Instalment #4: the doves

During her time of retreat in Iona, Rob told me that sitting on the window ledge in her little attic room that overlooked the bay of Mull, there was a Columba (dove). There are several representations of doves in the quilt: the dove at the top right hand corner carries a heart. The first drawing of the dove concerned me a little, thinking it resonated too much with the ‘Twitter” symbol, but on second thoughts that didn’t seem to be such a bad thing, since doves have long been connected with communicating and making connections. I also know that the first sketch is just that, and will continue to morph during the process as more ideas and connections are made.

By serendipity, at the ready I had a photocopied image printed on fabric (thanks to Sheila for printing them). It was one of the Goddesses that had appeared in the previous quilt of thea Gaia’s “Swinging Bridges”, a presentation of ancient images of women. It is usual that something from the previous quilt makes a demand to be included in the following quilt.  And, here She was: a small Goddess statue from ancient Crete wearing a dove crown.[1] Apart from resonating with Rob’s Ionian dove, I instantly knew that Her place was at the base of the mandorla of roses. There was no hesitation in this decision. It had been lovely placing the roses, and attaching them to the jacaranda background, and it felt very comforting to have the Dove Goddess ‘at home’ in the garland, holding the future of the quilt in place with her upraised arms. I read somewhere that upraised arms (and possibly by extension, wings) have long been the indication of worship in our human story.

The Dove Goddess sends out more doves from her hands to all corners. The four small doves rising from the hands at the bottom of the quilt came into place as a last minute addition. They are placed radiating outwards towards to the four corners. The small doves fly skyward, or to the four corners of the Earth maybe carrying messages of hope and love as does the heart-carrying dove, or giving back into the future with equal measure?

 

Symbol of the dove

The symbol of dove goes back a long way as indicating the spirit of a divine presence among us – by which I understand, something yet to be known fully about within ourselves, not something that it exists outside ourselves. The dove, or pigeon was the first domesticated bird, and was believed to be a messenger, a go-between for communicating with divinity (the divine in ourselves), destiny with a strong association with wishful prayer for taking charge of our destiny – communications occurring on many levels. The description of this little Cretan representation of Goddess assigned to her by Swinging Bridges goes: “She flies to the centre of being and connects with the infinite within.” In the image it can be seen that doves fly out from Her hands - so she also gives back what she has found within.

On the quilt, the four small doves had me in a conundrum as to the practical means to ensure they would not flying off’, since they are attached with an adhesive medium that needs stitching down to keep it in place, the medium all the symbols have been worked with.[2] Initially I felt reluctant to cover them with netting because of negative connotation of binding or entrapment, but did so with two of the little doves when I remembered from earlier research the net is a symbol of order, of weaving in order to keep the order of the Universe and the unfolding of human lives by weaving together the dark and the light. Knots and the nets they form are very important in this process. This interweaving is what Simone DeBeauvoir has succinctly described as the “unresolveable, ambiguous drama of freedom and contingency”… a condition weaving pleasure and pain, health and disease, life and death.[3] The other two small doves have been hand-stitched into place. In the original card, the doves eventually shapeshift into the labrys, the double-headed axe of justice held sacred in ancient Crete.

Doves were associated with oracular divination, often in the context of romantic relationships and fertility. The power for creation by women, represented by Canaanite, Sumerian and Israelite and Mediterranean Mother Goddesses known by various names in various locations as Ishtar, Inanna, Asherah, Tanit, Shekinah, Astarte, Anat and Aphrodite, was symbolically envisioned as the dove, with many of her dove symbols adorning images, temples and shrines. We now also recognise the dove as a peace symbol – a state of being so important to find within and among ourselves.

