An Online Retrospective

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West Kennet Long Barrow, Abode of the
Dark/Light Mother (oil on hardboard, 1989)

West Kennet Long Barrow is a womb/tomb and temple, a place of shamanic initiation and out-of-body journeying to communicate with the ancestor spirits that dwell here within the temple and womb of the most ancient Mother of the tombs. I have slept and dreamt within this long barrow, meeting some extremely primordial ancestor-beings in my dreams, on a dark moon night in July 1991, which is not surprising considering that West Kennet is one of the oldest megalithic structures in the world and could be from the 5th millennium BCE. It was built by early neolithic peoples to reproduce the darkness and powerful presence of the maternal cave, womb of the Mountain Mother. The outside of this elongated mound was originally approximately fifteen feet high, made of stones and earth and was covered in white chalk so that it gleamed in the moonlight. Silbury itself, built later, was also originally chalk white. West Kennet’s elongated entrance recreates a vaginal birth channel and its interior womb chambers lie beyond, within the darkness. This is a place of high energies, a space where all outside influences are cut off and one is left with meditative dream and trances states created and experienced by the lunar right-brain mind in us all.

This is no mere mortuary tomb, no more so than a Gothic cathedral where dead are also buried. There is the possibility that some people were buried here (in some long barrows no bones have been found at all) but could have simply been the guardians of/or the guides to those undertaking initiations within the womb of stones. The burials that have been found have been completely egalitarian, the bones of women, men and children together.

The neolithic women brought about the agricultural revolution through their knowledge of plants – both edible, healing/medicinal and psychedelic. It was early women’s inventions that made the first settled farming cultures a possibility. Women invented tools and crafts. They were the artist-potters, the healers, shamans, oracles and astrologers. Powerfully creative and sexual women originated human cultures and the religion and lunar/menstrual mysteries of the Goddess was their practice and creation as they perceived the universe as a great maternal being weaving the web of life and spirit.

West Kennet Long Barrow represents the Mother of the Dead, the dark Crone of winter and the death of vegetation, the time when the seed germinates within the dark and fertile soil. Across the field rises Silbury, the pregnant womb and Harvest Mother where the neolithic farmers witnessed the mound giving birth to the Harvest Child in August and even further in the distance stand the stones of Avebury stone circle where the May Day ecstatic sexual rites were celebrated with the coming of summer and the Goddess having grown into motherhood from Her Maiden beginnings in the early spring.

The whole life cycle of the Goddess, the external cyclic life of the seasons, Earth and vegetation, of the Sun (in ancient times the Sun was most often a Goddess also) as she brings forth new life with Her love and warmth, and of the Moon can be witnessed here within just a few fields on Wiltshire plain. Here was enacted the Northern Mysteries of Demeter, the Corn Mother, and Her daughter Persephone who becomes the Queen of the Underworld in winter, who rises and returns to Her Mother at spring with the newborn corn as the radiant young maiden, Kore.

The images of the Goddess that I have painted on the long barrow are some of the most ancient, going back to Palaeolithic times and found in the caves. The vaginal triangle, here shown as pure light radiant, is one of the oldest of such symbols.

I did this painting after returning from Lewis on the Outer Hebrides, a time of magic and inspiration. I had been there for Imbolc (Bride’s time) at the end of January/early February and had seen the Northern Lights across the sky, Bride’s flames and Her holy wells. The long-barrows is where She dwelt as the Mother of the Spirits, as the great womb within the mounds and stones where our dead ancestors live on. The entrance is a huge vagina of light through which one enters into the deep, almost fearful, darkness of the womb/tomb chambers. She is both the Ancient One and the Maiden of Spring, Cailleach and Brigid/Bride and Her mysteries are great. I have included images of the Palaeolithic Goddess of the caves and petroglyphs. The great bird rises like a Phoenix from the outline of the Hag mountain on Harris which looks like an old black woman resting, as on a sarcophagus, on its summit.

The painting belongs to the Swedish-American dowser, Sig Lonegren in Glastonbury.

Next: Rites of Passage

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 The Spirit of the Corn (mixed media, 1996)

p align=”justify”>A huge and beautiful crop circle appeared within view of Stonehenge. I happened to be going with a Welsh friend to that summer’s Big Green gathering where I gave a talk about, and was critical of, the New Age movement in the X File Avenue. I was the only speaker there to question the New Age movement. My book “New Age and Armageddon: Goddess or the Gurus? – Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future” had been published by The Women’s Press in London in 1992. On the way to the gathering from the station, where we were met by some women by car since I also was going to speak in the Women’s dome, we made a detour – a very long one as it turned out – to visit the crop circle which was immense and consisted of many circles forming a great spiral in the field. The rumour had it that a helicopter had flown across there and nothing was to be seen but when the person returned an hour or so later, in full daylight, there was the immense spiralling crop circle formation. So much for them being “man made”. The Spirit of the corn appeared magically as if drawing Herself. Is this the Corn Mother?

