When god was a woman merlin stone pdf

RECOVERING HER STORY:

FEMINIST ARTISTS RECLAIM THE

GREAT GODDESS BY GLORIA FEMAN ORENSTEIN

Cynthia Mailman. Self-Portrait as God from Sister Chapel. 1977. Acrylic on canvas, 60x 108'. Collection the artist

In her most recent book, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From The /Middle Ages to 18701 feminist historian Gerda Lerner argues that throughout Western history female mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen (twelfth century), women in the Cathar (eleventh-twelfth centuries), Beguine (twelfth-thirteenth centuries), anti Shaker (Ann Lee, founder 1736-84) movements as well as many secular female visionaries like Margery Kempe (c. 1373-1438), constitute a long matrilineage of women who, through powerful mystical visions anti divine revelations, ac­ quired the authority to challenge the sexism anti misogyny of their own patriarchal societies and religions. Lerner traces womens biblical commentary and criticism from Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pisan through Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gages The Woman’s Bible.- Her conclusion is that

women were denied knowledge of their history, and thus each woman had to argue as though no woman before her had ever thought or written. Women had to use their energy to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, generation after generation Men argued with the giants that preceded them; women ar­ gued against the oppressive weight of millennia of patriarchal thought, which denied them authority, even humanity, and when they had to argue they argued with the "great men" of the fast, deprived of the empowerment, strength, and knowl­ edge women of the fast could have offered them.3

The revelations of these female mystics often contained vi­ sions of a feminine aspect of the divinity or of a divine female, such as Sophia (the female aspect of God representing wisdom, or the Goddess of Wisdom), They also included images of the Church its Mother, and they frequently conceited of a holistic spirituality in which heaven and earth were linked, and spirit and nature were no longer antithetical. In retrospect it now seems evident, as Gerda Lerner noted, that “the concept of the divine female, Great Goddess, protreatrix, goddess of life and death, continued to inspire women 2,000 years after her pass­ ing. Despite all the gender indoctrination anti the intense pressure towards submissiveness, women, obsessed or rational, wrote themselves into the story of redemption."4

The female Goddess artists of the 1970s both participate in and expand upon this tradition. However, it is interesting to consider the fact that the movement to reclaim the Goddess in our own time began specifically with artistic anti archaeological rather than mystical expression. The two most important schol­ arly voices of the seventies, women whose works have grounded and launched our contemporary feminist approach to the study of the pre-patriarchal Goddess civilization in archaeology and history, were Marija Gimbutas and Merlin Stone. Merlin Stone had been a sculptor, and she hits often told the story of how she uncovered the material that later became her groundbreaking book When God Was A Woman.5 She had been looking for art- historical images of powerful female forms, which led her to the discovery of the Paleolithic Goddesses such as the Venus of Willendorf, and then took her on a quest for other Goddess im­ ages in pre-patriarchal cultures. Marija Gimbutas’s archaeo­ logical studies have given the highest scientific authority to our

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knowledge of ancient Goddess civilization. Her book, originally published in 1974 with the title The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 7000 to 3500 B.C., Myths, Legends, and Call Images,6 provided a full iconographic lexicon of pre-patriarchal images and symbols.7

The examples of these two pioneer women scholars, whose works served to reclaim the Goddess within a feminist "herstori- tal”8 context, indicate that art is a potent transmitter of knowl­ edge. We ate further reminded that in oral and primal cultures lacking a written language, knowledge was always conveyed through the arts.

The contemporary feminist movement to reclaim the God­ dess through the arts is thus to he understood as embedded both within a larger "herstory" of women's historical critique of patriarchal religions and within a pre-patriarchal herstorical context of women’s artistic creativity through representations of powerful female figures in nature, on stone, in caves, and in clay. These images contain a vital “herstory" of women's relation to the sacred and to the secular dimensions of their worlds. Il was, however, the artistic visions of Merlin Stone and Marija Gimbutas that eventually reinterpreted the meaning of these an­ cient, artistic images for us historically and archaelologyically, making them accessible and meaningful to contemporary femi­ nist artists of the 1970s. Thus, the reclamation of the Goddess in art is situated in the heart of the second wave of the feminist movement (1970s to the present) its well as within the newly de­ veloping field of women’s studies scholarship.

