It matters whether the Ouroboros swallows its tale, again.
—Donna Haraway
1) Was there ever a time that wasn’t like this, full of suffering and distress? When Marija Gimbutas began her journey as an archeologist I think she might have asked herself the same question. Born in 1921 Gimbutas survived both Soviet and German occupation, sheltered Jewish people fleeing the Nazi regime and witnessed indescribable violence. "Life just twisted me like a little plant, but my work was continuous in one direction," she once said about her life.[i]
2) Because of this experience I suspect Gimbutas, perhaps unconsciously at first, set out to prove through an at that time daring combination of mythology, folklore, linguistics and archaeology that the human world wasn’t always centered on aggression, and creating the tools needed to enact it (“the unnecessary killing of ongoingness”[ii], as writer, biologist, and feminist theorist Donna Haraway puts it). Gimbutas grew up in Lithuania in a family with rich folk traditions, feeding milk to the protective snakes under the house for example, and singing songs specific to that locality, songs of veneration for the elements, the water, the earth and the animals. Her father and grandfather literally kissed the ground upon waking and then again before going to sleep.
3) I’m not sure where or when Gimbutas unearthed the first sculpture or ceramic shard that would come to (re)define her life’s work. Seeing, for the very first time, the symbols, female figures and patterns that would continue to reveal themselves in archeological digs, not only in her ancestral Baltic lands but also throughout the entirety of Europe (from Ireland to Greece, Portugal to Iran) made a significant impact on Gimbutas. The exact same designs, sculpted animal-human and female figures, and evidence of ritualistic usage were discovered in far-reaching societies that would, during the Neolithic era, find it difficult if not impossible to engage in cultural exchange. And yet Gimbutas found ample proof that they shared a visual language, ideograms or “sonatas of becoming”[iii] as she called them. More than effigies, they were representations of a culture’s spiritual ideology and connection to ecology. “...the iconography of The Great Goddess arose in reflection and veneration of the laws of Nature.”[iv]
4) The hundreds of objects that Gimbutas and her teams unearthed were deities or depictions of deities. They revealed a matrilineal/matrifocal pantheon of female and female/animal hybrid goddesses, mirroring the social structure of the communities that made them. In the Neolithic era, God was a woman, or at least it seemed that way. That’s not to say there weren’t male god-figures (There were. In the form of deer, bison, bird-masked men and/or daimons.), it’s just that the majority of the figures found in burial sites and temples, near hearths and in kitchens, were definitively female.
5) Gimbutas says she found no evidence of warfare, no arrowheads or objects of deathly destruction, Which, to my mind, fails to indicate an entirely peaceful society, as gimbutas claims. More important to me and my pursuit however, are this era’s unique philosophies, rituals, customs, and perspectives towards ecology and spirituality, which Gimbutas was able to establish through what is now referred to as Goddess mythology and symbolism. I’m more curious about the potential of The Goddess in our lives today.
6) In the 1950’s, Gimbutas published a series of papers on the Kurgan culture (now Russia/Ukraine), specifically the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speakers and their homeland. She hypothesized that PIE Kurgan culture was patriarchal, warring, pastoral and horse-breeding without a pantheon of deities. In contrast, Gimbutas found Old Europe as matriarchal, peaceful, agricultural and in worship of a pantheon of goddesses, and gods. Gimbutas believed the meeting of these two groups resulted in tragedy, transforming Old Europe and its Neolithic culture into a patriarchal society with an appetite for violence, not unlike the one we live in today. Her thesis was initially ignored, criticized and debased. Moving forward, her work was often revaluated and found credible. Most recently in 2018, David Anthony, an anthropologist at Hartwick College, said that linguistic and archaeological evidence such as weapons found in graves suggests that European [PIE] progenitors had a warrior culture. “Language shifts generally flow in the direction of groups that have higher economic status...and in the most brutal situations, it will flow in the direction of the people who survived.”[v] The majority of Contemporary European languages come from PIE speakers.
