[This content is from S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies (V2 N1, 2023) Its online edition and paperback are available at Mago Bookstore.]
I am lucky enough to live in a place with both the deer and elk, the subject matter of chapter one in this book, and so this text immediately won my heart and became a touchstone in my life. As a mythologist, artist, weaver, spinner, and goddess scholar, as well as a devotee of Marija Gimbutas, I believe this book is brilliant and I am grateful for the scholarship that Dr. Małgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba offers us. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba continues the work of Gimbutas by demonstrating how the ancient symbolism of goddess religions has survived in the folk-art of many cultures around the world. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba helps expand our worldview back to one of wholeness rather than our current restrictive androcentric worldview.
Oleszkiewicz-Peralba not only clarifies the work of Gimbutas, but also brings our attention to other places these symbolisms are hidden, including headdresses, hairdos, embroidery, and in the weaving of Kilim rugs. I have books about the embroidery motifs of goddesses, as well as books about the symbolism of Kilims, but Oleszkiewicz-Peralba has electrified and resurrected the significance of these symbols in a profound way for me. The symbols seemingly lost to an androcentric world view are being recovered to reclaim the sacredness of the female body, the earth, the animals, the cosmos, as well as each other. We are currently paying the price for thousands of years of devaluing and suppressing the divine feminine, the female body, the earth, the animals, the plants, as well as fresh water and air that is life.
This text by Oleszkiewicz-Peralba is also significant since many male scholars, who are still considered the cornerstones of academic study, have insisted that women have contributed nothing to culture. Sigmund Freud for example, claimed that women braiding their own pubic hairs was the only thing that women contributed to culture. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba counters this male biased scholarship, by pointing out in chapter four how the symbols of life have survived in the symbols used in weaving and embroidery. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba also discusses the survival of the apron as an empowering symbol of flowering female sexuality in this chapter. Although the apron might seem a humble and simple item of clothing, it is a powerful symbol of female empowerment and agency. It gives new meaning to the ubiquitous hero myths of our androcentric culture, that we now find everywhere, which usually involves the defeat of the non-obedient monstrous feminine by the hero in epic literature. Both Hercules and Perseus are said to kill Amazon queens and steal their belts, which many scholars interpret as the defeat of matriarchal tribes and the ascent of patriarchy. This same misogyny is being demonstrated in the United States by a corrupted Supreme Court that has just taken the aprons and belts from half the population of the United States.
The male hero’s journey popularized by Joseph Campbell is the dominant framework of “success and progress” used in our modern world, an androcentric journey that promotes the individual at the expense of the collective. This narcissism justifies the use of violence to suppress female bodies, suppress divine feminine power, as well as to rape the earth at whatever cost, and to gain power even if this means nuclear annihilation. It is ironic that this text uses a multitude of examples of ancient and modern Ukrainian art to demonstrate the survival of the symbols of life and female empowerment, yet even now Vladimir Putin wages war and imposes his will against the peaceful country of Ukraine.
Oleszkiewicz-Peralba even touches on the use of psychedelic plants in chapter one and discusses the mythology of the female shaman, the deer, the connection to the peyote plant, as well as the Ayahuasca plant as a loving serpent mother that embraces the children of the earth. In my dissertation I discuss how male ethnobotanists create the neologism entheogen, which assumes all psychedelic plants facilitate a male divine experience, even when evidence suggests that for tens of thousands of years, the divine female was worshipped. I use the term entheagen, which changes the male divine experience to a female divine experience.
Oleszkiewicz-Peralba’s scholarship is an important contribution to recognizing and resurrecting the ancient symbols that once valued the female body and the earth. True immortality is accepting life and death as natural cycles rather than trying to defeat death, dominate women’s bodies, and/or conquering the world. The equidistant cross symbol of the great cosmic weaver symbolizes equality for all people, as well as the valuing of the female body and the earth. Centuries of male ideology of “transcending” the earth has resulted in billionaires competing to demonstrate their prowess by launching grotesque phallic rocket ships for no reason except to practice leaving this planet after it becomes inhabitable. We must reclaim all the appropriated symbols of the divine feminine and this text is a great place to start the journey.
Lisa R. Skura
Dr. Lisa R. Skura is an artist and mythologist who earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Mythology with emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, in Carpinteria, California. Lisa also has a Bachelor of Science in Design from Buffalo State University, in Buffalo, New York. Dr. Skura is a spinner and weaver of both textile and text as well as a tarot scholar and creator, an empathic energy healer with a deep connection to crystals, and a voracious reader and collector of books. Dr. Skura believes bridges of love are essential to the healing of humanity and the world.