Although our Western herstorical foremothers from Hil- degard of Bingen to Elizabeth Cady Stanton created feminist commentaries, critiques, and images in response to the divine or the sacred as it was inscribed and defined within patriarchal his­ tory, the 1970s were the first time dial women’s artistic creations self-consciously extended beyond the patriarchal art-histor ical parameters and references, and reclaimed matristic visual mod­ els and materials from as far hack as the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic eras.9 I hits, the meaning of these early Goddess works by women artists of the 1970s must he lead against the Western herstorical background of a powerful tradition of women mystics, heretics, and visionaries, as well its con­ textualized within it movement that lot the first time directed its energy and power toward self-consciously creating an art that would reimagine what it might have been like to he female, and to experience e one’s body, mind, spirit, and soul free of all the fetters imposed upon women by Western patriarchal religions."’

In California, the Goddess art movement explored ancient Goddess civilizations via history and archaeology, uncovering knowledge of such early Goddess figurines as the Venus of Willendorf (25,000 B.C.), the Venus of Lespugne (25,000- 18,000 B.C.), the Bird-Headed Snake Goddess (Africa, 4,000 B.C . and Crete, 1600 B.C,), and the Venus of Laussel (29,999 B.C.). It was also a quest lor the presence of Goddess energy. This might he manifested in nonhuman nature, in the cosmos, and in our female bodies, both at ancient sacred sites where the God­ dess was once worshipped, as well as in our minds when they entered an altered state of consciousness in which past-life memories could be accessed.

In New York, the context of the reclamation of the Goddess

in art was, to a large extent, colored by the rediscovery of Jung’s concept of the archetype of the Great Goddess. The word archetype was freely used in those days, and it had been taken from Erich Neumann’s discussion of jungian ideas about the ar­ chetype of the Great Goddess in his book The Great Mother: An Analysis of The Archetype.11 Jungian psychology had posited that the Great Mother represents the feminine in the human psyche, and that archetypes are internal images that exist in the collec­ tive unconscious and are at work in the psyche everywhere. I then used archetype in the title of my first article for the (neat Goddess issue of Heresies (Spring 1978), "The Re-emergence of The Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women," because I had also come to believe that the archetype of the Great Goddess was emerging in the universal psyche at that moment in history.

As a critic, I, too, espoused the Jungian hypothesis because, at the time, I had no other theoretical framework within which to interpret the Goddess images I was encountering in feminist art of the seventies, and also because many of the artists I inter- viewed plat ed their works within this context. The Jungian interpretation, which predated Goddess scholarship, lent an in­ tellectual legitimacy to the powerful female images that women were painting, sculpting, and drawing. In other words, while art and historical research could perhaps explain why certain artists were inspired by these newly rediscovered Goddess images, only the Jungian hypothesis seemed to explain why women artists who had never read about the Goddess before were suddenly dreaming about and creating images that tallied with the an- cient forms and symbols of the Goddess that appeared in pre- patriarchal cultures.

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Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, who became a friend in the early 1970s and whose art I had studied, had a great af­ finity for the works of Jung, as opposed to those of Freud. Indeed, when I began to analyze her paintings within a Jungian perspective that included an understanding both of alchemical symbology as well as of the archetype of the Goddess, I was at last able to interpret her otherwise cryptic and mysterious paint- ings in ways that revealed important and inspiring feminist meanings. But Leonora Carrington was not the only artist dur­ ing that time who spoke to me about Jung.