7) To help me work through the gaps in my own thoughts, ideas and research, I sought out other artists, academics, philosophers and writers who might be interested in investigating the influence of goddess mythology on contemporary culture, in discovering the ways in which The Goddess manifests herself in everyday life, in experimenting with forms that might represent a contemporary goddess, should there be one.
8) Richard Rohr, American author, spiritual writer, and Franciscan friar asks, “What if changing our perception of God changes everything?”[vi].
9) Like the Venus of Willendorf discovered in 1908 in Austria, some of the Neolithic goddess figurines were what people in 2021 might call ‘full-figured’. But not all of them. Some were shown pregnant, but not all of them. Some of the statues were not human, rather they depicted many different species of female animals, from frogs to pigs to birds to bison, which were rendered pregnant but, not always. Some were hybrids of human female-bird-snake goddesses, or human female-bear-mothers, or human female-deer and so on. Through her intensive research, Gimbutas discovered The Goddess, and her many “epiphanies”. The kind of “symbiont” earth-being Haraway knows well, “Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up to the minute...tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, unruly hair...they demonstrate a material meaningfulness...writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names.”[vii]
9) Like the Venus of Willendorf discovered in 1908 in Austria, some of the Neolithic goddess figurines were what people in 2021 might call ‘full-figured’. But not all of them. Some were shown pregnant, but not all of them. Some of the statues were not human, rather they depicted many different species of female animals, from frogs to pigs to birds to bison, which were rendered pregnant but, not always. Some were hybrids of human female-bird-snake goddesses, or human female-bear-mothers, or human female-deer and so on. Through her intensive research, Gimbutas discovered The Goddess, and her many “epiphanies”. The kind of “symbiont” earth-being Haraway knows well, “Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up to the minute...tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, unruly hair...they demonstrate a material meaningfulness...writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names.”[vii]
10) Humans living in the Neolithic era used basic pastoral farming practices. As such, they were deeply connected to and reliant on the natural sources around them. Namely the earth, the sun and water. But also, animals and their ability to reproduce. And, not to mention, the continuation of their own lineage. This relationship was, and still is, based on natural cycles in which human beings participated in and benefited from a complex ecology. Goddess symbols and associated myths were a reminder to human beings of their place within a larger, cyclical framework, a reminder to care and respect the earth and her cycles, and to work with the cycles as any other tool.
11) Haraway says, “...it’s important to not only respect the, a, life but to acknowledge that all have a death...”[viii] In the cycle of life and death, something that we as contemporary humans disregard is that death is situated very near to birth, to life. The beginning and the end are right beside each other on the wheel of life. Thus, The Goddess, more than Earth Mother or a seductive Venus (although she was this as well), was equal parts life-giving and death-wielding. She controlled the duration of existence for all living entities on Earth, making daily worship imperative to survival, or as Haraway says for “thriving”. The tomb is the womb.
12) In her series of oil paintings titled, “Mother’s Storage”, Amanda Boulos (featured in this project) creates sanctuary-like spaces for forms which are sometimes indistinguishable from cavities. A hearts rests within a bloodied abyss, rounded bodies refute “the empty vessel” by embodying patchwork landscapes, while shadowy holes exist not as voids but as lush, black bogs. The tomb is the womb.
13) Observing the dead as an essential part of life is not macabre or grim. It’s the opposite, “...without sustained remembrance we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think.”[ix] (Haraway again) Without ghosts, we cannot imagine, conceive, sketch, plan, foresee, envision; activities that are the basis of the future, of multiple futures. First we think and then we act. In Western (capitalistic) culture, our circle’s been ironed out and the ghost-energies and knowledges that we need to (re)create a holistic world-feeling, all but erased. We continue towards progress without learning and embodying both our mistakes and successes from the past, so obsessed are we with the new.
14) “We the living, are a minority, the dead out-number us...”, observed poet Ocean Vuong.[x]
15) By denying ourselves the right to think about a circular, rejuvenating rather than fearsome, end-all death, we sacrifice our shared vulnerability to death’s grip. Life’s going to end for everyone, a little different for everyone, but nonetheless we’re all in for it. Why not come together over the similarity? Why not embrace those that can guide us? The Neolithic Goddess in her manifold forms was a ‘speaker for the dead’, and the living.[xi] There is no simple death, as Gimbutas states in the conclusion of her book “The Language of the Goddess”, a Goddess bible of sorts. There is never only death she means, always death and regeneration, the big round.