Next: Mother Earth in Pain…

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 Fire Dakini Dancing Woman (oil, 1999)

This painting was inspired by visiting Yosemite Park in September, 1998, with Jane Lowe, whom I met at Z. Budapest’s International Goddess Conference. It was also inspired by an experience I had at Glastonbury Goddess Conference in August with the Lammas fire and our ritual around it. I was at the time still undergoing radiotherapy treatment and was in a strange state, feeling as if I were being zapped. I had a waking dream, the night before the Lammas ritual that was part of the conference, which told me I must bare my breasts to the sacred fire of the Goddess to exorcise the radiation. And this I did while warning everyone that the Harvest Mother is not only benevolent, She also takes life, that She had taken my son (my son had died on a Lammas full moon in August), that there is fear but also hope. Something was speaking through me …. perhaps the Dakini Herself as She dances wildly with the elements and gives us wisdom and transformation. In my painting I have brought together fire and water and rocks and mountains. Above is Yosemite park and below the Rocky Valley in Cornwall, with its waterfalls and carved labyrinths in the rock. Beautiful ancient wild lands.

The Dakinis are sky-dancing ancestral pre-Buddhist Goddess spirits of Tibet. They cut through illusions and falsehoods and theirs is a secret language. They hold skullcaps full of blood as they wildly dance. My fire-dancer rises out of a volcano. The molten red hot magma at the centre of the Earth Mother’s womb is like the Kundalini She-serpent that lies coiled and dormant in the spine. She creates and she destroys. If activated she rises through the Chakras to ultimately join Shakti, cosmic female power. She is ecstatic sexual power and therefore feared by the patriarchs.

My dancing Dakini is also inspired by the life-sized carved relief of Maria Magdalena, placed in the centre of a great altar triptych that I saw in a museum of medieval art in Lubeck in Germany. She wears dreadlocks and is covered in fur. She is the wild green woman of the desert. It is now thought that perhaps she in fact was an Ethiopian priestess and therefore African and black.

Cromwell’s Calvinist puritans in Britain destroyed priceless catholic art works, statues of the Madonna and precious old stained glass windows while in Germany, during the Lutheran Reformation, the Protestants had the good sense to preserve medieval art for the future. Thus, the Maria Magdalena, the likes of which I have never seen anywhere else. Calvin was a sort of fascist Taliban of his days and to him anything beautiful or sensuous was an abomination. Earth was a fallen realm and women especially were damned.

Next: Madonna on the Serpent Mound…

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Rites of Passage (oil, 1994)

Avebury stone avenue snakes its way across the fields, the stones incredibly expressive. I know every one of them by now. Always different …… in changing lights ….. when wet, which brings out intense colours or dry, quartz embedded in the stone itself ….. sometimes alive and vivid and other times static and not communicating. The stone avenue in my painting leads into West Kennet long barrow but this is not so in reality. My poetic licence. Within it shines a little candle for a friend who died and all around are images of the Goddess from the Neolithic that I took from Marija Gimbutas’s book “The Language of the Goddess”, a book so astoundingly beautiful, a treasure). It so “happened” that as I was working on this painting late in January 1994, Marija was dying from cancer after a long struggle. She died on Imbolc itself, Bride’s day. She would! So ….. I call this painting “Rites of Passage” for Marija’s journey to the Mother. It is on the cover of the anthology “From the Realm of Ancestors” (edited by Joan Marler and published in 1997) which celebrates Marija’s life and work. A great soul and a courageous woman.

The painting was bought by Joan Marler and now hangs in the Marija Gimbutas archive in California.