Many other Goddess images from antiquity have wings. I’m thinking particularly of Isis, who shelters all and sheltered her beloved son, Horus, beneath her wings (a myth that later morphed into the Mary and Jesus story). In Hebrew the word for ‘spirit’ is in the feminine form (‘ruarch’), and Goddess embodiment in the religion is known as Shekinah, Queen of Wisdom. Many aspects of these earlier ancient stories have been incorporated into Christian symbolism as the symbol of the dove: for the immaculate conception of the godhead by mother Mary; and the dove hovering over the head of Jesus at his baptism, for example.[4]

  

I have also read that there are images of a dove being re-born from the mouth of a dolphin, later transposed into the story of Jonah being ‘born’ from a whale, his name meaning dove in Hebrew. ‘Ionah’ is a cognate of the Sanskrit word ‘yoni’, which later became known in Latin as the ‘vesica piscis’. The root form ‘io’ has connotations with and means ‘moon’ in the Egyptian lexicon, providing yet another connection to the monthly blood ritual that is the basis of continuing human life.[5] The yoni of course represents the female pubic area (often referred to as a woman’s ‘sexuality’), but it is much more importantly the sacred site in a woman’s body, through which life is endlessly renewed, symbolizing the faith, hope, joy and love that is at the heart of the lived human experience.[6]

Needless to say there are too many historical and cultural associations to explore here. What is important here is Rob’s association through the time she spent in retreat on the Island of Iona, the abbey of St Columba – whose name means dove in Latin. It is difficult to be certain about the reason this person received his name, and how the symbol of the white dove relates to him (apart from his name). Maybe because he brokered a peace with the story of Jesus among the feuding barbarian tribes of the place the Romans called Hibernia and had long wanted to conquer, by building on existing pagan rites and symbols – a common approach to the process of colonising, even today. Since his name Colum-cille (kille) means ‘Dove of the Church’, it may be another appropriation of women’s reproductive power for renewing life to fertilize a spiritual renewal in pagan lands, though the symbol is normally attributed (perhaps in hindsight) as being a messenger of the Christian God of peace to a violent environment.

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[1] She can be seen in my PhD thesis on page 154, and is taken from the Awesome power series, 1989, published by Swinging Bridges Visuals, Australia, produced by Rosanne DeBats & thea Rainbow/Gaia.

[2] It is with thanks to Kerry Beaumont that the rose mandorla has been given more detail through stitching into them using the free machining technique.

[3] http://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/webs-and-nets. Shared by many cultures in different ways through their stories, the weaving of warp and woof into net and fabric seems to have the common thread of fate and destiny.

[4] Iona Miller, 2016, Ancestors and archetypes, http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/dove-goddess.html

[5] Barbara Walker, 1988, The woman’s dictionary of symbols and sacred objects, Harper & Row: San Francisco. For me personally at the moment ‘IO’ stands for ‘immuno-oncology’, which has been my treatment for advanced melanoma over the last 9 months.

[6] Barbara Walker, 1983, The woman’s Encyclopedia of myths and secrets, HarperSanFrancisco

Instalment #3: the background colour and the 'vesica piscis'

The problem was that by creating the frame first, I had inadvertently given myself serious design challenges – unseen in advance, like putting the horse before the cart. I had never worked this way before, usually working from the centre out, or at least having a background to work on. The frame always came last.  And it presented me with quite a conundrum. So I started working on the symbols that would fill the space. I’d already drawn up designs for the Celtic knot and Ionian dove, (though had to play with the latter in order to come to a pleasing design - I didn’t want a “twitter” bird, and the earlier one I’d chosen seemed to give this impression). I knew that they could float on top of the background, placed in the either corner at the top. But first the roses, the moon, and the ancient Dove Goddess image I had chosen to include needed a firm and clear position in the whole, requiring a choice of colour for the background. Looking around at where the blooms were showing in the natural world, with the stunning Jacarandas in full bloom, by serendipity, I had a piece of hand-dyed fabric just that colour in my stash, which was just enough fabric to fill the frame - if I was careful.

I was keen to place the many individual roses, cut out months before and still arranged around the candle on my coffee table, into position within the frame. I often lit this candle, looking for inspiration on how these many roses might be positioned on the quilt. Many people liked them on my coffee table, but I knew they were destined for Rob’s quilt! I needed to give another dimension to the stark rectangular frame with its as yet blank purple canvas, and dividing up the space with the roses seemed like a pleasurable thing to do. Trouble was, how to arrange them? In a circle? In a ’bunch’? In each corner? One morning I went back to bed with my cup of tea, and as I stepped on the little Afghan carpet beside the bed I noticed the elongated square, a square pulled into a lozenge or diamond shape, and overall design for the holding space of the background fell into place, leaving the four corners for the symbols hovering to find their place on the quilt. Strange where inspiration comes from! Another serendipity came from reading a story about a woman who saw her inner self as a rose (Rachel Remen, Kitchen table wisdom). Forming a perhaps rather angular and stylised mandorla shape, this was the first representation of the vesica piscis symbol, which continued to become manifest in other places as the creative process progressed.