16) As a contemporary advanced society with selective amnesia, we desperately need to re-establish ‘speakers for the dead’. Haraway explains, “The speakers for the dead should be a new kind of symbiosis...tasked with bringing into mind and heart...the emerging kinds of beings and ways of life of an always evolving home world. The speakers of the dead seek and release the energies of the past, present and future...”.[xii] ‘Speakers for the dead’ don’t necessarily have to be human or animals, or materials, or technologies; they can be both and. They should be, both and.
17) Along with a rigid, fear-based division between life and death, we’ve also done an excellent job of divorcing ourselves from other living beings, including and especially other humans. Bruno Latour suggests, “It is the peculiar trait of Westerners that they have imposed the total separation of humans and nonhumans—The Internal Great Divide—and have thereby artificially created the scandal of the others.”[xiii]Us versus them, was there ever a greater act of violence? Goddess mythology, and the representation of divinity via hybrid forms, was telling the story of more than just a deity and her power. it symbolled forth unity and inter-dependence between all living and non-living matter. It even symbolized, via its emphasis on invisible cycles, a connection between material planes of existence and the ephemeral, what some might call the 'energetic field’.
18) Goddess myth was about storytelling. It is about storytelling. Reading Gimbutas reminded me of the power of cultural myths. And about the need to create and re-create mythologies that ‘work’ for everyone including animals, plant life and objects. A myth is about telling the story of ourselves, to and through ourselves so that at first, we listen. And then, in subsequent iterations and versions passed down from eye to brain to ear to mouth to stomach and heart, we are able to hear it, ingest it, and continue to hear it as part of a (re)worlding-practice. Because, what is a myth but a method of self-placement and understanding? Eastern Philosopher and speaker Alan Watts summarizes it nicely, “A myth is an image with which we make sense of the world.”[xiv] Without continual revision of our cultural myths, we are susceptible to illness on all levels, but particularly that of an afflicted collective consciousness. Like washing in a tepid pool of used bath water, it’s done its job, time for something fresh.
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18) Goddess myth was about storytelling. It is about storytelling. Reading Gimbutas reminded me of the power of cultural myths. And about the need to create and re-create mythologies that ‘work’ for everyone including animals, plant life and objects. A myth is about telling the story of ourselves, to and through ourselves so that at first, we listen. And then, in subsequent iterations and versions passed down from eye to brain to ear to mouth to stomach and heart, we are able to hear it, ingest it, and continue to hear it as part of a (re)worlding-practice. Because, what is a myth but a method of self-placement and understanding? Eastern Philosopher and speaker Alan Watts summarizes it nicely, “A myth is an image with which we make sense of the world.”[xiv] Without continual revision of our cultural myths, we are susceptible to illness on all levels, but particularly that of an afflicted collective consciousness. Like washing in a tepid pool of used bath water, it’s done its job, time for something fresh.
19) Do you ever think about why people find change so difficult? “Metamorphosis is something vanishing, and something else growing...described as something in-between, a becoming,” wrote author Johanna Pope on the topic of the ‘growthocene’. Becoming, I’ve grown to love the word. The logic of growth is to “become something which one already is, what is inside becomes outside.”[xv] And what’s inside? Fluid, we’re all made of water. We’re meant to take the shape of our container, conceptually speaking. We’re designed to shapeshift.
20) In the past, mythology’s highest aim (regardless of its actual success) might have been to bring every form of life into nourishment and power, not separation, or categories recognizable to Western philosophy, politics, and economic sanctions. At their best, myths work to bond together seemingly disparate patterns, bodies, ideas and habits. Consider the classical definition of the word religion. It comes from the Latin word ‘religio’ or’ religare’: to bind or reconnect.[xvi] Now a symbol, for far too many, of the corruption and abuse actioned by secular organized religious groups, the idea behind religion is what should hold value. Whether a person claims a formal creed or identifies themselves as spiritual, a belief system with a sincere intention to re-world should help one to “embrace oppositions and conflicts, not to purify them, but to live inside [the] complexities of shared flesh...”[xvii], Haraway once again.
