Mother Nature #1

Mother Nature is beautiful, tempting and vulnerable. she is very powerful. You cannot outsmart her. She settles all scores in her own time. She... more

by Charles Wallis

Title

Mother Nature #1

Artist

Charles Wallis

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

Mother Nature is beautiful, tempting and vulnerable. she is very powerful. You cannot outsmart her. She settles all scores in her own time. She feeds all living things including us at her discretion. You cannot
ignore her. She is to be respected. Should this be a wildlife painting?

Mother Nature (sometimes known as Mother Earth or the Earth-Mother) is a common personification of nature that focuses on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature by embodying it in the form of the mother. Images of women representing mother earth, and mother nature, are timeless. In prehistoric times, goddesses were worshipped for their association with fertility, fecundity, and agricultural bounty. Priestesses held dominion over aspects of Incan, Algonquian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Slavonic, Germanic, Roman, Greek, Indian, and Iroquoian religions in the millennia prior to the inception of patriarchal religions.

The earliest written and safely dated literal references to the term "Mother Earth" occur in Mycenaean Greek ma-ka (transliterated as ma-ga), "Mother Gaia", written in Linear B syllabic script (13th or 12th century BC).
The various myths of nature goddesses such as Inanna/Ishtar (myths and hymns attested on Mesopotamian tablets as early as the 3rd millennium BC) show that the personification of the creative and nurturing sides of Nature as female deities had deep roots. In Greece, the pre-Socratic philosophers had "invented" nature when they abstracted the entirety of phenomena of the world as singular: physis, and this was inherited by Aristotle. Later medieval Christian thinkers did not see nature as inclusive of everything, but thought that she had been created by God; her place lay on earth, below the unchanging heavens and moon. Nature lay somewhere in the centre, with agents above her (angels) and below her (demons and hell). For the medieval mind she was only a personification, not a goddess.

Algonquian legend says that "beneath the clouds lives the Earth-Mother from whom is derived the Water of Life, who at her bosom feeds plants, animals and human" (Larousse 428). (8) She is also known as Nokomis, the Grandmother. In Inca mythology, Mama Pacha or Pachamama is a fertility goddess who presides over planting and harvesting. Pachamama is usually translated as "Mother Earth" but a more literal translation would be "Mother Universe" (in Aymara and Quechua mama = mother / pacha = world, space-time or the universe). Pachamama and her husband, Inti are the most benevolent deities and are worshiped in parts of the Andean mountain ranges, also known as Tawantinsuyu (stretching from present day Ecuador to Chile and Argentina).

Uploaded

December 11th, 2014