The vesica piscis in the Celtic knot

The first symbol to come into form, and waiting to be placed, was the Celtic knot. Robyn had visited the Findhorn Foundation on the island of Iona to do a week-long spiritual retreat, called "Birth of the Undivided Self. During her time there she had felt the place itself had given her a sense of the veil between the worlds being thin, connections with the other world tangible, especially in the case of her grandmother’s presence, who had visited Iona when Rob was 10 years old. While the interlaced triangle is linked to this visit by her Grandmother to Iona, who brought back a souvenir of a silver serviette ring with a Celtic knot engraved on it, the image has no doubt great significance in Rob’s own personal spiritual journey. 

On the quilt, the symbol of the Celtic knot (or ‘triquetra’) is composed of three overlapping vesica pisces, which I have coloured white, red and black to signify the triple Goddess and three stages of a woman’s life: maiden, mother and crone. Unlike most images I’ve seen of this knot, however, I have positioned the ‘triquetra’ with the base at the top, and the red vesica of motherhood pointing downwards (rather than the more usual upward pointing orientation) because I feel this gives emphasis to the power of womanhood in bringing forth and nurturing life. It is placed inside an inverted triangle, traditionally representing the fertile pubic triangle.

Interlacing in design is, of course, so beautifully executed in the Book of Kells, and these designs also embody story, with perhaps some evidence for an overlap between indigenous understandings entwined with the imported stories of the Christian Gospels. In the art of story telling, interlacing was a common way of communicating traditional tales and familial connections, in the sense that the audience at a telling could make connections without the need for specific or detailed explanation. These days of digital communications we might say they could pick up on the thread. The interpretation of course relies on familiarity with the story and characters involved, especially in reference to binary complementarities, such as war and peace, love and hate, life and death. Further to this, the interlacing in stories was about endless games containing riddles, hidden omens concealed in the story telling…the more such inferences, the more entertaining, erudite and educational, it was. But, perhaps most importantly for our forebears, ‘it (interlacing) attempts to symbolize the intricate patterns of destiny which none can avoid.’[1]

      

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[1] Claire French, 2001, The Celtic Goddess: Great queen of demon witch? Bell & Bain: Glasgow, p.17

Instalment #2 in creating Rob's quilt: the frame

The frame becomes manifest

After month upon month of little productive creative activity, I was feeling frustrated by the many false starts, and tired of waiting for inspiration. The many attempts to bring the background into satisfactory visible form seemed futile. So, I decided to act in a rather ruthless fashion for me. I made a promise to myself: to start and finish something in the one sitting! I had cut the chosen floral fabrics into 8-inch squares as described previously. Next I decided, quite impetuously, to cut the squares into 4-inch rectangles. By joining them together along the long side I was able to cut through the middle again and create a border four inches wide, each the same. With the second half I could complete a border-frame with the chakra colours in descending order, thus completing the cycle. After all, the chakras are hardly independent of each other, nor have any distinct hierarchy the way I see it! There it was: a floral frame for Rob’s quilt! I had both started and finished it in one sitting! Of course, it had to remain in four pieces until it could be attached to the central panel, the heart of the quilt, which would display Rob’s requested motifs: the Celtic knot, the Ionian dove, the vesica piscis – and, all the roses I’d cut out in preparation. The moon would be there too.  Finally I felt more confident, now that the colours of the chakras had been represented.

Significance of the Chakra: colours of the rainbow

The significances of the meridian points on the body known as the ‘chakras’ goes back countless millennia, crossing many geographical areas, showing up as religious and spiritual signifiers in many different cultural contexts. In that way it is universal – and why wouldn’t those colours be for anyone looking at the natural phenomenon of a rainbow found everywhere on Earth? It separates white light, the stuff we don't tend to see, because ‘that’s just how it is’, into the spectrum of multiple colliding colours, revealing the full glory of white light and at the same time, its hidden dimension. For scientist, Candace Pert the rainbow is about both hope and truth, reminding us  ‘to pierce through the layers of everyday reality and penetrate to the truth’ (p118). She was referring in particular to the domain of scientific discovery of course, but that’s not the only way to view her comment.

