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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in figurines

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Our Lady of the Mammoths

She's one of Stone Age Eurasia's lesser-known “Venus” figurines.

But she has an extremely interesting story to tell.

Carved from mammoth ivory, the Lady of Yeliseyevich—named for the place in Siberia where she was found—stands 15 cm. (5.9 inches) tall.

You could call her Our Lady of the Mammoths.

Some 15,000 years ago, she was buried in the Siberian permafrost, with a pile of bones and partially-worked tusks heaped over her. Arranged on the ground in a circle around her were 27 mammoth skulls.

In other words, heap big magic.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Spring Dreams

All summer long the little clay goddess has stood in the good, brown earth of the garden.

All summer long she has watched over the waxing of the crops.

Now, standing in a bowl of seed wheat, she presides over the Harvest Supper.

(On Midwinter's Eve we will eat this self-same wheat, made sweet with honey, rich with almonds and poppy seed, perfumed with rose water, from this very bowl.)

And when the last bite has been taken, the last toast poured, she will go to her bed in the storage cupboards, with the fruits of summer all around her.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Fat Lady and the Animal Man

Some 30,000 years ago, they first appear: the Fat Lady and the Animal Man.

For 20,000 years after that, the ancestors kept making Fat Ladies and Animal Men.

We find their likenesses across Eurasia, literally from Spain to Siberia.

We don't know who they were or what they meant to the people that made them. Across such vast distances and time-spans, it's likely that they meant many things to many different people.

What's maybe most amazing is that, across those vast distances and time-spans, they're still recognizably themselves.

Some decades ago it became intellectually fashionable to deny that the Fat Lady and the Animal Man were gods. In the case of the Animal Man, the word shamanism got bandied about a lot: an explanation that explains very little, really.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Thanks for the close reading and the corrections, Andrew. The development of agriculture is, of course, exactly what distinguishes
  • Andrew
    Andrew says #
    "Some decades ago it became intellectually fashionable to deny that the Fat Lady and the Animal Man were gods." Do we have any pr
  • Tasha Halpert
    Tasha Halpert says #
    Nicely said.Cheers, Tasha

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Little Clay Goddess

The little clay goddess went out into the garden on Planting Day.

Ohmigods.

Now I practically need a machete to get into the garden.

The tomatoes have been the size of grapefruits.

The collard leaves are as big as skillets.

The squash vine, umbilical, not content with taking over the garden, is in the process of claiming the entire back yard. I'm expecting it to grab me as I go out the door any day now.

The butternuts it bears are each more than a foot long. The last one I cooked weighed two and a half pounds.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Our Lady of Paganistan

If genuine, she could well be the oldest human artifact in Paganistan.

From coiffed head to pointed toe, you can see the resemblance to the Lady of Willendorf immediately.

Articulate, enigmatic, she simultaneously merges with, and emerges from, the stone that is her matrix. At 5¼ x 2¼ inches, you could hold her in the palm of your hand.

And believe me, when you see her, you want to.

She now resides in the heart of the American Midwest at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. If the stories are true, her previous home was a cave in southern France, and she's 22,000 years old.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    You're very welcome, Drum. She's definitely worth a visit.
  • Jean Pagano
    Jean Pagano says #
    Steven, This is beautiful; thank you for posting this info. Blessings, Drum

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Clay Ladies in Winter

Now they stand knee-deep in the good, tilled earth of our gardens and fields, bestowing their gift of fruitfulness, as they have since the end of the last Great Ice.

 

Call them the Clay Ladies.

 

But come winter, what then?

 

To ask is to know.

 

Of course the Mothers do not stand in the fields all winter long, buried in snow.

 

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Lady of the Thrice-Plowed Furrow

You could call them the Clay Ladies.

The ancestors made them by the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands: little naked women, poised on pointed toes to stand calf-deep in the good tilled soil of our gardens and fields.

We've been doing this since the end of the last Ice Age, and we still do. No one needs to be told why we put them there.

The best magic explains itself.

There they stand, graciously bestowing their gift of fruitfulness, looking as if they are rising from the Earth.

They are Earth itself, formlessness rising into form. The goddess rising from Earth was a minor (but not uncommon) motif in ancient Greek art, and rightly so. The furrow parts: the goddess is born.

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