21) Speaking of flesh, I wonder if the makers of the Goddess figurines and symbols saw themselves in the bodies they were creating. Who were their models? How did they know that The Goddess in female human form looked the way she did? It’s a chicken-egg question: did Neolithic women look like The Goddess or vice versa? If we were to make a goddess sculpture now, what would she/he/they look like? Taking into account gender and identity politics, globalisation, socio-political structures...fashion...how could we even use the word goddess?
22) Neolithic Goddess sculptures and objects were, perhaps, merely emblematic messengers made to communicate with the divine, like three-dimensional prayers. But maybe they were also a way for ancient cultures to literally figure themselves into a complex world-belief system, so they wouldn’t forget themselves. Poet Lisa Robertson, featured in this project, wrote in her recent novel, “The Baudelaire Fractal”, “I needed to write in order to make a site for my body.”[xviii]
23) As we all know and have likely experienced, social acceptance is not a given. Humans are reluctant to embrace difference. For complex but ultimately superficial reasons, we put dissimilarities through the rigours of classification, categorization and hierarchy. We define our relation to difference via dominance rather than appreciation. And this fear, masked as control, disguised as superiority, is continually veiled as progress. Difference is just another word for separate. If you ask most Eastern Philosophers, they’ll tell you that identification with ourselves as separate is the root of all fear.
24) “...more ‘them’ than ‘us’, sheep are regarded as being as close to an automaton and mindless animal species as can be imagined...They are disregarded as subjects because of their “overt” behavior patterns...highly fearful of predation...few defences...content to be led...These considerations implicitly highlight our cultural taxonomy and criteria for superiority: primacy, excellence, aggression and predator-like behavior.”[xix].
25) Long before this project started, I had an infatuation with hybrid forms. (Think Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, or the Italian Emperor Nero’s Cave.) The art-historical period of the traditional grotesque with its ever-evolving beings transiting from human to plant, animal to musical instrument, monster to child and back again, seemed like the perfect solution. To what? The problem of belonging, a problem rooted in language (and money).
24) Sebene Selassie, teacher and author, said, “...We have to keep reminding ourselves, these are the culture’s thoughts, and the culture is really shitty. They’ve adopted these patterns of comparison and competition, of hierarchy and oppression...
I absorbed separation and domination the same way I absorbed language...”[xx] The body doesn’t know the difference between a word thought, a word spoken, a word heard, or an action. They’re all the same. And it can’t distinguish between language that comes from the outside and language that is internal; what you say to yourself is the same as what others say to you, from the perspective of your body. Given language’s slippery and inadequate character absorbing any form of it without careful consideration is, therefore, potentially dangerous.
23) The Latin word “monstrum” (monster) has its roots not in evil but in divinity, “a divine catastrophe” as Ocean Vuong says [xxi]. “A monstrum is a phenomenon, deviating from normality, a disconcerting irregularity such as a two-headed calf...the term monstrum refers to the problem of interpretation and thus, to the problematization of [lingual] taxonomies...”[xxii] such as man/woman, animal/human, good/evil, white/black. Monsters were living entities that existed even though they remained unclassifiable and thus, atrocious. Hybrids, like the classical Greek chimera, “...have come to describe any mythical or fictional creature with parts taken from various animals, to describe anything composed of very disparate parts, or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling.”[xxiii] To encounter a monster was a sublime experience, equally terrifying and equally seducing, an experience hard to define.
22) What I’m reaching for through this project and in my personal life, through the investigation of hybrids or ‘monsters’, through the consideration of cultural myths including gender itself, is to participate in the debate of what constitutes the self. And to stretch our imagination of how many ‘selves’ or identifications with our ‘selves’ we might encounter within a given lifetime, to create a space where the word wrong cannot be considered. Every thing is more than one (self), more than one limited and definable controllable entity, at any given time, simultaneously. The self is a changeable linguistic construct, attached to a material form that is also constantly changing.