After checking the significance of the chakra in Barbara Walker’s two tomes, reference to the chakras appears under many different entries.[1] Everyone is familiar with the Tantric meditation of the ascending stages of wisdom represented by the snake goddess Kundalini uncoiling herself from the base of the spine towards the crown of the head. This meditation is done by visualizing the intertwining of an ascending double helix (of the DNA?), which unites one thread representing the moon with the other representing the sun. Candace Pert, using impeccable scientific techniques identified these bundles of receptors and associated peptides residing along either side of the spinal column. She was perhaps among the first to show that the chakra points, the centres of “subtle energy” that influence the body’s function on all levels, physical and metaphysical, identified thousands of years ago in Eastern holistic health practices, aligned with this ancient version of understanding body-mind integrated functions.[2]

Rather then enjoying these subtle energies in a motion of ascent, the circular motion of group interaction in coming together to deeper understanding is the one that appeals to me (and it appears to be more accurate physiologically). In the circle there is no beginning and no end. Walker refers also to Sufi practice (‘halka’ in Arabic) and a ‘magic circle whose members cooperated in the effort of comprehension’(p.160). And of course it is evident in the practice of traditional circle dances central to so many cultures, and which I know to be part of Robyn’s spiritual practice.

  

Flowers around the border frame, representing the chakras:

Red colours are represented by the chillies (I know, not flowers, but red hot!), warratahs, kangaroo paw, and Sturt dessert pea. The reds then meld into the orange and yellows of poppies and daffodils, intermingling with sunflowers and the pale yellow flower of the Tasmanian Blue Gum. The various blues and greens of foliage surround them, and finally, the purples and mauves are blended in the patches of pansies and primroses to represent the sixth and seventh chakras.

Other breakdowns of the significance of the chakras can be found in many online sites. This is what I have gleaned from several, (which I haven’t referenced because I made a sort of composite, as it felt right for me):

At the root is red, which represents groundedness through connection to Earth as Mother Gaia. Orange is about pleasure and the sex organs, represented by the Middle Eastern Goddess, Anat. Another Goddess from the Middle East, Tanit, sits at the juncture of our claiming our personal power, the yellow representing the solar plexus. Green for the heart chakra is of course the fecund power of love, as represented by the mother Goddess, Isis. While another Egyptian Goddess, Neith, as the blue centre of the throat, is the speaker of truth. At the centre of the forehead is the third eye, represented by the purple for our intuitive psyche, our soul, and at the crown is the reason for all the others: being in community!

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[1] Barbara Walker, 1988, The woman’s dictionary of symbols and sacred objects, Harper & Row: San Francisco

Barbara Walker, 1983, The woman’s encyclopedia of myths and secrets, HarperSanFrancisco

[2] Candace Pert, 1999 ed, The molecules of emotion: why you feel the way you feel, Simon & Schuster:UK

Robyn's personal story quilt: first thoughts and drafts

This is the first of several posts to follow that describe the process of creating Robyn's personal story quilt from the elements in her life that she mentioned for the commission, and from our more than thirty years of friendship. It took longer than expected to come into its final form, which, as you will see is very different from the early inceptions. Many interpretations of the various symbols follow each section, and are according to the research I have done in order to represent them in the quilt, made especially for Robyn, with much love and admiration for a woman who has lived soulfully.

First design

With ideas starting to gestate about how to represent her special symbols of the chakras, the vesica piscis (sacred yoni), the white dove of Iona and the Celtic interlaced triangle - set within the context of communion with others in her life, love of community and her very personal spiritual journey - the background needed to be visualised.  The symbols are seeded in form quite easily, the most basic and essential of which is the full moon. Placement, as usual will come later. First the background needs to become manifest.

