I am trying to find the Scottish equivalent of Gaea, or the Goddess of Earth or nature. Thanks in advance. I have gone on some sites, but I'm not finding exactly what I'm looking for
The Greek goddess Gaia is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia Some immediate questions are:- (1) - why on earth would Scotland have had any equivalent to a Greek goddess? (2) - what level of accuracy is needed? (is this for a textbook on ancient religions, or a YA vampire romance?) (3) - sensitivity: does the OP believe in Gaea, or the Goddess of Earth or nature? (4) - which time periods and regions and aspects of theology are being compared? E.g. Gaia by Hesiod's time in the 8th Century BC might already have transitioned into being more of an art object (loads of mentions in poetry but not many actual temples to her - but compare Demeter). Very little is known about late Bronze Age/early Iron Age Scottish religion. (Added to which "Greece" and "Scotland" aren't monolithic cultures with a single religion.) Need to be cautious of speculating based on different time periods (e.g. reading 1st Century AD druids further back into Scottish history) or different regions (e.g. assuming ancient Scotland's religion was similar to ancient Ireland's). In general "we do not know, we cannot tell." In the background of this is a long-running academic controversy that started in the 1960s with anthropologists postulating the existence of a "pre-Indo-European Great Mother" (which coincides with the 1960s feminism - so ends up being extremely popular and possibly also politically convenient). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_goddess#Prehistoric_matriarchy_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchal_religion#History Danu, mentioned by SapereAude, was speculation about Ireland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danu_(Irish_goddess) There are some typical signs of new-age revisionism in Danu's wikipedia article:- "She has possible parallels with the Welsh literary figure Dôn, whom most modern scholars regard as a mythological mother goddess in the medieval tales of the Mabinogion.[5]" but the only article cited is non-academic https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wYAnySDa0O0C&q=danu+don&pg=PA65&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=danu don&f=false, and doesn't offer any sort of literature review of "most modern scholars", and quickly hares off talking about Sanskrit. (This is interesting to me because it's using the surface-level similarity of the English letters D-A-N without examining the phonology of the original languages or setting out a route-of-transmission.)
To add to evild4ve's post above, it also depends what you mean by Scottish. The people known as the Scotti/Scoti were the Gaels of Ireland. It was only around the 4th century that they migrated to what is now Scotland, and clashed with the Picts. Their religion would have been similar to that of the ancient Irish. Of the Picts, we just don't know enough about them.
For that to be a historical fact, we'd need an ancient Scot writing down words to the effect that "our earth goddess is the equivalent of the Greek goddess Gaia." (And even then it would be open to doubt that they were speaking for the religious practices of their entire culture.) We're fortunate that the Greek side of the question isn't purely conjecture - there is some evidence on Gaia. It's often exaggerated to support recently-revealed religions with vested interests looking for bases from which to claim authenticity (e.g. the idea that Delphi was a temple to Gaia), but at least there's some starting points. What is there though on the Scottish side? I doubt there's even any recorded contact before Saint Andreas' bones turn up there in the 8th Century AD, by which time both Greece and Scotland are Christian. Edit: on equivalence, we can't even say Ovid's Tellus is equivalent to Hesiod's Gaia. 800 years passed, in advanced societies where we've seen much shorter intervals of time develop Aristotle from Plato and John from Mark. There are some poets and a little archaeology, but the theology and ordinary people's understanding of it are lost to history. I believe equivalence should be resisted in case it conceals how much is missing and how little is left. Edit2: if we lost the whole of Catholicism except a thurible stand and the words to Ave Maria, probably they'd be telling us Mary was an earth goddess. Were ancient religions primitive and similar to one another, or complex and we're missing most of the data?
