Mother Nature!” She is truly the Mother of All Moth-
ers! And Mother knows best!Father Time (Chronos)
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
—Gollum’s riddle,
from The Hobbit, by J.R.R. TolkienThe ancient Greeks personified Father Time as the
Titan Chronos, from which we get words like chro-
nometer (clock) and chronology (time-line). As Time
devours all, Chronos was said to have devoured his
own children. Gaea, their Mother, was furious over
this, and she hid the 12th child from him when it was
born, substituting a rock wrapped in a baby blanket.
Raised secretly in a cave, when the last child (named
Zeus) was grown, he cut Chronos open and released
his eleven brothers and sisters. After the great Battle
of the Titans (the Titanomachia), these became the
familiar Gods and Goddesses of Olympus.
The Romans called Chronos Saturn, and identi-
fied him as the God of both Time and the Harvest.
Shown in a black hooded robe and carrying a reaper’s
scythe and an hourglass, Saturn became known as
the Harvester of Souls—or
the Grim Reaper. Rome cel-
ebrated a huge festival in his
honor every year at the time
of the Winter Solstice, the
shortest day of the year, which
marked the turning of the yearly
Wheel of Time into the New Year.
This week-long festival was called
Saturnalia, and it is the origin of
most of our customs around
Christmas and New Year’s. Saturn
was often depicted as departing
at this time, to be replaced with the
newborn Sun Child of the coming
year. I’m sure you will recognize this
Saturnine imagery!The Star Goddess (Nyx & Astra)
Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess
The dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven
She whose body encircles the universe...
—Doreen Valiente, “The Charge of the Goddess”The Star Goddess is the personification of the night
sky, with all the stars. The Egyptians called her Nuit;to the Greeks she was Nyx; to the Romans Nox (from
which we get the words equinox and nocturnal); and
we call her Night. The Milky Way is said to be the milk
of her breasts expressed across the heavens to nour-
ish life on all the infinite worlds. She is the spirit and
body of our galaxy. Of her are born star systems and
planets including, of course, our own Earth.
Of course, many individual stars and constella-
tions are also named for goddesses (as well as gods).
Such a star goddess in ancient times was Astraea, or
Astra, whose name gives us the generic word for “star,”
as in astral, astronomy, and astronaut. The daughter
of Themis, Goddess of Harmony, Astraea was said to
have lived on Earth in the
legendary Golden Age.
But as humans grew
more violent, the gods
abandoned the Earth
and retreated to the
heavens. Patient and
hopeful, Astraea was the
last of the immortals to
leave the world of men.
The original name Astra is the root of many names
for the Goddess of the Evening Star, or, literally, “East-
ern Star:” Ishtar, Esther, Aster, Asherah, Aphrodite,
Astarte—and Eostre, goddess of the fertile Spring,
whose Festival is Ostara or Easter, celebrated at Spring
Equinox. The Eastern Star, however, is actually a planet:
Venus (the Roman name for this goddess). All these
variations of her name still share the same attributes:
love, beauty, sex, and fertility. And her symbol is the
seven-pointed star. Because it is visible before any
other stars can be seen, this is the “Wishing Star” of
the child’s spell-poem:Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight;
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.Father Sun (Sol)
One of the most powerful and universal represen-
tations of divine masculinity is the Sun God. He was
called Ra by the Egyptians, Helios by the Greeks, and
Sol by the Romans. As the blazing heart at the core of
our solar system, Sol supplies all the energy for life on
Earth. Plants convert sunlight into food, which nour-
ishes animals. And the burning of organic materials to
warm our bodies and cook our meals only releases the
sunlight stored within. Thus, Sol is truly the Father of
us all, as Gaea is our Mother.
Some of the many sun gods worshipped through-
out the world have included Apollo in Greece—brother
of Artemis, the Moon Goddess; Lucifer, the light-
bringer; Lugh of the Celts; and Horus and Aten in
Egypt. One of his oldest names is Bel—meaningCourse Two: Nature 61
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