Buffie Johnson also told me that since the late 1940s her work had been influenced by the Jungian concept of the collec­ tive unconscious.12 Her paintings evoke mythic memories and archetypal images from ancient civilizations such as the Minoan civilization of Crete, where the Great Goddess was once levered. The titles and subjects of Johnson's paintings, such as Labrys, 1972, are often symbolic of the knits of nature that were sacred in the worship of the Great Goddess of Crete. Several of Johnson's works contain specific references to the aspect of the Great Goddess known as Mistress of the Beasts and Lack of the- Plants. In Ariadne (Barley Mother), 1971, the Goddess of Vegeta­ tion is depicted in the image of a gentle rain-flow of a skin of long-grain bailey. Pasiphae, 1976, combines the image of the iris (the sacred Lily of Crete), with a bovine head and leaves that be­ come the horns of the bull (as in The Horns of Consecration at Knossos). All these Cretan mythic resonances show the ways in which contemporary artists may use ancient Goddess memories

170 CHAUFNGING MODE RNISM THE F ACE TS OF F FMINIST ART

to transform our perception of the natural world from pa­ triarchal to matristic. The paintings complete the regeneration process by stimulating memory in the psyches of those viewers who now learn to perceive the bull-in-the-lily) (in the composite image painted by Johnson) in a matrislic way. The viewer will then, presumably, begin to summon up other mythic memories of the Cretan Goddess civilization once the unconscious has been thus awakened.

Architect Mimi Lobell, working with two other women, one a Jungian, designed a Goddess Temple that expressed the themes of initiation and rebirth into a Goddess religion. The temple was considered to be the externalization of an archetypal structure that exists within the psyche. Its eventual site was to be a mountainous region near Aspen, Colorado, and it was con­ ceived of as analogous to the body of the Great Goddess through which the initiate would pass in a ceremony of transfor­ mation. According to Lobell "To go through the temple will be to experience an initiation into the mysteries of the feminine and activate a prelogical consciousness."13

In the 1970s Donna Henes was making process environ­ mental sculptures based upon Spider Woman from the Navajo Emergence Myth. Jungian writer Sheila Moon, in her study of the Navajo Emergence Myth, has said that Spider Woman is “the protective feminine objectivity. Spider Woman is the unobtrusive but powerful archetype of fate—not in the sense of determi­ nism, but in the sense of the magical law of one’s own gravity, which leads always beyond itself towards wholeness."14 Donna Henes also performed a yearly winter solstice ritual celebration entitled Reverence to Her: A Chant To Invoke the Female Forces of the Universe Present in All People. Since, according to Erich Neu­ mann, it is at the winter solstice that "the Great Mother gives birth to the Sun, who is Her Son, and stands at the center of the matriarchal mysteries,”15 Henes’s participatory chant invoked the Great Goddess as the archetypal principle of female power. (Sec also Withers, page 163.)

Feminists of the nineties, reflecting upon the ways in which some American, white, middle-class female artists used images from ancient and indigenous cultures in their own works, might be led to conclude that these artists were appropriating images from tribal peoples and foreign cultures, and making them their own in ways that today might be considered a form of cultural imperialism. However, I would argue that within the context of the notion of Jungian archetypes in the collective unconscious as it was understood in the early seventies (a period of pioneering and exploratory research in women's studies done in the absence of a feminist multicultural theory), many artists and scholars tended to believe that this collective unconscious was equally ac­ cessible to anyone, anywhere, and that the images thus inspired or created transcended all patriarchal cultural barriers. Indeed, it was believed that via these images all oppressed women (whether oppressed by class, race, or ethnic origin, for example) could reconnect with an ancient primal female forte emanating from these symbols, which would charge them with a specifically female energy (known as “gynergy”). This gynergic force would then bring together in a new harmony women who had pre­ viously been separated from each other by patriarchally constructed divisions such as class and race.

It seems to me that these artists of the seventies were actu­ ally searching for specific matrislic symbols (such as the web) that could become universalized in order to replace the icons of a hegemonic, patriarchal religion (such as the cross) with those of a universal matrislic and holistic spirituality.16 In the 1970s, Goddess artists such as Ana Mendieta, Mary Beth Edelson, Ur­ sula Kavanagh, Betsy Damon, Monica Sjoo, and Donna Henes reclaimed such forms as the spiral, the labyrinth, the egg, the circle, crescents, horns, quatrefoils, disks, coils, meanders, lozenges, concentric circles, the labyris, the earth mound, and the serpent from pre-patriarchal Goddess art. They then ele­ vated these symbols to a quasi-universal inatristic status, interpreting them as symbols and aspects of a unified Goddess culture, rather than seeing them as cross-culturally diverse.

