An Online Retrospective

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

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 Nordic Solar Maiden (oil on hardboard, 2000)

I visited Tanum on the Swedish west coast where there are innumerable petroglyphs carved on the cliffs all around the area, not far from the sea. This is a World Heritage site. The symbolism is very different from the neolithic elk cows at Namforsen and probably belonged to the Vanir people who used magic instead of swords and whose great Shaman Goddess was Freya, before She was co-opted by the invading Aesir Indoeuropean warlike people of the Iron Age. Freya was both solar and lunar and she owned the bird costume used for shamanic flights. Her shaman priestesses were the Valas and Valkyries. Everywhere at Tanum there are dancing joyous figures, priestess acrobats doing somersaults over boats, men in ritual battle, solar wheels, etc.

Next: Nordic Mother of the Animals

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 Nuestra Señora De Guadalupe (oil, 2000)

To my great surprise, I have found myself, a northerner, drawn to the indigenous Dark Mother of the Americas. I was travelling in the USA in 1999 during the launch of my book “Return of the Dark/Light Mother or New Age Armageddon?: Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future” which was published in Austin, Texas by Plainview Press. During the six week tour I got ill and exhausted with bronchitis and continuous coughing. Whilst in Texas I had previously been introduced to La Senora/Our Lady by a feminist nun in San Antonio. As I travelled, finally to end up in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and Mexico City itself, Her call became louder and louder. I found myself delirious, feverish and hysterical on a New York airport, having missed the connecting flight to Mexico and was put up in a hotel overnight. I managed to sleep a few hours and had a marvellous visionary dream. I dreamt that I saw all the world’s Goddesses swirling and rotating in a great pyramidal form and at its summit stood Our Lady of Guadalupe radiating a great and blessed light. When I finally arrived in Mexico City, I was still ill and I was alone, speaking very little Spanish in this vast, dangerous and very polluted city but somehow I felt protected. I managed to sleep all night in the cheap hotel room situated close to the grand El Zocolo or plaza in the city centre. The Aztecs practise their ancient dances here in front of what once were their temples, long time gone. I knew in my sleep that even if I crawled on my knees, I had to get to Tepeyac, the sacred site where Nuestra Senora was seen hundreds of years ago by an Aztec shepherd. Here stood the ancient temple of Tonanzin (the pre-Aztec Goddess) and below the rocks and waterfalls are the chapels and great cathedral dedicated to Our Lady. She is Tonanzin reborn. She is NOT Mary of the church even though the Catholic church attempts to whiten Her and make Her look submissive. There is, however, a sculpture group, high in the rocks and by the waterfalls of Nuestra Senora, hands out-stretched and dark skinned with a group of Aztecs in traditional clothes and ornaments, very beautiful, giving Her gifts. She simply said, ‘I am the Mother of your people”, which is very different from the vision of Mary the Virgin that appeared at Lourdes and obligingly said ‘I am the immaculate conception”. The whole day at Tepeyac was blissful and I was surrounded by mainly indigenous Mexicans. Every time I entered the cathedral I cried my eyes out but so did everyone else. She has always stayed with me.

Huldra, Nordic Queen of the Forest

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Triple Goddess at Pentre Ifan Cromlech/
The Womb of Cerridwen (oil on hardboard, 1991)

I lived in Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales/Cymru for five years, from 1980-85, in a cottage in a hamlet near Fishguard. After the initiatory experience of the Goddess of Silbury, I felt a great need to live in the countryside with Her seasons, following the cycles of growth and death in nature, and to be close to the sea, to the night and day skies. In cities one never experiences the Moon in Her changes and the darkness is banished in streets where the god of artificial electric light rules. This has done great damage to our women’s sense of our lunar/menstrual rhythms and sexuality.

I experienced a great ancientness in the land of Wales and there are many remains from both neolithic as well as early Celtic times. There are many cromlechs or Dolmens that I came to know but the most powerful and dramatic, both in its structure as well as in its setting, high up on the slopes of the Preselau mountains off the Cardigan Road, is Pentre Ifan. Originally with a homed/lunar forecourt of stones, it is a ‘gateway cromlech’, clearly an entrance, to an oblong or egg shaped earth mound that no longer exists but the outline of which one can still see. The Druids called it ‘The Womb of Cerridwen’ and used the mound/womb as a place of initiation, spending days and nights within its darkness seeking death and rebirth, as shamans have done in all ages within the caves and in the wild and remote places of the Earth.

