Geb is the ground. Not the world, not nature, not fertility in the abstract — the actual physical earth of Egypt, the surface you stand on and the mass beneath it, personified as a man lying on his back with one knee raised and one arm reaching up. In painted versions his skin is green and his body carries vegetation, sometimes with plants growing directly out of him.
A reader arriving from Greek, Roman, Norse or Mesopotamian material will find the arrangement upside down. Gaia is the earth-mother and Ouranos the sky-father; Jörð is female and the sky above her is not; Ki is earth and An is heaven. Egypt inverts both terms at once: the earth is male, the sky is female, and the sky lies on top. The reversal is not a curiosity — it changes the sexual logic of the whole cosmogony, since here it is the female sky that must be lifted off the male earth rather than a father sky who must be pushed away.
Held apart
The separation is the most reproduced image in Egyptian art after the weighing of the heart. Shu, their father and the god of air, stands between them with both arms raised, holding Nut up while Geb lies beneath, often propped on an elbow, sometimes with an unmistakable erection reaching towards her. Two ram-headed figures frequently help Shu on either side.
The version everyone has seen is from the Greenfield Papyrus in the British Museum, a Twenty-first Dynasty Book of the Dead made for the priestess Nesitanebtashru. It is the standard illustration in general books on Egypt, and it is late — roughly a thousand years after the New Kingdom material and two thousand after the Pyramid Texts that first describe the arrangement.
Egyptian sources do not agree on why the separation happened. In some readings Shu simply performs his function as air, which by nature occupies the space between. Others have the two locked in continuous embrace and needing to be parted so that creation has room to exist. A grimmer version, associated with Nut's pregnancy, gives Geb's grief at the separation an explicit voice; his weeping in some texts produces the sound of the earth.
The goose
His sacred bird is the Nile goose, and it sits on his head as a determinative in his name. A well-known Egyptian tradition of the cosmic egg — the sun emerging from an egg laid at the beginning — attaches to him in some texts under the epithet "the great cackler". This overlaps with, but is distinct from, the Hermopolitan account in which the egg is laid on the primeval mound by the Ogdoad. Egyptian creation imagery is not organised into consistent variants: it is a set of images that could be combined as a particular temple's theology required.
Earthquakes, and what the earth does to the dead
Egypt is not seismically dramatic, but earthquakes occur, and texts attribute them to Geb — his laughter in one formulation. The more common concern is subtler and more frightening: the earth holds the dead, and funerary spells worry about being seized by it. Geb is repeatedly asked to open his jaws, or told not to close them, and the Pyramid Texts have the king demand that the earth release him so he can ascend. A god who is the material into which corpses are placed occupies an uncomfortable double position, and the texts do not pretend otherwise. He is also, in the same corpus, the one who opens the ground so the dead king can rise.
The judge, and the throne
His most consequential role is judicial. Geb presides over the tribunal that adjudicates the succession dispute between Horus and Set, and several sources have him award the throne — sometimes dividing Egypt between them, giving the Delta to Horus and the southern valley to Set, and sometimes reversing that and awarding the whole country to Horus. The division-then-reunification pattern maps neatly onto Egypt's own political self-understanding as Two Lands.
Because of this, the royal throne is the seat of Geb, and the phrase "heir of Geb" is a standing royal title. He is also called the hereditary prince of the gods, an actual administrative rank borrowed and applied upwards. The Egyptian family tree has him as son of Shu and Tefnut, husband of his sister Nut, and father of the four gods on whom Egyptian narrative myth depends: Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys.
Almost no cult
He has no significant temple, no major festival and no priesthood of note. What he has instead is presence in the offering formula and in the language of land: agricultural produce belongs to him, snakes are called his children — a logical inference, since snakes come out of the ground — and mineral wealth in the earth falls under him.
His classical reception is minimal. The Greeks equated him with Kronos, an equation driven by generational position rather than by any shared characteristic, and Plutarch follows it. Modern reception is almost nil; he appears occasionally in games and in reference lists and has never acquired a popular image, which makes him a useful control case for how much of a deity's modern fame depends on having a story rather than a function.
Questions about the male earth
Why did Egypt reverse the usual sky and earth genders?
There is no agreed answer, and the honest position is that we do not know. Suggestions have included the visual model of the sky as a cow standing over the land, which is female by observation; the Nile valley's arrangement of a flat, fertile, generative strip beneath an enormous arching sky; and simple linguistic accident, since the Egyptian word for sky is grammatically feminine and the word for earth masculine. Grammatical gender shaping divine gender is a plausible mechanism across many personified concepts, but it explains the pattern rather than proving the cause.
Is he related to the "green man" of European folklore?
No, and the resemblance is superficial. Green in Egyptian art signals vegetation and regeneration and is applied to Osiris far more prominently than to Geb. The European foliate head is a medieval architectural motif whose own origins and meaning are contested, and there is no line of transmission. Colour symbolism converging in two agricultural societies requires no contact to explain.
Does anything survive of his worship at all?
Chiefly through language and titles rather than buildings. The throne of Geb, the heir of Geb, produce offerings as things that come from Geb, snakes as sons of Geb — the god is embedded in the standard vocabulary of Egyptian religion and administration in a way that a temple-less deity normally is not. That is a form of survival, and it argues he was old and fundamental rather than unimportant.