21) In the introduction to Gimbutas’ book, “The Language of the Goddess”, she references the work of George Dumézil, French philologist, linguist, and religious studies scholar specializing in mythology, “...studies have shown that mythic beings are the means for exploring the order of [hu]mankind and the origins of the universe...”[xxiv] When I look at a hybrid form, a so-called mythic being, I see possibility. I see real and sustainable authority enabled by a living being performing as more than one, being more than one. Because they, hybrids, exude an understanding of the multifaceted interwovenness of the fabric of the world. One of the ever-shifting knowledges this project attempts to grasp, and one in which Gimbutas became an expert.
20) “...not simply Venus; more than fertility and prosperity; life-givers, death-wielders, emblems and energy-givers for interconnected life and death...not only human but all life on earth and... the cosmos... “Earth Mother”, “The Fertility Goddess”, young and old, rising and dying with [the] plant[s]. She was the single source of all life who took her energy from the springs and wells, from the moon, and moist earth.”[xxv]
In this collection of creative deliberations, explorations and experimentations, water as a fluid entity is a central character, particularly for artist Adama Delphine Fawundu. In her moving-image series “Wata Bodies”, water is divine. A shapeshifting goddess, water inhabits and nourishes the fabrics of invisible and yet tangible (her)stories and bodies, disrupting and dissolving time and its perceived boundaries.
19) “This [goddess] system represents cyclical, not linear, mythical time. In art, this is manifested by the signs of dynamic motion: whirling and twisting spirals, winding and coiling snakes, circles and crescents, horns, sprouting seeds and shoots....”[xxvi] Seeds, where would we be without seeds? In the poem by Lisa Robertson (included in this project) titled “Weeds: (for the Natufians)”, a research-based poem on the Mesolithic Natufian culture and the powerful role of women therein, seeds are given their rightful place as the integral beginning (and ending) of a culture. “This is about weeds...” the piece begins, tipping us off to the literal nature of its contents and to the fact that even those entities, those things, those thoughts and actions, which we do not mean to sew, come together in the (w)hole.
18) One of the characteristics of the historical grotesque period, and its hybrid imagery, was the illustration of the concept of the infinite represented by bodies in continuous, evolving, modification. The kinds of bodies that beg the question, what is it then between us? The kinds of bodies that dare us to be accountable through their interrelation, by making visible the invisible webbing that ties us (and our bodies) together. Mallika Dutt, an author and teacher deeply committed to exploring interconnectedness asks, “How do we go into deep and [painful] shapeshifting?”[xxvii] Some might argue the option of psychoanalysis, with its intellectual rigour. I’ve come to wonder if its through the soul or, if you prefer, the spirit and its difficult-to-classify experiences.
17) In 1917, German theologian, philosopher, and comparative religionist, Rudolph Otto, tried to identify the non-rational element of religious experience by describing what is left when the rational elements have been subtracted. In his book, “The Idea of Holy”, he coined the word ‘numinous’ taken from the Latin ‘numen’, as “the holy, minus its moral factor or... its rational aspect all together.”[xxviii] Otto breaks down the numinous into three-parts: “mysterium tremendum”, “creature feeling” and “the element of energy or urgency”.
16) Mysterium Tremendum: “...The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship...It may burst...with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering...It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless...We say ˋmy blood ran icy cold´ and ˋmy flesh crept...”