In thinking about the first draft for the background, the chakras made visible through the colours of a rainbow was my starting point, since of course, the colours are the same. The seven Chakras and rainbow colours would encircle a full moon in such a way as to blend out from the full dark on the other side of the moon. Excitedly I searched through my stash of hand-dyed cottons for colours that might work for the rainbow hues, none of which seemed to sit nicely beside each other. And then it occurred to me the colours of the rainbow-Chakra could be done while including Rob’s desire to represent her love of flowers. I started by pulling out a very large collection of all my ‘flower power’ fabrics stored in one of my many plastic tubs. Rob had given me free rein on how to represent the essential elements in her personal story, but we had made one agreement: that I would not buy any new fabrics for her quilt - an agreement I stuck to.

Feeling slightly overwhelmed by the variety and colour of the fabrics in my flower power selection, I had made many attempts to represent the seven colours in ascending order, as they are normally viewed in relation to the body’s control points along the spinal column - starting with red at the base and working through orange (pelvis), yellow (sacral region) green (heart), blue (throat), purple for the third eye in the centre of the forehead, and violet vermillion for the top of the head, representing the unity of emotions, body and soul. Suddenly, I realised that flowers often contain several of the desired colours in one, which led to the next design decision - to cut the chosen fabrics into 8 inch squares! In this way I thought, I could still represent the colours as ascending from the bottom, interspersed with the sky fabrics that I’d wanted to include as part of the background. Again, not to be!

As I sorted through for the colours appropriate to the Chakras, thinking they might end up looking like a large bed of flowers rather than the rigid stripes of the rainbow, it provided a chance for an overlapping and an intermingling of the hues. I thought I had better warn Rob that she might be getting a pretty bright and flamboyant quilt! Little did I know then, but this first design was to go underground, and slowly re-emerge in a totally different, but no less flamboyantly colourful form.

By serendipity, during this excursion into the flower patch, I had also uncovered a large piece of fabric with very natural images of rose flowers - another request from Robyn for inclusion in the quilt. This gave me something to work with! I backed the fabric with fusible webbing and, with great satisfaction, I started cutting each rose out individually while resting my leg in a horizontal position after a serious bout of cellulitis that had recently landed me in hospital receiving intravenous antibiotics. Not knowing when to finish, I just kept going until there were more than thirty or more roses in various stages of growth  and colours, ready to be assembled in the centre of the quilt - when and how was not yet apparent!

Final thoughts, and a litany of titles

The intention in making this wall-hanging was as a tribute to my beautiful mentor and friend of 25 years, thea Gaia. Today is the first anniversary of her passing. Thea had already been working for many years in the area of women’s spirituality, firstly within the Congregational (laterUniting) Church as a minister, then stepping outside the rigid masculinist interpretations of divinity to explore with other women ‘a free and lively exploration of a female divine in women, nature, the earth, and the interconnectedness of life.’[1]

In working on the small shrines for each image, I wondered why thea had chosen these particular goddesses – and perhaps more critically about their relevance for today’s woman and today’s world. It is clear that the images presented in the work do not belong to the same era, nor do they have the same geographical location, though are generally associated with civilizations that came and went in the middle/near East. They do cover a wide area and very broad time-span of spiritual exploration, from Central Europe 30,000 years before the present era (Venus of Willendorf) to the last century (Kali) – much older than the patriarchal, Abrahamic religions, which are less than 3,500 years old, and offering great variety and depth of understanding.

Reflecting on the title and final presentation of the work I was aware of the relationship between the materials being used to construct the wall-hanging, and the valuable relevance of such ancient images of goddess in today’s societies. The use of natural and perishable materials, such as tapa, a cloth made by indigenous Pacific islander peoples from plant fibre, and a sloughed snake skin seemed significant in presenting an idea of female divinity that perished as a result of the overpowering of those earlier egalitarian, peaceful societies by a patriarchal mindset, one that set about establishing and maintaining through religion an ethos of domination over cooperation as the norm for social interaction. Then modern technology has produced the digitally printed images. During the time of its making, I began to think about the enduring presence of these indigenous goddesses from the northern hemisphere. They have the power to initiate personal and unique explorations of subjectivity outside the cultural domination preserved by a monotheistic male mythology for the divine. During the month-long process of construction many titles came to mind:

