Good Morning!. This is Curate Shiloh Sophia for The Cura Council. Today’s episode includes an invitation to join us for a complimentary event The Archetypal Feminine Power and the Red Madonna. Red Madonna is our sisterhood that has been in continuous membership since 2012 that I started with Caron McCloud.
I was teaching a group of students yesterday, Path of Mystics, the significance of making images of women by women. And what it means to be a woman today who is making the sacred mother and the elements in her own image. We shared in gratitude and praise for the ancestors who came before us.
Who, roughly half a million years ago, began to make the first intentional marks — a zigzag, a chevron, on a shell. And then all the way to today, how we have been curating consciousness, telling stories, and imagining sacred images of women and family and our relationships with creation. All this time, we have not ceased to create.
This is why in our community it’s a rites of passage to create images. Entire households and businesses and sanctuaries have been modified to include the sacred feminine in a way that makes me want to cry. Tens of thousands of images of the feminine have been shared as a result of the Stardust Lineage.
This matters for so many reasons, but here’s the biggest one to me. Without the images of the sacred feminine that our ancestors carved into stone and painted with red ochre on cave walls and etched into skin with the first tattoos and sculpted into clay, we would not know who we are.
The marks on the bones. The heads of drums. The marking of the moon. The decoration of tools. All of it intentional versions of symbolic storytelling. The beginning of language. Without these images, we wouldn’t know who we are. And even just as early as the 1960s, we barely had any references for the archaeomythology of our ancestry available at our fingertips.
Archaeomythology is a term coined by the late and great Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. It is a way of reading the archaeology of a place alongside its mythology, its folklore, and its language — because we cannot understand what the objects are if they are removed from where they came and interpreted as somehow an extraction instead of the origin source. The very ground, or walls, or caves, the origins within which it was created.
We didn’t know we had a mother-centered past. Patriarchies, oppressive forces, systemic paradigmatic zeitgeist did everything they could to keep the truth from us — that women have been at the center of the sacred image for at least 40,000 years before this time.
So the images that tell the stories of who we’ve been are the evidence that it’s been another way. Evidence that demonstrates that war has not always been the way that we are as a people. That violence, and intimate partner violence, and violence to the degree that we’re seeing it today as normalized in films and stories, was not always the norm.
I think it’s important to remember this inside of our stardust bones — that it hasn’t always been this way, and that we cannot necessarily return to a former state, but we can study who we were before, when women were at the center, and then choose to live our lives from an expanded awareness of honoring women. Because women honor all their children. It doesn’t matter what the gender is.
And patriarchy really isn’t about men. They too are victims, and while they are the majority of the perpetrators who insist upon the paradigm, most of them don’t really know they are in it in some ways. It is kind of bizarre they can’t see their context and what it is costing them, and Earth and Water. Women at least know that we’re inside of a framework that isn’t set up for us to thrive and succeed.
The making of art in the sacred feminine, in terms of how we interpret her through our own soft feminine bodies, is a form of medicine impossible to describe unless you’ve experienced it. Painting with Intentional Creativity - having NOTHING to do with talent - changes who you are at a fundamental level. It alters the way that you see yourself, and it gives you an insight into the creativity of the ancestors who told stories about breasts and bellies and vulvas and spirals and relationships with plants and animals and the cosmos.
No, we have not always been violent. Yes, we can remember a state of collaboration, partnership, and co-creation. Yes, even alongside the chaos that’s unfolding now, we can continue to choose the work of our hands and our hearts and our minds to be in service to creation, creating.
And that’s why I invite you to paint with me. And why I invite you to come along for a 13-moon journey with the Red Madonna, she who appears in your heart. And in this cycle of time, we are studying, worshiping, painting, and writing about the primordial womb and the being of water.
We are stardust and water. I’ll see you in circle.
Shiloh Sophia
Here’s what is on my easel, my work in progress in this yearlong course, Path of Mystics. YOU TOO can paint a big painting….over many moons by joining us in Red Madonna!
REFERENCES
The engraved shell
Joordens, J.C.A. et al. (2015). “Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving.” Nature 518: 228–231. The zigzag was cut into a Pseudodon freshwater mussel shell at Trinil, Java. Sediment inside the shells dated to a maximum of 540,000 years and a minimum of 430,000 years. It is at least 300,000 years older than any other undisputed engraving of this kind. Two things worth knowing: the maker was Homo erectus, not Homo sapiens, and the sex of the maker is unknown. The researchers note the engraver worked on a fresh shell with a sharp implement, with no gaps between the turns of the zigzag — evidence of attention and deliberateness. History of Information + 2
Images of the feminine at 40,000 years
Conard, N.J. (2009). “A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany.” Nature 459: 248–252. The Venus of Hohle Fels dates to between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago, and is the earliest known depiction of a human being. NBC NewsArchaeology Magazine
Women as the makers
Snow, D.R. (2013). “Sexual Dimorphism in European Upper Paleolithic Cave Art.” American Antiquity 78(4): 746–761. Measuring 32 hand stencils from French and Spanish caves, Snow concluded that the people who made them were predominantly female, overturning the long-standing assumption that the stencils were men’s work. Not everyone accepts it — R. Dale Guthrie’s comparable study concluded most were adolescent boys. Also relevant: McDermott, L. (1996), “Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines,” Current Anthropology 37(2) — argues the Venus figurines were self-portraits, women carving what they saw looking down at their own bodies. That one is made for your “through our own soft feminine bodies” line. Cambridge CoreSci.News
Gimbutas and archaeomythology
Gimbutas, M. (1989). The Language of the Goddess; (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Archaeomythology was her interdisciplinary method, combining archaeology with mythology and linguistics. Important: after publishing The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe she deliberately stopped using the word “matriarchy,” even in her own qualified sense, because it was being read as the flip side of patriarchy. She used “matristic” instead — often matrilocal, definitely matrifocal, probably matrilineal. Her Old Europe spans roughly 6500 to 3500 BCE, not 40,000 years. Marler, J. (2022), “Baltic Archaeology, Cultural History, Ancient Lithuanian Symbolism, Old Europe, and the Archaeomythology of Marija Gimbutas,” Archaeologia Lituana 23, is the best short scholarly overview of her method. doaj + 2
War is not our baseline
Fry, D.P., ed. (2013). War, Peace, and Human Nature. Oxford University Press. In particular Ferguson’s chapter, “The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East,” which argues that prehistoric war was not ubiquitous, is rare in very early archaeological records, and becomes common only over time — based on compiling the total record rather than the most violent cases. Ferguson dates the earliest signs of war to around 12,000 years ago, with much later dates in many regions, and distinguishes war — organized, socially sanctioned, group against group — from interpersonal violence. This is contested; critics argue Fry overreaches when he says war was simply absent for the vast majority of human existence. But you are on solid ground saying the archaeological record does not support war as our permanent condition.
