A while ago I made a spirit doll of a female shaman with horns. This morning she caught my eye as I walked past the shelf she stands on.
Questioning me,
the antlered spirit doll
becomes archetypal
Why has she manifested in my life?
Going online I did some research. Horned goddesses appeared in several ancient cultures but most, like the Egyptian goddesses Hathor and Isis, had cow horn headdresses. These days images of magical females with similar horns are turning up in contemporary art and popular culture. The Disney fairy, Maleficent is one. Online I read a Jungian analysis of Maleficent.
“So this story of the Sleeping Beauty deals with what happens to our feminine feeling consciousness when it is repressed, ravaged and rejected by both our society and our own ego-consciousness. When we reject this feeling and imaginative aspect of life, it gets twisted and becomes the negative mother—the witch who wants to kill us or curse us. And we are left cursed with our masculine, left-brain thinking that cuts off our feminine wings and power, grounding us in a masculine reality that hates and fears the Divine Feminine’s beauty, freedom and power.
But the negative mother doesn’t just make our lives miserable: she pushes us to become more conscious. Her curse ultimately becomes a blessing, since it makes each of us face our fate and live our purpose. That’s the purpose of archetypal stories—they show us a path to travel that will bring us to greater consciousness.” emerging archetypal themes
Maleficent is the 13th fairy – the forgotten one. She represents the connection of women to nature. In our patriarchal cultural this connection has been ignored – it has become invisible.
Re-appearing now
rewriting Sleeping Beauty
– magical healing
Maleficent is healed by love and the natural world around her is restored to health. In this way the movie becomes a metaphor for reclaiming our forgotten relationship with nature – a sacred relationship of interconnectedness.
Ancient stories
of goddesses and fairies
finding new forms
As fascinating as these ideas are they still don’t answer my question as to why the doll I made has antlers. Following link after link online I eventually found an article about the deer goddesses and female shamans deer mother While I am familiar with the ancient horned god, Cernunnos, I didn’t know that there is archaeological evidence of horned females deities and shamanic figures that date to neolithic times.
(artist reconstruction of neolithic headdress found in Germany – image source here
These ancient female shaman are associated with the deer and reindeer of the far north. Their sacred significance was about connection to the tree of life, motherhood, fertility, birth and rebirth
Returning to us
images of the sacred
spirit of nature
prompt: Today’s d’verse prompt gave me a way into writing about something that’s been on my mind all morning. https://dversepoets.com/2019/02/05/poetics-invisible/ My response stretches the idea of poetry and of haibun so I hope that’s ok with Merrill – the creator of the prompt (and with the rest of the poets who write for d’verse).