsense was warped in the extreme; really puffing on the good stuff. Or perhaps, as in all mythology, there’s a true kernel of corn in the mythological haystack waiting to be uncovered. Perhaps both Hesiod and his readers couldn’t think of any other interpretation of reality but that Mother Goddess Gaia really did mate and produce offspring as wildly divergent as nymphs, 50 headed giants and the Cyclopes. Perhaps they had no concept of the extraterrestrial!

All of these collections of beings (Titans, Cyclopes, Meliae, etc.) are so different that each is unlikely in the extreme to be related to each other. Each is probably an alien race in its own right – alien as in various extraterrestrial intelligences.

So here’s my alternative scenario. Chaos (the void, the cosmos) ultimately formed our Sun and solar system including ‘Gaia’ as Terra/Tellus, the Planet Earth. Eons ago that other but biological flesh-and-blood Mother Goddess Gaia and her sons (Uranus and Pontus) along with a host of her species (probably the Titans) arrived on Planet Earth as part and parcel of their boldly going, exploring the Milky Way Galaxy exercise. Liking what they found, they settled down, perhaps thinking of Planet Earth as an R&R spot, perhaps as a colony planet. Things then proceed pretty much according to Hesiod’s mythology, except for one incorrect translation. There were no real acts of Mother Goddess Gaia reproducing which resulted in the creation of a high and unlikely diversity of other biological species. There were only those like-with-like sexual reproductions as in the original Titans creating the next generation of Titans (Atlas, Prometheus, etc.). Mother Goddess Gaia wasn’t so much a mother of extreme biological diversity as a hostess (with the mostest) to that rather wide diversity of extraterrestrial species.

Mother Goddess Gaia threw out the welcome mat for other alien species that came to visit, or were invited to visit, just like parents might play host to a much broader diversity of humans than their offspring would typify. Their dinner party might include guests short and tall, old and young, black and white, normal and handicapped, as well as other species – cats, dogs and aquarium fish – for the sake of wide-ranging diversity, etc. In the case of Mother Goddess Gaia however, things got a bit more serious as Mother Goddess Gaia and the various extraterrestrial races she’s associated with IMHO formed a block of allies against another block of allies – the Olympians (offspring of the original Titans and thus related to [Grand] Mother Goddess Gaia. The ‘War of the Titans’ was on the horizon and inevitable in a power struggle of epic proportions.

The extraterrestrial Cyclopes and that alien race, the Hecatonchires, which were once allied with Mother Goddess Gaia and the Titans, changed sides and supported the Olympians led by Zeus in their war against the Titans (the Titanomachy). Some Titans like Prometheus also switched sides and supported Zeus. In fact only about five of the original dozen Titans took up arms against Zeus and company. The Titans were actually led mainly by second generation Atlas (as first generation Cronus, Zeus’s daddy, proved not to be so invincible when Zeus freed his swallowed brothers and sisters, and therefore wasn’t really available for a leadership position). Zeus, as leader of the winners, however reserved a special punishment for Atlas as we all know. Atlas ended up with the weight of the world on his shoulders. As an aside, the ‘War of the Titans’ apparently happened in that region of Greece known as Thessaly.

It should be noted, in support of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, that the Titanomachy was a high-tech war, at least high-tech relative to what the ancient Greeks had. It was not a war fought with bows and arrows, slingshots, spears and swords, even though it did last an entire decade plus. Zeus had his thunderbolts – lightning, or perhaps in today’s terminology, lasers or particle-beam weaponry. Hades had a ‘magic’ helmet providing invisibility – the ultimate form of stealth technology and camouflage. Poseidon had his ‘magic’ trident which he could use to produce storms (weather modification), earthquakes, tidal waves/tsunamis, floods and all manner of ‘natural’ disasters – and he was noted for having a very bad temper with a very short fuse attached.

The Titanomachy was also noted for the hurling of massive boulders (missiles?); the rumbling earth which became scorched with flame and the vast forests that were levelled. The oceans and rivers, probably courtesy of Poseidon, swelled and steamed and boiled. And of course the heavens shook as well. If extraterrestrial, I’m sure the Titanomachy was as much a ‘star wars’ as a terrestrial one.

Now all of this probably happened in Planet Earth’s pre-human era. That’s because ‘humans’ back then probably weren’t the Homo sapiens we know today. Our modern species was created out of clay (as the ancient Greeks had no concept nor phrase for ‘genetically engineered’) by Prometheus (of gift of fire fame), a second generation Titan, and that ‘clay’ event probably happened way after the original extraterrestrial ‘gods’ (like Uranus) and ‘goddesses’ (like Gaia) arrived to set up shop. Thus, we probably have no actual eyewitnesses to what actually happened regarding the Titanomachy, as well as no real first hand accounts of Mother Goddess Gaia’s reproductive prowess, only what happened can not be taken literally as it violates fundamental principles of reproductive biology. The tales were probably all handed down way after-the-fact to the ancient Greeks by the Olympians – the winners – with a lot of understandable mistranslation and misunderstanding in the nitty-gritty details eventuating. 

But that’s not quite the end of the story. Mother Goddess Gaia had another go at dethroning Zeus and his Olympians, the location allegedly shifting to Italy and the Phlegraean Fields. This time she threw the Gigantes (Giants) against them (the Gigantomachy). So, round two - it was Mother Goddess Gaia and the Gigantes versus Zeus and the Olympians, but with a little help from the demigod Hercules, the Fates and even Helius (the sun-god), Selene (the moon-goddess) and Eos (the goddess of the dawn, known to the Romans as Aurora). Now since Hercules was the offspring of a deity (Zeus) and a mortal, humans had to have been around to witness round two. What was the upshot of Mother Goddess Gaia’s second attempt to grab power? All of the Gigantes became the late Gigantes, and nothing was ever heard from Mother Goddess Gaia ever again! In my version of the tale, Mother Goddess Gaia and those Gaia supporters who survived the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy tucked tail (if they had one) and headed back to whatever planet(s) they originally came from. Eventually, for reasons unrecorded and unknown, Zeus and company ultimately did the same, or at least boldly went elsewhere.

One other observation is required. Normally, sexual relations between mother and son; mother and grandson; mother and just about anyone and anything else without benefit of a wedding ring, is considered taboo. That’s of course according to human morals and ethics. However, if my premise is correct, and all and sundry belonged to various species of extraterrestrials, then we can’t hold them to, or impose on them, our standards.