In the seventies, women artists reclaiming the Goddess were looking for a unity beyond the pluralism of culturally specific symbols. It was important to them to learn that Goddesses once existed everywhere, and that their presence tended, on the whole, to give women higher status in their societies. At the time, feminists did not realize that this retrieval of a worldwide Goddess civilization was largely being done by white, middle- class, Western women and for the sake of what some have called an “essentialist” theory17 until it was pointed out to them. As with other feminist art of the seventies, women were looking for forms and themes that showed female bodies as strong, and that depicted women in positions of power, both socially and spir­ itually. While this pursuit may be viewed as simplistic today, in the nineties, it was revolutionary in the seventies. The aesthetic questions asked at the time sought a universal female response to the inquiry about whether there is a specifically female art or a specifically female iconography. The questions that were then posed in feminist art-historical research sought to use data from diverse cultures to prove that the Great Goddess, whether arche­ type or historical reality, was the original female image of the Creator of all life, and that the multiplicity of different Goddess images found in different cultures simply illustrated her many varied aspects. There was, in my opinion, an important feminist political motive in the way that the Goddess art of the 1970s ig­ nored cultural specificity and transgressed many historic and geographic boundaries by importing, transporting, and trans­ planting images freely, and by using them as universal symbols for a notion of “Womankind”, understood archetypal!)', as if such a general concept could unite women from around the world in a global revolution against patriarchal oppression.

An example of contemporary Goddess images that tran­ scend specificity is the work of Anne Heal). Her White Gothless, 1972, and Hecate, 1972, depict flowing sculptural forms made of nylon fabric and aluminum bars (to delineate the form over which the fabric flows); both are suggestive and evocative, rather than culture-specific. They refer to the light and dark as­ pects of a universal Goddess. While their titles give mythological substance to the forms, the sculptures themselves are like spirits, and can fly in the wind or bend and turn according to the sur­ rounding air currents. These works indicate the spiritual nature of an all-embracing Goddess.

While feminist Goddess art of the eighties and the nineties has come to be closely linked to ecological themes and to Earth

RECOVERING HER STORY FEMINIST ARTISTS RECLAIM THE GREAT GODDESS 177

Buffie Johnson. Labrys. 1972. Oil on linen, 68 x 96" Collection the artist

Art, because of the growing awareness of the ecological devasta- tion of our planet, Goddess art of the seventies was primarily focused on the Goddess as a symbol of women's lost herstory and as a path for women to recover their lost spiritual power.

For if the theory of the collective unconscious is true, this infor- mation and these experiences are not only located in the deeps trata of rock and earth, in the deepest strata of pre-patriarchal herstory, but also in the deepest strata of the minds, spirits, souls, and bodies of all women, everywhere, who ultimately de­ cend in time from this ancient matristic matrilineage.

Marija Gimbutas's book, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Eu- rope, presented the first archaeological evidence that Neolithic Europe (6500-3500 B.C.) the Great Goddess Creatress was wor- sihipped for thousands of years primarily in two aspects: as Cosmogonic Creator and source of all life (Fertility Goddess, Mother Goddess, Goddess of Vegetation and Creation), and as Goddess of Life, Death, and Regeneration (Moon Goddess), in- corporating the cycles of light as well as the cycles of darkness- the symbol of all renewing and becoming.18 In my earliest stud- ies of contemporary feminist Goddess art I began to observe that the new Goddess artworks fell into the same two categories as the ancient ones. In the aspect of Cosmogonic Creator, Source of all Life and Fertility, were the painted and sculpted artworks by artists such as Ursula Kavanagh, Judy Chicago, Betty La Duke, Judy Baca, Nancy Azara, Yolanda M. Lopez, Ghila Hirsch, Anne Healy, Jovette Marchessault, Betye Saar, and Leonora Carrington. In the aspect of Life, Death and Regenera­ tion that dealt with the cycles, both cosmic and historical, were works based upon ritual, ceremony, performance, and journey

by artists such as Mary Beth Edelson, Betsy Damon, Donna Henes, Jane Ellen Gilmore, Beth Ames Swartz, Kyra, Susan Schwalb, and The Waitresses performance art group.

