Mother Nature a personification of nature. Images of women representing "mother" earth, and mother nature, are timeless. Long before history was recorded, goddesses were worshiped for their association with fertility, fecundity, and agricultural bounty. Priestesses held dominion over Incan, Assyrian, Babylonian, Slavonic, Roman, Greek, Proto-Indo-European, and Iroquoian fertility religions in the millennia prior to the inception of patriarchal religions.
Algonquin legend says that "[b]eneath the clouds [lives] the Earth-Mother from whom is derived the Water of Life, who at her bosom feeds plants, animals and men" (Larousse 428). (8) She is known as Nakomis, the Grandmother.
Although not a scientific term, the term 'mother nature' has sometimes been used in science-related papers, of either global (rarely universal) unexplained phenomena or of life-related phenomena which acquire their energy either from photosynthesis or chemosynthesis with no apparent intelligent human assistance, because it is a more neutral term than the word God.
