Femine power of the gods shines in new art exhibition in Canberra

An exhibition delves into nurture, destruction and the femininepower of spiritual beings through the ages.

‘Queen of the Night’ relief painted clay Iraq, about 1750 BCE.

Feared and Revered
National Museum of Australia to August 27

In the human experience of the world, there is no deeper polarity than that of light and dark. Light is day, warmth, hope, understanding, joy, and life itself. Dark is night, cold, despair, ignorance, ­terror and death. The cultural expressions of this polarity are inexhaustible in their variety, but its existential reality is universal.

Similarly, as this loan exhibition from the British ­Museum reminds us, no polarity is deeper or more ­ineluctable in our experience of our own bodies and minds than that of male and female. Of course we are human before we are men or women, so sex is not an “essential” property; and the qualities that the Chinese call yang and yin are present in all of us to varying degrees. Assertive and receptive, active and passive, innovative and conservative; a balance of these is necessary for all complex and higher-order activities.

And yet fundamental biological facts, stubborn and unalterable, determine the distinction and the difference between the sexes. Only men produce spermatozoa; only women produce ova and bear children. It makes no difference whether individuals are attracted to the opposite sex, their own, or both; it makes no difference how people dress, and ultimately it makes no difference whether they have cosmetic or any other kind of surgery.

This is why the current preoccupation with transexuality is such a strange socio-psychological phenomenon, which will be studied by historians when the ideological dust settles. How have we reached a point where women such as J.K. Rowling can be excoriated for the new thoughtcrime of “transphobia”, for simply asserting the specificity of their own sex? It is as though the critique of culturally shaped gender roles has been extended beyond the scope of culture and grown into an attack on nature itself.

Goddesses naturally have two principal and parallel roles in relation to the fertility of the earth and that of women, writes Christopher Allen.

There is a special irony in this, since the defence of nature against the encroachment and destruction wrought by humanity in its ruthless pursuit of consumption is ostensibly one of our great moral concerns today. But the reality of contemporary life is a state of extreme dissociation from nature, which extends from the modern mass diet to the alienation of screen life. It is perhaps not surprising that in such a cultural environment we should also be subject to absorption in ideas, fads and ideologies that are radically alienated from nature.

Gender dysphoria is undoubtedly a real psychological condition but much as activists may try to evade the facts, no human culture has doubted that the defining power of women lies in bringing life into the world. The earliest and least evolved cultures, which do not yet understand the role of the male, venerate the power of the female. The birth of children is vital to the life of the tribe; and much later, after the development of agriculture, childbearing is conceived as analogous to the growth of cereal crops and the earth herself becomes a mother.

Goddesses thus naturally have two principal and parallel roles in relation to the fertility of the earth and that of women, as well as other associations that derive from these primary roles. And because gods in all traditions can both give and take away, goddesses associated with nourishment, reproduction, survival and life itself can be alternately kindly and nurturing or fearsome and savagely destructive; hence the exhibition’s title: Feared and Revered.

Probably all goddesses had a variety of functions initially, but the Greeks at least rationalised theirs into a set of divinities with different and complementary functions. Thus Demeter (Ceres in Latin) was the goddess of cereal crops, who was worshipped in a mystery cult at Eleusis near Athens; the secret ceremonies and rituals of the cult retraced the story of her daughter Persephone, who was carried off to the underworld by Hades and whose annual return – the consequence of eating three pomegranate seeds during her sojourn in the land of the dead – was an aetiological myth explaining the cycle of the seasons.

There is a statue from the Roman imperial period of Demeter holding the ritual torch and nearby a much older – perhaps 700 years – Attic black figure vase from around 510-500 BC with Hermes visiting the underworld to tell Hades he must give Persephone back; the girl herself is shown in the middle, holding ears of wheat to signify the regeneration of the earth on her return, and next to her the underworld scene is set by the image of Sisyphus pushing his rock up a hill.

Head from a statue of Athena

Hera (Juno), wife of Zeus (Jupiter) became the patroness of the married state, while the virgin huntress Artemis (Diana), sister of Apollo, took care of girls before marriage. Aphrodite (Venus), born in the sea from the transformed genitals of her castrated father Kronos, was the goddess of sexual love and desire and patroness of courtesans. The exhibition includes a Roman period sculpture based on one of the most famous works of antiquity, Praxiteles’s statue of Venus rising from her bath, recalling her marine birth.

