«"The Eye sees more than the Heart knows. "»

William Blake, 1793

"The Great Mother embodied the gigantism and unknowability of primeval nature. She descended from the periode before agriculture, when nature seemed autocratic and capricious. The mother godess gives life but takes it away. Lucretius says, "the universal mother is also the common grave." She is morally ambivalent, violent as well as benevolent. The sanitized pacifist godess promoted by feminism is wishful thinking. From prehistory to the end of the Roman empire, the Great Mother never lost her barbarism. She is the ever-changing face of chthonian nature, now savage, now smiling. The medieval madonna, a direct descendant of Isis, is a Great Mother with her chthonian terror removed. She has lost her roots in nature, because it is pagan nature that Christianity rose to oppose."

Woman was an idol of belly magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law. From the beginning of time, woman has seemed an uncanny being. Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to headmagic."

[Camille paglia, "Sexual Personae" art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.]

Credits

Drawing, charcoal on paper: Jacqueline García