While it seems more than coincidental that the contempo­ rary artworks should fall into the same categories as the ancient ones, the reasons for this can be attributed to the influence of the hooks by Merlin Stone, Marija Gimbutas, and other pioneer­ ing feminist scholars upon these contemporary women artists, as well as a Jungian explanation that would posit the re-emergence of the archetype of the Goddess in the human psyche. As a pro- fesssor of women's studies I would prefer to think that the nourishing of Goddess imagery in these contemporary works was the direct result of historical, social, and political changes brought about by the Women’s Liberation Movement in conjunc­ tion with women’s studies scholarship. Many of the artists that I interviewed who did not place their works in a Jungian pet spec- live cited studies, travels to Goddess sites, readings, and scholarship as the immediate sources of inspiration and influ­ ence upon their Goddess works. The research engaged in by the group of women who worked on Judy Chicago's Dinner Party Project illustrates the importance of scholarship. These feminist researchers came up with the subjects for the plates used in The Dinner Party, among which were The Primordial Goddess, The Fertile Goddess, and The Eye Goddess. Yet, while a simple academic approach might decide in favor of it material explana­ tion of the influence of the new feminist data in the social, historical, political, and archaeological sciences, it is also possible that because the Goddess symbolizes a spiritual mythos and ethos, the latent force unleashed by the discovery of the repres-

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Josette Marchessault Plant Mother, 1975. Wood, plaster, acrylic and raffia, 5' 5". Collection the artist

Donna Hanes. Pocono Web (Spider Woman Series), 1976. Cotton, 8x8x8'. Site installation at Mountain Home, California. Photograph by artist

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Mary Beth Edelson. Goddess Head (Calling Series). 1975 Photograph, collage, and china markers, 40 x 40" Documentation of a private ritual performed at Montauk, Long Island. Collect on the artist

Mary Beth Edelson. "See for Yourself," from Grapceva Cave. 1977. Photograph. Collection the artist

sion of this image in patriarchal civilization might also have generated a powerful psychic effect resulting in the return of the repressed in our time via dreams. Most probably it was the confluence of these two phenomena that contributed to the de­ velopment of this movement in the arts in the seventies. Thus, we are led to a synergistic explanation of the origins of this sev­ enties art movement.

However, once women artists became conscious of this an­ cient material as it appeared both in their research and in their dreams, they self-consciously set about creating a symbolic vo­ cabulary based upon the pre-patriarchal signs and symbols revealed in the Gunbutas material, where the constellations of motifs and forms linked to the pre-Indo-European mythology included the Serpent Goddess, the Bird Goddess, the Eye God­ dess, the Primordial Egg, the butterfly, caves, labyrinths, grains, rivers, pottery, horns, bull, labyris, the uplifted arms of the Cretan Goddess, and assorted spirals, zigzags, moons, lozenges, disks, animals, and female forms. These sy mbols can also be di­ vided into two categories: natural symbols referring to fertility, sexuality, plant and animal life, and the cosmos; and symbols as­ sociated with specifically female contributions to the creation of culture such as weav ing, cooking, pottery, agriculture, healing, and the arts.

Because of their pre-tcchnological nature, ancient Goddess or “matristic” symbols—displaying the talents, powers, creativity, and important cultural contributions made by women of the past—have been omitted from the patriarchal record of history. These symbols also re-create an animistic vision that reveals the existence of a vital spiritual energy or life-force inherent in all matter. The works that fall into the second category of the Cy­ cles of Life, Death, and Regeneration manifest vital animistic energies in dynamic aesthetic forms that often invite audience participation.

COSMOGONIC CREATOR, EARTH MOTHER, FERTILITY

One of the most prolific Goddess artists from the 1970s is Ur­ sula Kavanagh, who came to the United States from Ireland and who participated in the early Goddess movement in the arts in Chicago. Kavanagh now lives and works in New York, and spends each summer in Ireland making Goddess earthworks and stone circles for rituals near the sea.