“She is here: I am she”/ Shrines to She /Awesome Power / Soul Sisters / Bloodlines /Shrines to when God was a woman

Eventually it was settled on: “Before the beginning, when God was a woman”, using two other titles: the first part is taken from the prologue to Carol Christ's "Rebirth of the Goddess", titled 'Before the beginning', in which she quotes a beautiful poem by Christine Lavadas[2]. (thea, myself and Glenys Livingstone 'performed' this poem at a visit from Elizabet Sahtouris to thea's home when she lived in the Blue Mountains). And the second part is from the title of a text by one of the earliest spiritual feminist writers, Merlin Stone (1976). Here is the poem:

Evrynome – A Story of Creation

By Christine Lavadas

Long, long in the past, far, far in the future,

At that point, before the beginning, after the end,

Where time and space do not exist,

Where all colours and forms are lost in the blackness of the void.

There was a heavy, vast silence,

A profound eternal motionless,

And nothingness and everything were the same.

And then Evrynome, Gaia, Goddess of a thousand names,

Mother of all,

Sighed.

And the sound of her breath echoed pleasingly in her ears.

As if it were a foreseeing

And yet as if it were a remembrance,

She heard summer breezes ruffling tall green grasses,

And winter hurricanes howling through deep valleys,

And the pounding of the sea,

And the calling voices of all creation.

And so Evrynome, Gaia, Goddess of a thousand names,

Mother of all,

Pursed her lips and whistled for the wind.

Then slowly, smoothly, and with perfect sensuality

She rose up from the timeless bed of her infinite rest

And caught up the wind

In her cupped hands,

In her streaming hair,

In the billows of her skirts,

And in the warm secret places of her body,

And she danced.

She danced delicately, she danced frenziedly,

She danced in staccato rhythm and liquid movement,

She danced with pure precision and orgiastic abandon,

She danced gloriously.

She danced holding the wind in her close embrace,

She danced the love and joy of creation.

She danced and danced.

And from the arch of her foot leapt the circles of time,

And from the curve of her spine, the spirals of life,

Day and night,

Black and white,

Absorption, reflection,

Birth, death, resurrection.

And as the ecstasy grew, as the beat increased,

The wind blew wild and her belly swelled round.

And from the rivers of her sweat, oceans flowed,

And with each heave of her breast, mountains rose.

And when she threw back her hair and opened her hands,

Life teemed around her and harmony reigned.

Creation now danced in her perfect time

And she smiled.

  

In spite of their origins, they still have the power to inform my own sense of being ‘indigenous’ to Earth in the land of my birth Australia, through my European cultural heritage. We know that the attitude of the Indigenous Australians to the arrival of the Europeans on their shores was one of honouring them, in the expectation of a customary reciprocal and fair exchange.[3] While we also know that this is not how it has finally played out, the images tend to awaken another sense of how it might have been. Maybe that’s why these images remain important, needing to be revived and re-viewed: to remind us of how it once was - “In the beginning, when god was a woman”, and of the possibility of how it might be if we go full circle by restoring the female to her awesome power, through contemporary women. These images live in a continuum encompassing living women, spirits and ancestors, qualities that are essential governing principles for a fair, just and egalitarian society. Further paraphrasing the thoughts of Max Dashu, these goddesses express, embrace, and invite the awe that is the sense of Mystery aroused by the beauty in nature, art, music and dance, and the interconnections between self and other - not the mystification practiced in authoritarian, hierarchical institutions that demand submission without knowledge[4] (commonly expressed as having ‘faith’). ‘What is divine can be found within our embodied selves rather than in a transcendent disembodied theology,’ [5]…and looking at images of ancient empowered women across time and across the globe can only help! I feel that thea would agree.

             

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[1] Barbara Caine, ed. 1998, Oxford Australian Feminism: a companion, OUP: Melbourne p. 270

[2] Prologue in Carol Christ, 1997, Rebirth of the Goddess: finding meaning in feminist spirituality, Addison Wesley Pub Co: NY

[3] Meyer Eidelson, Melbourne Dreaming: a guide to important places of past and present, Aboriginal Studies Press.

