Research: honoring my inner goddess

BOUND TO BE FREE

by Skye Avalon

In the poem “Hymn to Aphrodite,” Aphrodite arises in the human heart when the animal nature of humanity is experienced as divine.[1] In the poem, she represents humanity’s longing for reunion with the whole, and she is imagined as an act of love. She is the likeness of the original Great Mother Goddess when people remember the sacred reality that bonds exist between human beings, animals, and the whole of nature through union as reunion.[2] As in the poem, I hope to restore Aphrodite’s sacred connection to nature in my paintings.

Along with the psychological foundations of a transpersonal narrative, I use the historical foundations of the goddess to understand the origins of my own feminine identity. In Neolithic times, the female body was purportedly used to represent the sacred image of the mother-goddess. Mircea Eliade, who wrote extensively on the history of religions, interpreted these ancient female nudes as explicitly sexed, divine beings.[3] The idea of calling these images the “Great Mother” is comparable to the mother archetype asserted by Jung.[4] In 1974, Marija Gumbutas theorized that the great mother became the Greek goddesses of the sixth and fifth millennia BC in her various manifestations.[5] She was represented as either life giver or life taker. The nakedness of goddesses was continued with the idealization of Greek art and signified power and untouchability.[6] This was the case until all images of the goddess from earlier periods were replaced in Christianity by mother and saint. Christianity demonized the human body and the goddess as a life taker in the form of a whore or a chaotic destroyer. As Anne Baring and Jules Cashford explain in their book The Myth of the Goddess, “The opposition between mind and body in Christian doctrine took its flavor from the ‘sin of Eve,’ which became the inherent sinfulness of the flesh, in particular all those bodily organs that had to do with excretion of waste matter, sexual intercourse and birth.”[7] The dark goddess–the life taker, are the parts of my identity that my culture has demonized. My creative solution combines light and dark aspects of the great mother goddess in fine art bondage paintings. I include artifacts of the life giving, nude and sexualized Neolithic Great Mother; the idealized nude beauty of the Greek goddesses; as well as the tree of life, crystals, and elements of nature. These artifacts are important because they are more inclusive of all aspects of the goddess.

During my lifetime, a negative narrative has circled around feminine attributes such as emotionality, sensuality, and creativity. These negative projections have hurt my self-identity and sexual identity. I cannot relate to the angry rhetoric and victimizing propaganda of many of the women around me. I think feminists of the past have blamed men for issues that women needed to take responsibility for by honoring their own sexual needs and identities, rather than being victim to how men and other women define them. Even though I believe great progress in how women define themselves in a more empowered way was made by the second and third waves of the feminist movement and later independent, pro-choice post-feminists, women are still held to an unrealistic standard in their sexual conduct. I still cannot be sexually expressive and open the way men are, without being labeled by both men and women as “a pretty dumb girl,” “slut,” and “whore”.[8]

Maria Elena Buszek, author of “Pin-up Grrrls, Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture,” describes some of the artists who questioned the feminist movements’ critique of the beauty queen and female sexuality. “Viewed in this light, Miss Chicago and the California Girl’s bikini-clad women of different shapes and sizes, conventionally and unconventionally beautiful, deserve to be viewed as part of the feminist movement’s drive for pleasure as well as critique. The women obviously take subversive delight in their own sexual pride, audacity, and exhibitionism—delight that is all too frequently forgotten when looking back at the movement’s history”. The Fresno women artists that created the collective work understood sexism another way: “women were harpies when they downplayed their desirability, shallow and brainless when they didn’t."[9] Much like Miss Chicago and the California Girls, in my oil painting Hello Kitty, the central figure openly delights in her own sexual power and audacity in being bound. She is laughing and playfully expressing her pleasure in rope bondage. The Hello Kitty graphic in the background and the color pink represent female friendship. 

Now that we have entered into the fourth wave of the feminist movement, which first started in 2012, there is an increasing awareness and inclusiveness towards gender and race.[10] I believe this moment is an opportunity for me to openly claim autonomy over my own body and sexuality, given my bondage artwork transcends cultural taboos about female identity and sexuality. I am no different than many women around the world who are creating and using their own images on social media platforms to express their views to counterpoint the limited narrative about how women feel about their bodies and sexuality. In Charlotte Jansens’ book Girl on Girl, she says, “In the hours I spent interviewing the 40 artists from 17 countries, I was often surprised by the reasons for which women photograph women. They can be a way to understanding identity, femininity, sexuality, beauty and bodies. At times, using the female body is only a means to an end: it’s material that is available, over which the photographer-model has total ownership and final sovereignty.”[11] As an art model, I find rope bondage erotic and an embodied form of expression. The psychological effects of being bound are profoundly illuminating.[12] My ability to go into a state of higher awareness is based on my capacity to stop conscious thinking and go into a state similar to a flow state.[13] In altered awareness, I align and integrate myself with individual or collective archetypal forces.[14] In my painting Metamorphosis for instance, my facial expression as an everyday goddess is one of awe or wonder after the pain of the ropes has turned into a peaceful altered state. The red bondage ropes in my paintings represent the dark goddess as a taker of life, binding bodies to earth and to certain death. The color of the red ropes symbolizes blood, a life force and sign of death. 

[1] Anne Barring, Jules Cashford, “Hymn to Aphrodite,” in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (1993): 349.

[2] Anne Barring, Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Penguin Books, 1993), 350 - 353. 

[3] M. Eliade, Das Heilige und das Profane, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1957 (English edition: The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 162.

[4] C.G. Jung, Four Archetypes. Mother, Rebirth, Spirit (Princeton University Press, 1970).

[5] M. Gumbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. Myths and Cult Image (London, Thames & Hudson, 1974), 195.

[6] Flaminio Gualdoni, The History of the Nude (Skira Editore, 2012), 12-14, 19.

[7] Anne Barring, Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Penguin Books, 1993), 530.

[8] Maria Elena Buzsek, Pin-Up Grrrls. Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2006), 285.

[9] Maria Elena Buzsek, Pin-Up Grrrls. Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2006), 285.

[10] Nicola Rivers, Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides. (Springer International Publishing AG, 2017), 5.

[11] Charlotte Jansen, Girl on Girl (Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2017), 9.

[12] Ellen Lee, "Consensual BDSM Facilitates Role-Specific Altered States of Consciousness: A Preliminary Study" in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice (2016): 15

[13] Flow state is when one is fully immersed in an activity with focus and a sense of inner clarity (Csikszentmihalyi 1). 

[14] Archetypes represent universal patterns of energy that repeat in art, literature and mythology. C. G. Jung believed we inherit these instinctive patterns of behavior (Jung 179).