Kavanagh’s art establishes a symbolic language and a ma­ tristic iconography relating to a wide variety of Goddess cultures and to numerous sacred sites that she visited. An exam­ ple from her archaeology scries is Crete, 1979, in which she depicts stone and ceramic fragments bearing images of the God­ dess and the Priestess of the Minoan culture. The colors she employs restore the vibrancy and rhythm of a matristic life wherein gestures of dance, offering, and joy were experienced by the women of Minoan Crete. Kavanagh's work teaches us how a woman archaeologist might draw certain gy nocentric10 conclusions about womens roles in ancient cultures, with only shards and chips of stone or ceramic from which to extrapolate.

In the early seventies, New York artist Mary Beth Edelson

pioneered Goddess works by using her own body in photo­ graphs taken of poses with her arms uplifted as a stand-in for Evcrywoman receiving Goddess energy from the cosmos. The gesture of uplifted arms soon became a popular feminist symbol of matristic spiritual empowerment. It is inspired by the figu­ rines of the Cretan Goddess of the Minoan culture and from the Bird-headed Snake Goddess from Egypt. In Nobody Messes With Her, 1973, Edelson draws in the Goddess wings of energy that spiritually empowered women will acquire as they reclaim their ancient sacred relationships to nature and culture. Edelson’s work in the seventies also addressed the second aspect of the Great Goddess—the Cycles of Life, Death, and Regeneration. Her installation and ritual entitled Your 5,000 Years Are Up, 1977, held at the Mandeville Gallery of the University of Califor­ nia in La Jolla, and her piece Memorial to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era, 1977 (A.I.R. Gallery’, New York) commemorate the cy cles of history in which women who worshipped the Goddess were crucified for their heretical beliefs. Her fire circles and fire ladders made these events into ceremonies about the exorcism of the pain of patriarchal history, and they also illuminated the hidden cy cles of female empower­ ment in Goddess civilizations, which the women in the audience could then reclaim. In See For Yourself (Grapfeva Cave: Memo­ rial Pilgrimage), 1977, Edelson documented her journey to the Grapfeva cave on Hvar Island in Yugoslavia. She sat in a fire ring in the Neolithic cave on Hvar Island, where the Goddess was once revered, and photographed herself in meditation. An unexpected energy flare can be seen in the photo on the right, suggesting that the photo might have captured a trace of the Goddess's spiritual presence in the cave during Edelson’s cere­ mony. In this work Mary Beth Edelson attempted to experience what it must have felt like to be a w’orshipper of the Goddess during the Neolithic era, when people crawled into caves to per­ form their sacred ceremonies.

Los Angeles Chicana artist Judy Baca painted Califia in 1976, which is based upon the legend of the Amazon Califia for whom California was named. This work is Baca's v ision of the beginning of the world. Califia’s body is webbed with venal and arterial networks that become her roots in the earth and that grow into her flowering branched arms, reaching up to the sky. In this image the Amazon woman is a Goddess Creatress of all life. She is powerful, she radiates the life-force, and she mediates between heaven and earth, between human and nonhuman na­ ture. All that lives emanates from her fertile, creative energy.

Quebecoise artist and writer Jovette Marchessauit sculpted Telluric Women: Women of Hope and Resurrection in the seven­ ties, and she participated in a group show in New York as well as in the New York Woman’s Salon for Literature,20 where her visual art as well as her literary texts created an important link between the Goddess artists of Quebec and the U.S. Her sculp­ ture Plant Mother portrays The Great Mother of Vegetation. Made of materials found in piles of rubbish, Plant Mother exemplifies the recycling of materials as an alchemical process transforming primal matter into a matristic image of feminine spiritual enlightenment. Plant Mother wears branches on her head, which receive and transmit Goddess energies to and from the universe. They serve as her “arms uplifted,” her radar an-

Yolanda M. L6pez. "Portra t of the Art st as Virg n of Guadaupe" from Guadalupe Triptych. 1973 Oil pastel on paper, 22 x 30". Collection the artist