[4] Max Dashu, 2012, That which is sacred, Feminism and Religion website

[5] Barbara Caine, ed. 1998, Oxford Australian Feminism: a companion, OUP:Melbourne  p.272

Goddesses: last two in my quilt

Two enigmatic faces: Astarte/Asherah (Kalili) and Medusa

The “look at me” moments coming to us from antiquity, (minus the ‘Kath n Kim’ recriminations of women) in Lilith, as the goddess image is developed in different ways by the last two images to be discussed here. There are two faces at the bottom of the quilt, on the right and left hand positions, both enigmatic and full of the paradox that is life as it is lived. Like the other goddesses in the shrines, they contain and hold the Mystery that is Goddess knowledge (I use the term ‘gnowing’, with the inflection of knowledge gained through insightful intuition, observation and experience) embodied through differentiation without losing a sense of an organic, living and sacred one-ness in which all participate. They are the Medusa and the so-called ‘woman at the window’, who is also named as the Mona Lisa of Numrud, for obvious reasons – the latter for where she was found, and the former due to her gorgeous smile, one that extends to her eyes –and tongue. Of course, both titles have been super-imposed by the limited and limiting patriarchal concept of women and their roles in society.

The Sumerian name of Kalili is assigned to this Mona Lisa, though she is likely be associated with Astarte and Asherah, mentioned in the Bible. The name conferred by thea in the card appellation is “Seer”, and looking at her image, while recalling the name of the women looking out of a window, it is not difficult to understand why she chose this title. She is very beautiful and does appear to gaze directly back at the viewer, unabashed and clearly with insight.

The one image on the quilt that perhaps stands out from the others, being on her head (bottom left hand row). She is of course Medusa, perhaps my favourite, since she is so ancient, so powerful, and so humorous in her way – with her eyes bulging and tongue sticking out in derision and ‘gnowing’, her head full of writhing snakes. Be afraid, be very afraid – because she is in charge!

Much maligned as she has been over the millennia since the onset of deliberate, concerted and through the continual patriarchal project of demonizing women, she has offered herself as a role model. Though they have succeeded in belittling her through inverting the story of her as protector, her ensign was marked on battle shields to instill fear into the opponent, to turn the enemy ‘into stone’ in battle – I wonder if that story worked. As might be expected, the final version of this evolving story goes that the ‘hero’ Perseus had to conquer her completely by cutting off her head through a clever and insidious ploy of smoke and mirrors. No more powerful snakes to instill fear – or respect!

A short text from thea accompanied each of the images, as can be viewed in the previous posts. During the quilt formation I quite coincidentally uncovered four lovely postcards stored in a box and sent to me from thea Gaia when she was visiting the underground cistern to the Basilica in Istanbul. They showed two very large renditions of the Medusa’s head, placed at the bottom of huge columns originating in the Roman conquest of Constantinople (not Istanbul) over 1600 ago. One is standing on her head, the other glancing up sideways at the visitors to the place. For thea, Medusa represents the “Mystery” that always is. She had a wonderful way with words, and had written her words of wisdom on the back of the postcards, remembering my birthday at the time of her visit to the cistern. She wrote:

            …as you go into the Mystery of the underground may you go into the Mystery of your underground self and celebrate your own being. And do not be surprised when you find a Medusa there, at the foot of a column, looking up into the world above.

The obvious question is why is one upside down? Thea’s answer:

…she is there to keep her eye on Mary in statue and fresco form in the building above her – “next door” – and to give acknowledgment to the innerness and outerness of us all.

And thea’s reflection on the other Medusa head, which is looking out, curiously sideways? She suggests that she ‘continues to look within and wonder, reflecting on the Mystery of the divided world in which we live’, adding a short mantra…

May we recognize her wisdom and her power and her presence waiting to be confirmed in our depths.           