Athena (Minerva), another virgin goddess, was a protectress of cities – especially the city that bore her name, Athens – and a patroness of the arts and crafts of both men and women. The story of her birth from the head of Zeus, after he had swallowed her mother Metis – a very ancient myth as shown by its naïve implausibility – is illustrated on another black-figure vase, where Hephaistos is seen walking off on the right after duly splitting the skull of Zeus with his axe to allow the birth to take place. Not far away is a surprisingly sensitive oversized head of Athena from the second century AD but based on a classical Greek original.

One of the more intriguing aspects of this ancient rationalisation of the roles of goddesses is the way that Hecate, among the most ancient, was left so to speak on the cutting-room floor. Already Homer’s contemporary Hesiod is clearly anxious about the failure to find an enduring place for her among the great Olympians, and in Theogony he bends over backwards to stress how much Zeus honours her.

In reality, however, Hecate was destined for a sub-Olympian afterlife as the goddess of witches and sorcery; modest statues of her were common in private homes, and she recurs throughout ancient literature; she was venerated at crossroads, particularly three-way crossroads where the Y-shape, recalling the meeting of belly and legs, was a female symbol from time immemorial; hence her appearance in Macbeth as “Triple Hecate”. But the image of a triple goddess was also literarily represented even in antiquity, as again here in a sculpture that is probably from the Antonine period.

Nearby in the exhibition are evocations of other sorceresses, such as the Homeric Circe, and of witchcraft in more modern times. Even in antiquity witches tended to be female, like those mentioned in the poems of Theocritus and Horace, although the practice of magic was common in the Renaissance in the hands of some celebrated male intellectuals, and until the 17th century could still intersect with philosophy and even science. The witch panic of the early modern period, mainly in the 17th century and extending into the early 18th, was really a consequence of the crisis of faith and the acute anxiety provoked by the Reformation.

The goddesses of India are particularly fascinating because of the special way that some of them are paired with and supplement the power of the most important male gods. Thus Vishnu has Lakshmi as a consort and Shiva has Parvati, and the relationship of the last two is aniconically evoked here in a ritual object representing the phallus of Shiva set within the vulva or yoni of Parvati.

Statue of Venus.

But Hinduism undoubtedly has the most savage and terrifying range of female divinities, especially associated with the tantric tradition, in which there are demonesses who can either make love to you and bring you mystical enlightenment or, if you do not approach them properly, simply destroy you and feast on your cadaver.

The exhibition includes a fine range of Indian sculpture, mostly complex reliefs in which a principal figure is typically surrounded by a set of smaller figures or groups recalling other episodes in their myth. There is, notably, an impressive carving of Durga slaying the demon Mahisha, who has taken the form of a buffalo, as well as the figure of Kali in her most terrifying manifestation as Chamunda, an emaciated hag who is supposed to destroy the ego and release her devotees from the bonds of the self.

The goddesses of the Near East are interesting precisely because they have not undergone the Greek rationalisation and are still dark and complex embodiments of many different forces. Thus one of the most remarkable works in the exhibition is a clay relief of the Mesopotamian divinity Ishtar, who evokes fertility, sexuality, power and even war; she stands on two lionesses, like the Mistress of Beasts at the entrance of Mycenae who is also flanked by lionesses; she is accompanied by owls like Athena; she is naked and erotic; and she has fearsome talons like a Harpy.

Ishtar is much the same goddess as the Phoenician Astarte, and the Greeks loosely associated her with Artemis – hence the disconcerting image of the so-called Diana of Ephesus (not in this exhibition), with what look like multiple breasts but are actually the testicles of bulls offered in sacrifice. The cult of of the eastern goddess is described by Herodotus in Book I of his History, an eye-witness account written in the mid 5th century BC, and is revisited in greater detail 700 years later by Lucian – going as far as to pastiche the style of Herodotus – in his essay On the Syrian goddess (2nd century AD).

The eastern goddesses were bloodthirsty and liked to be served by eunuch priests; in the more humane world of Greek religion, the votaries of Artemis are virgins of either sex. Lucian describes how young male devotees would work themselves into a frenzy of hysteria and then castrate themselves. The Roman poet Catullus, undoubtedly imitating a lost Hellenistic model, tells in his Poem 63 of a young man who enters the grove of the goddess and, possessed by madness, mutilates himself with a sharp flint. The poet at once begins to refer to him in the feminine, but this is bitterly ironic, for the protagonist is distraught, caught between two worlds and belonging to neither.

Feared and Revered
National Museum of Australia to August 27