Next: Bride’s Well at Imbolc

Mother Earth in Pain: Her Trees Cut Down,
Her Seas Polluted (oil, 1996)

I did this painting after twice visiting Newbury, with women of our Bristol AMA MAWU group, walking the old and beautiful woodland within 14,000 trees that were supposed to be sacrificed and cut down to make a bypass for motorists, supposedly saving them five minutes driving time. We came back again and happened on an occupation of Tarmac’s offices in Newbury. I used to go to Greenham Common women’s peace camps nearby in the 80s. Now there were “Ecowarriors”, women and men, living in “houses” high up in the threatened trees trying to save them. There was a battle lasting months but in the end they were defeated and the trees cut down. I felt great pain and grief as I grew up in the north of Sweden with the vast boreal birch and pine forests that once originated from the Siberian primordial Taiga forest. I love the forest and its magical beings, the delight of my childhood. The patriarchs, however, always hated the forest which is female, dark, damp and impenetrable and ruled over by a great female spirit. The Hebrew prophets, acting on behalf of Jahveh who hates the dark Mother Earth, cut down the sacred groves of the great Semitic Canaanite Goddess Asherah, the Christians demolished the tree enclosures of the Old European Triple Mothers …. in Germany and elsewhere. Today the great rainforests of Brazil and the Taiga of Siberia are under onslaught. The Earth will turn into a desert and there be no water or topsoil if the forests die. We will not be able to breathe.

At around the same time as the battle for the tree land at Newbury, there was a terrible oil slick from a stranded oil tanker outside of Milford Haven in South Wales, near where I had lived for five years in the 80s. My beloved and most beautiful Pembrokeshire coastline was fouled and polluted and thousands of birds died covered in black oil.

I first experienced the pain of Mother Earth during an altered state on sacred mushrooms on Silbury, Earth’s pregnant womb, in 1978. The Yews of Europe, the Redwoods, Cedars and Douglas firs can become thousands of years old and are venerable ancient beings who live in a different timescale from us, their branches high in the sky and their roots deep in the Mother’s dark soil.

Soon after I did the painting in 1996, I decided that I wanted to use it in political action and I brought it to a spring equinox ritual a group of us (around twenty women) from AMA MAWU and Rowantree eco-feminist group were performing outside the gates of a Bristol University research station at Long Ashton – (Ama is a word relating to mothering – breast feeding in Sweden and in many languages and Mawu is a great West African goddess). Genetically “modified” or rather engineered wheat was experimentally grown there, partly funded by the giant US multi-national Monsanto which is set upon dominating (and polluting) the world’s food supply. Some of us were at the time involved in the Genetix group, active against GM foods. Mother Earth Herself in my painting is based on a neolithic sculpture to be found in the great feminist Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas’ book “The Language of the Goddess“.

Next: And Her Belly lit up the World

Black Madonna of Malta (oil, 1999)

When I have been on Malta and Gozo I have not only been spending time in the Neolithic temples of the Great Mother but I have also been taken to see Black Madonnas in churches and in crypts. The most emotional encounter for me was/is with the Black Madonna under the ground. She is to be found in a crypt or cave under the floor of a cloister church in Rabat on Malta. My friend, Chloe Misfud, who loves her also, took me there and the times I have been in that crypt we have both spent long times in a trance state in the presence of the Madonna who was carved in a brown streaked marble and is so beautiful. The legend goes that a hunter was out shooting with his friends but felt tired and went into a cave to rest. He fell asleep and had the vision of the Madonna with the child. When he woke up many years had gone by. Very similar to the Celtic legends of visits to the land of the Faerie when a day might have been a hundred years in human terms. The crypt under the church is that very Faerie cave preserved. Perhaps no surprise that we enter such an enchanted state when down there. She is also known to have cried tears that look like blood, a miracle. She is surrounded by African spirit masks. The original Black Madonna would have been Isis of Egypt with the Horus child.

Bride’s Well at Imbolc on Lewis (oil on hardboard, 1989)

While I was in the USA in late summer 1988, doing slideshows of my art and speaking on the cultures of the Goddess, I spent a Full Moon day in San Francisco with African-American Luisah Teish, the Goddess Woundon-priestess and writer, well-known for her “Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals“. She is a medium and she communicated in trance with my sons in the spirit world. I have lost two sons in the last seven years. My youngest “dark” son was/is mixed race, his father African-American. He was killed by a car in August 1985. My oldest and “light” son died from cancer in July 1987. Both died on a Full Moon. Since my young sons’ deaths I have dwelt in an inbetween world, neither dead nor truly alive. It is as if my heart and part of my spirit went with them into the Otherworld and since then I have dwelt in the shadows. Luisah however communicated from my oldest son that I could go no further in my identification with the ancient Crone/the Dark One except through death itself and that I must now become like the young maiden of spring: I must transform myself or die. Wise words from a wise woman.