           

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Birds in Goddess symbolism

Birds have always been deeply associated with the powerful cycle of Earth’s seasons of new existence, new beginnings, demise and an unsolicited source of renewal. In ancient myths, beginnings were conceived as the cosmic world egg in the deep abyss bringing forth the shape, space and passage of time in the Universe, sometimes encircled by a snake, as in the myth of Eurynome, (from which my wall-hanging in part takes its title: “Before the beginning…”). As the snake in its environmental habitats brings the upper, earthly and lower worlds together, so does the bird, which flies in from the absence of the sky-place, can live and breed on the ground, or float and feed on the waters. Veneration for the bird’s association with the seasonal return of the sky’s life-giving waters and women’s procreative powers is easily imaginable, of course embodied in the breaking of the amniotic waters in giving human birth. Natural recurrent cycles resonate across time and space, corroborated by human observation and experience, most importantly in the birth-giving powers of the body of woman and other female animals. No wonder the bird was such a strong symbol of the powers of goddesses. There is much more that can be explored by way of bird symbolism through the ancient images and artifacts uncovered in recent times.[1]

The dove in particular has been woven through story and myth from earliest times, and remains a powerful symbol today. Though co-opted into Christian mythology as the (male) Holy Ghost and general symbol of epiphany, (think Noah’s ark; the annunciation to Mary of her divine conception, the dove hovering over Jesus when he was being baptized by John in the Jordan, and many others), it is significant that the dove had always been a female symbol associated with very early Goddesses, as well as being a central image of goddess in the Minoan culture of Crete. Two doves are in the crown of the little Goddess with her arms upraised at the epiphany of a full harvest moon behind her. Since she was found at Knossos, it is not surprising that there are bull’s horns on her crown also, though it must be acknowledged that the skull and horns of a bull is an image the dates back to the Neolithic village of Catal Huyuk as likely a recognition of female reproductive anatomy;[2] and even further back into the Palaeolitic period, where it is thought that the shape may have been associated with the new moon.[3]

The moon is present in seven of the nine shrines, and is a personal addition, not present in the original images on the cards. It was through our group moon rituals that I grew to understand, accept and cherish my power as woman, and I have come to watch and recognize the phases of the moon as they appear in the southern hemisphere, from waxing to waning. the moon is a daily (nightly?) visual symbol of the energies of birth, life and death in its cycle of fullness, demise and renewal. It is an organic reality that cannot be discounted, with women’s monthly menstrual cycles having been closely entrained to shedding and renewing according to the pull of the moon cycle. Moon, woman and earth are all entrained to the cycles of gestation, nurturance and regeneration.

 

Goddess known as Lilith stands on a moon that could be seen as being in the last stages of waxing to fullness – or the first stage of waning: in the southern hemisphere starting on the right and moving back to the left. It is after all a cycle, without precedence of one stage over the other. She stands proudly in the top right corner shrine of my wall hanging.  She is named Lilith in the cards produced by thea, and is also referred to often in relation to the Goddess Innana/Ishtar. There are similarities to the images of Inanna, in particular the tall, slim and upright, naked body, the beehive headdress/crown and holding the symbols of power in her arms, upraised in a gesture of epiphany. Lilith is the first discredited woman in literature, the woman who told the first man, Adam that his sex didn’t please her, providing grounds for the first divorce. How dare she? Her disgrace and demonisation may have become apparent through the Bible story around the same time as the tribes of the Hibiru were getting together to sort out political ways to deal with the other tribes, and the various goddesses being venerated regionally, becoming the ‘lady of the might’. However, her primordial physical manifestation tells another story. She not only holds the symbols of power and wears the regal crown, she herself bears large wings, in a similar way to the Egyptian Isis. She is also flanked either side by two owls, birds that see in the darkness of night (as seen in the original image of the card, shown in an earlier post). Here, her bird claws stand on the snake skin, not to suggest the conquering of her supposedly uncontrollable sexual rapaciousness (remember Adam and Eve, where the snake was the helpless temptor (is this the masculine of this word, usually used in the feminine?) that she succumbed to - a story women have been burdened with for millennia since), but the snake as her powerful consort. With her shape-shifting capacity, she offers a cultural re-empowerment for women: she dares us to revision and reclaim her powers for ourselves, to transform our ways of viewing reality of patriarchal interpretations from an insubordinate woman to an autonomous woman.

 

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[1] see Baring and Cashford, 1993, The Myth of the Goddess: evolution of an image, Arkana:London (pp. 58-62)

[2] Dorothy Cameron, 1981, Symbols of Birth and of Death in the Neolithic Era, Kenyon-Deane Ltd: London

[3] Baring and Cashford, p.129