15) Creature Feeling: “... we undoubtedly here first meet with feelings familiar enough... gratitude, trust, love, reliance, humble submission, and dedication...This is the feeling of dependence ...which is yet at the same time far more than, and something other than...dependence...I propose to call it creature-consciousness or creature-feeling. It is the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures...”[xxx] (See the poem, The Dream of the Rood, “Wonderful was the triumphant tree and I stained with sin.”[xxxi])
14) The Element of Energy: “It is particularly, vividly perceptible in Wrath; and it everywhere clothes itself in symbolical expressions: vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement, activity, impetus... the mystics’ love claims a perceptible kinship with...Love, says one of the mystics, is nothing else than quenched Wrath.”[xxxii]
13) An envisioning practice is one that helps people move fluidly between polarities. Envisioning practices, like the practice of prayer, meditation or ‘evoking the witness’, are found within Eastern philosophies and religious beliefs including Buddhism. The trick is to view yourself from the outside in your current setting, amid whatever experience you are having to see the reality of the present moment. It’s a kind of personal mirroring, a reflection. While I was reading Gimbutas’ book, “The Language of the Goddess” I asked myself, was The Goddess a reflection of the Neolithic people? And in that sense, were the figurines made to stand not only as talismans for the people themselves (here we are dirty and sinful before her, The Goddess) but also a grand witness to their lives? Can a reflection be a witness? In Priscilla Aleman’s installation (featured in this project] we face ourselves in human form, in the colour blue, Floating in a parallel universe. Aleman tasks us with the challenge of unmooring, to detach from the narratives that tether us to limiting ideas that inevitably dictate an unsatisfactory relationship to the words “land”, “water” and “body”.
12) In psychologist Erich Neumann’s book, “The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype” he states that the great mother is a psychic reality, stemming from The Feminine archetype, which derives from the Ouroboros. The Ouroboros (a snake with its own tail in its mouth) is a symbol of both the beginning and the end, an unconscious and undifferentiated state of being...but also, he says, a symbol of united primordial parental figures. The Great Mother, according to Neumann, later separated from the heteronormative couple, splitting into The Good and The Terrible Mother.[xxxiii] Exploring the mother in a series titled “Cocoon”, artist Marianna Simnett’s achromatic watercolors (included in this project) lead us through a somewhat troubling and cathartic investigation of mother/child relations. But not only that. She begs us to examine the role, and perhaps sentience, of domestic objects in an environment of trauma, attachment, and control. In Simnett’s work, the Ouroboros grasps its tail but also objects like furniture and paper.
11) Gimbutas refutes Neumann’s analysis by saying that his theories are based upon Indo-European ideologies that devalue the mother archetype’s significance. The Great Mother may have split, but into a Woman of Plants and a Woman of Beasts. Gimbutas goes on to explain that in the Neolithic era, the Goddess is one deity, both Life-Giver and Death-Wielder with no male counterpart. She may be anthropomorphic, or zoomorphic, or may appear in double or triple form to emphasize her powers, not to represent a division of self but rather a whole and complex regeneratrix.[xxxiv] In Giulia Maria Chesi and Francesco Giusti’s essay, “the dreams of the mother”, (featured in this project) mothers’ dreams have the power to literally enact both generative and destructive changes in thier sons lives, including revenge.
10) Separating the goddess mother into good and evil, is a way of rationalizing her ability to be destructive and constructive simultaneously. And a way to destabilise her position. This kind of subversion is seen in ancient Greek and Roman mythology as well. Artemis of Ephesus, for example, (described in detail in Konstantinos Bilias and Nina Horn-Wittkuhn’s meticulous historical account titled “Aphrodite and Artemis”, included in this project) was initially represented with a multitude of breast-like forms on her chest, a wreath-necklace of seeds and berries, a temple-like headpiece, and animals shown alongside and directly embedded in her body. She later became, through Greek and then Roman mythology, the infantilised Diana, Virgin Huntress.
9) In 1965, Gimbutas’ research of Kurgan burial mounds and linguistics set forth to transform Indo-European studies, the study of the groups of people who are now most common in Europe. She found that Indo-Europeans and their languages expanded from the Russian Steppes through patriarchal lineages in which they passed on language and rituals. Gimbutas saw the beginning of the Indo-European culture as the end of the era of the Neolithic (Chthonic) Goddess and the beginning of private land ownership and warfare. This was the beginning of Bronze and Iron Ages that resulted in advanced weapons and simultaneously, superb craft abilities. Indo-European culture also marked the beginning of Christianity with its monotheistic male God and the devaluing of female skills and contributions.
