Sacred Art, Bloody Clay, and the Body of the Goddess

Sacred Art, Bloody Clay and the Body of the Goddess
Originally published in Pan Gaia Magazine under the title "The Sacred Herstory of Clay" - Artist Bio

To our distant ancestors in the Paleolithic era, all things came from and returned to the earth. The daily activities of hunting animals, gathering plants, finding shelter, and drawing water, helped foster an intimate connection with the natural world. This connection and dependence on the earth was the basis of their spiritual beliefs and rituals. Female statues made in stone or clay, such as the Villendorf Earth Mother or the Dolni Vestonice statues, or ritual paintings on the Lascaux cave walls, show a reverence for the earth as the Divine Mother. Archaeologists believe the oldest kiln was in the home of a Paoleolithic shaman who produced, then fired figures of women and beasts. These female figures were the predominant images in Paleolithic sculpture and personified the continuity of the species and magically invocated the survival of the race."1

In Neolithic Europe, when humans first began creating vessel forms and working with clay on a widespread basis, the earth-centered spirituality of the Great Mother Goddess had been an integral part of people's lives for thousands of years. They honored the mystery of birth and death and the continual renewal of life. They saw the Great Mother as "the single source of all life who took her energy from the springs and wells, from the sun, moon, and moist earth."2 This divine fertility was a mysterious, awesome power that was honored and respected.

The earth giving forth its fruits, and women giving birth, were seen as intricately connected. The process, which fertilized the earth, was also thought to fertilize women, and women became the embodiment of these primal mysteries of creation.3 This viewpoint "emerged from women's direct physical and psychic experiences of these mysteries, in bleeding, in growing a child, in nursing, in working with fire, in making a pot, in planting a seed."4 Women possessed magical powers of child rearing and these same powers were extended to the arts of agriculture and cultivation of the soil.5 With the development of agriculture and settled life, people began to create pottery to store grains, prepare and cook food.

With a deep reverence for and connection to the earth, these early people began to work with clay, a gift from the Great Earth Mother. This magical substance was soft and pliable, easily formed, and magically transformed to stone-like hardness in the fire. With thousands of years of earth-based spirituality as their history, the first potters must have instinctively known that this was sacred material.

As civilization progressed, creation myths began to reference clay as the substance from which all life emerged. "Clay was a common symbolic synonym for flesh... and flesh manufactured by a deity out of clay went through many cycles and myths before it reached the Judeo-Christian Bible"6 where God made Adam, or adamah (earth) from clay. In the earlier Sumerian/Babylonian creation myth, Aururu, the Potter-Goddess, first created human beings out of clay. Today, science views the earth as a clay-making machine where rocks become eroded and weathered over eons and end up as a crystallized composite of the entire earth.7 Scientists speculating on the origins of life theorize one scenario that suggests clay served as a template allowing complex associations of molecules to form, leading to living organisms.8

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