When I returned to England I felt a great need and urge to travel to the Holy Well of Brigid/Bride on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. I wanted to be there at Imbolc itself when She returns as a young white maiden from Her dark Mother Cailleach’s mountain fastness. She and her Mother are one, they are as the Lunar Mother in Her changes. The Lunar Mother who is both dark and light was always thought to give mind powers and oracular wisdom, as well as bringing fertility and growth. Marija Gimbutas says that during the neolithic period and later, white symbolised death to the dark Aboriginal peoples of Old Europe; the white of bleached bones, hair, ashes and snow. Black symbolised fertility and life, as in the womb where the embryo grows, the fertile soil in which the seed germinates during the winter and the luminous nights when visions and dreams come, when plants grow and wounds heal.

I travelled there at the end of January, during snowstorms and blizzards in the Scottish Highlands, and gales on the Hebrides. I stayed with my friend, Jill Smith, an Earth Mysteries artist and poet, and her son Taliesin, then five years old. Together we travelled in a hired van to where Bride’s Well snuggles in a field near a very wild coastline with ferocious winds and seas. This is on the west coast of the island, not far from Callanish stone circle and the beautiful and powerful Silver Maiden mountain.

We slept in the van overnight and at dawn next morning in the rain and wind we waited by the beautiful little well to welcome Bride, the White Maiden. (There are numerous legends of a ghost-like spectre of a white lady seen by many wells).

Later that day we passed the vibrant stones of Callanish and then, late at night, the greatest treat of all we saw the Northern Lights! Almost as if the candles or torches from Bride’s body or head flared across the skies with great arching white lights. It was truly wonderful and we were totally awestruck as we stood in the darkness for hours enchanted by this radiant presence and proof of the powers of the Maiden Goddess of spring.

Next: Bride/Brigid with her Tree, Well and Stone

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And Her Belly Lit Up The World (oil, 1996)

It was the first of January 1996, the day after my birthday on New Year’s Eve and I was walking with a friend in the dusk in the mountains near the sacred Carn Ingli (Mountain of Angels) in South Wales, high above the world. I looked up and “saw” a great white bird in the distance with a brilliant light shining from its belly. I was amazed and was going to ask my friend if he also had seen it. But when I turned around again I “saw” a car with its headlights on. The point being that I saw both! When I returned to Bristol I found that I had written in a notebook a few weeks earlier of a dream in which I saw a winged fish – or serpent-tailed Goddess – and I heard the words “And Her belly lit up the world”.

There are strange magnetic anomalies at the summit of Cam Ingli and there are remains of neolithic settlements here high above the world. The legend goes that St. Brynach, probably a pagan god turned into a saint by the Church, lived up there and was fed by the angels. Carn Ingli is part of the Preselau mountains domain Cerridwen and where the Stonehenge Blue Stones were brought. It is an area full of magic and faerie legends. Pentre Ifan cromlech is not far away and Nevern Church and graveyard with its beautiful golden Celtic cross and ancient yews, one of which is the “Bleeding Yew”. It is said that St. Brynach carried the tall and immensely heavy Celtic cross on his shoulders to where it now stands by a little Church named after him. Carn Ingli is a place of strange dreams and trance states. I did many important paintings whilst living in south Wales and I felt very strongly the presence of spirits in the land itself.

Next: Nordic Solar Maiden

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 Madonna on the Serpent Mound with the
Sun on her Back (mixed media, 1992)

This is another miraculous experience on Malta, this time with Willow La Monte (editor and producer of the Goddessing Journal) at Cospicua, a city by the sea close to Valletta, the capital. On the 9th December every year the Madonna of the Immaculate Conception is carried through the streets of Cospicua from her great cathedral. She is immensely heavy and made of silver and is carried by many strong men and a few women who are both ecstatic and delirious after many hours. They do ritual steps, swaying back and forth as they carry The Madonna. I cannot describe the feeling of seeing her returning after her long journey. I know that we both cried. She is lit up by the sun on her back. In my image she is at one with the serpent and is not crushing its head under her feet. The first time I saw her carried out of that cathedral some years earlier, there was a violent downpour of rain the moment she was visible in the doorway even though there had been a drought for months. She clearly brought that rain and everyone thanked her.

Next: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

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Bride/Brigid with Her Tree, Well and Stone (oil, 1988)

There was a dead, gnarled tree standing at the end of Dod Lane in Glastonbury. The patterns and colours on the tree trunk were amazing. This was the inspiration for this painting. The tree is now long gone. There are many legends of white ladies appearing by holy wells. Here is my interpretation of the Maiden Bride at Imbolc looking like a white lady. In a dream I myself was her as I saw myself in the distance leaning against a tree. The well is Bride’s well on Lewis, Glastonbury Tor in the background and an Avebury stone looking like an ancient crone. This painting has been on the cover of several books and belongs now to the American singer and priestess, Ruth Barrett.

Next: Triple Goddess at Pentre Ifan Cromlech