8) According to Gimbutas, this transition resulted in other “strange transformations...the conversion of Athena, the Old European Bird Goddess, into a militarized figure carrying a shield and wearing a helmet. The belief in her birth from the head of Zeus, the ruling God...shows how far the transformation went... Zeus was a bull...and Athena’s birth from the head of a bull was nothing else but a memory of birth from a bucranium... the uterus in Old European symbolism.”[xxxv]
7) Indo-Europeans, as they stormed Neolithic villages and farmsteads, took their reign as the ruling class, creating a corresponding and dominating androcentric belief system. But as Gimbutas believes, “... [old European sacred images] could only have disappeared with the total extermination of the female population.” [AKA “witch hunt”][xxxvii]
6) The artwork, conversations and writing included in this hybrid publication/exhibition is, I believe, not only a method for approaching the potential and important role of myth through transformative living forms, but also a way to envision oneself as such, to never let oneself trip and fall into tiny cracks, or be pushed to the darkest corners of the earth.“I pondered in my diary whether one could become an image for oneself, an image to live from, or at least to write from...This image would not be a means of appearing to a social given; rather, it would be the self-given permission to not disappear to oneself...” wrote Robertson in “The Baudelaire Fractal”.
5) There are of course, some weaknesses in Gimbutas’ theories. One being the simplification of the transition from Neolithic to Indo-European. As Ernestine Elster, a former student of Gimbutas writes, “...In prehistory, just as in modern history, social control and negotiation of power were much more ambiguous than would be allowed by claiming that matriarchy was simply usurped by patriarchy....”[xxxix] If you imagine the bodies seemingly in control of Western societies now, we might first see white men of a certain age in the corner offices of our biggest institutions. But a quick glimpse behind the closed doors of most of our homes would soon reveal a different outlook. Who cleaned, cooked, and kept your emotional-physical life “under control” when you were a child? (See socialist-feminist activist and author Silvia Federici and her “Wages for Housework”.)
4) Even though the popularity of Gimbutas’ work coincided with the rise of feminist ideas in the late 1960’s she never outwardly called herself a feminist. And I see, as others have, that her emphasis on motherhood, reproduction and a connection to nature can be limiting in terms of the representation of women via the goddess. She also failed to speak to the differences between women, as well as between women and men, as intersectional feminism has worked to address. She was a product of her time, perhaps motivated more by the success and/or sufferings of her parents both academic gurus, and not gender parity. This, however, has likely made it easier for me and the artists featured in this project to expand upon her interpretations, transmutating personal mythologies, lineages, memories, bodies, rituals, beliefs, feelings and our own limiting beliefs into futuring practices, visions of what The Goddess can be.
3) For example, Canadian artist Heather Davis, anthropocene scholar and Assistant Professor at The New School in New York, says that plastic can be our new queer kin. Rather than maintaining our current relationship with the material, one that calls for its complete eradication however impossible, Davis suggests that we might embrace and care for plastic as we would any other living form. In her 2021 artist talk called, “The Queer Futurity of Plastic”, she alludes to the idea that like any other seemingly disparate component making up a (hybrid) living entity, plastic is now a permanent part of our human body. And also, a part of many animals, the water, soil and even outer space.[xl] It’s possible, we can become whatever we need to be for each other, for “ongoingness”.
2) “The animal-sym partners remain unaltered by human genes. The human syms take on ever more properties of their animal partners...bringing ongoing presence, through active memory, the lost lifeways...Crucial to the work was to not forget the stink in the air from the burning of witches, not to forget the murders of human and non-human beings...Moving through mourning, to represencing, to practiced vital memory was the work...Their task was to strengthen the healing that was gaining momentum across the earth.” The future, as indicated by those early Goddess figurines lifted from their soil beds, isn’t about who we are, but “how we can become with.” [xli]>
1) Ancient Lithuanian goddess Giltinė was known to take form as inanimate objects including the most inconspicuous of things, wood shavings or baskets for example. She could appear as one or three goddesses but was often more heard than seen: a splashing of water, a long run of ale, a tapping at the door or on the table, the sound of a striking whip, rattling glasses or a shudder in the body...”[xlii]
the sound of a striking whip, rattling glasses or a shudder in the body.
the sound of a striking whip, rattling glasses or a shudder in the body.
