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This thesis has support in Pausanias’ text, “Hellados Periegesis”, written in second
century A.D. In this “Description of Greece” the alter of godess Gaia is located on
the slope of Kronos hill at Olympia, north of the Temple of Hera. (16)
In Ancient Olympia this sacred area was called “Gaion”. It was found directly
opposite the equally sacred Olympic Games premisses. During that period, the
setting of Gaion became famous in Greece for the beauty of the landscape and
specially for the river Alpheios, where waters flowed down into earth. (17)
The myth of Gaia, therefore, might have originated as a relationship for the
Alpheios’ geological break and the established religious rituals, since Gaia was
acknowledged as “mother earth” as well as a godess among Olympian gods. It is
worth noting that Gregory Bateson when discussing the analogy between the
system by which social groups are recognizes as parts of the larger ecological
system, proposed that fantasy becomes morphogenetic, that is, it turn out a
determinant of the shape of the society. (18)
For the most part then the sacred area of Olympia should represent a selfvalidation
example of a cultural identity, involving nature and religion from former
Greek civilization. And the “actions that the fantasy dictates”, still reviewing
Bateson words, seems to refer to Altis valley where worship, art and agonistic
contest – Olympic Games included - were integrated in celebrations.
In sum, totemism is the best description for Olympism if anthropological
terminology is adopted in order to define the relationship of the natural world and
social systems. Such interpretation is reinforced by recalling a H.W. Pleket text: (19)
Olympia was a function of an increasingly urbanized world but was itself not
the product of an important city… Elis, that is the region in which Olympia was
situated, was an agrarian district and the city of Elis was a relatively late, rather
artificial town… Olympia just was and remained all through antiquity the top of
the vast iceberg of crown-games.
It follows that a sound explanation for choosing Olympia to stand as the “locus
classicus” of Olympic Games, relates to the vitality of local forests and rivers, the
natural elements that gave birth to Gaia symbolism. Nikolas Yalouris, Greek
archeologist and historian, favours this interpretation too, following his decades
of excavating the different sites of the Elis region. (20)
In his vivid analysis he declares: (21)
Myth is the language of the spirit. Unlike history, it does not refer to
ephemeral events and incidents, to ever-changing external factors and phenomena
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