Cerridwen was/is an great Celtic (or pre-Celtic) Goddess and to Her belongs the magical cauldron of transformations. The cauldron was the womb of the Goddess filled with Her life-giving and trance-inducing menstrual liquid that brought about shapeshifting and transmutations. Cerru means cauldron. To the later patriarchs Cerridwen was the archetypal ‘witch’. Her cauldron became the Holy Grail forever pursued by King Arthur’s knights and was then transformed into the Chalice of the Catholic church, but instead of being filled with the magical life-giving blood of the Goddess, it now contains the blood of a crucified man.

The Blue stones of the inner, older and lunar/horseshoe circle at Stonehenge were brought from the Preselau mountains and on Cam Menyn, one of its peaks, one can see stones looking very much like the ones at Stonehenge, almost freestanding and not needing to be quarried. Is it possible that the Blue stones were brought from a stone circle of Cerridwen up in the mountains? This is Her domain. Were the stones considered equally precious because they turn blue when wet?…….. waters and the colour blue always being sacred to the Goddess.

In the summer of 1990, I experienced sleeping on a very rainy night, under the capstone of Pentre Ifan and having strange visions and dreams. I got soaking wet. It was this experience which made me do this painting. I dreamt of cromlechs for weeks thereafter ………..

There are many legends of fairy paths, fairy lights, etc. around this area which stretches from Pentre Ifan on the Preselies above the Nevern that cradles by the river of the same name, in the valley several miles below. In Nevern there is an old graveyard with ancient gnarled Yew trees, the tree of the Goddess of the Underworld and the dead. The bleeding Yew has a sap that looks, smells and tastes like blood.

There is also the magnificent Celtic cross of St. Brynach’s that glows golden from the red-golden pollen of the trees. It is one of the finest Celtic crosses still standing in the world.

Pentre Ifan cromlech, formerly called “The Womb of Cerridwen”, was a gateway-entrance into a great oval or egg shaped mound where shamans, and later the Druids, would spend days and nights in visionary initiations. The cromlech stands on the edge of the Preselau mountains with a magnificent view over the sea and distant mountains. Nearby is an enchanted faery wood called Tycanol forest where dwarf oak trees grow out of moss covered boulders. From there, as from Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor in Devon, came the Wild Hunt of Spirits led by Hel, Nordic Goddess of the Underworld, or by Odin. In the valley below, by the Nevern river, is the graveyard with the Bleeding Yew Mother. And everywhere there are faery paths and legends. I spent a night sleeping under the capstone of the cromlech, trying to hide from pelting rain on a very dark night, together with some of the AMA MAWU women from Bristol. We were on a magical mystery tour and this was the night after the full moon. I was sitting up in the middle of the night trying to draw the stones, holding a flashlight, barely able to see. For weeks after that I kept dreaming of cromlechs (chambers of stone) and did this and other paintings of Cerridwen as Maiden, Mother and Crone.

Next: Mawu, African Mother of Us All

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 Nordic Mother of the Animals (oil, 1995)

I have stayed at Skogsnas, an eco village started by hippies who, 30 years ago, built their own log cabins and developed arts and crafts and music, many times. It is situated inland in the same county from the city on the Baltic where I was born. Not far from the “village” there is a neolithic settlement that probably belonged to the Saami, the original inhabitants in the north who have been there since the Ice Age at least. The settlement would have been a summer fishing and elk hunting village and it is situated by the shores of a powerful river call Namforsen. A lot of excavations have taken place there and there are perhaps thousands of petroglyphs carved and painted on mighty cliffs by the river and on its islands. The interesting thing is that the majority of the images are of female elks, very few horns in sight. Obviously the elk cow was sacred and the Great Goddess was of her nature. There are ships carved with elk heads and what looks like shaman women. Of course the archaeologists have not noticed any of this and also tend to deny the Saami heritage which I discovered when I travelled to Jokkmokk on the Arctic circle in Saami/Lapland.

I have written all about this in “The Norse Goddess” book. In my painting the Goddess looks like one of the mystical Seide stones, sacred to the Saami and she wears a crown of elk cow heads. There are great numbers of elks in the Swedish forests today and there are even bears to be found here up north.

I remember going to Namsforsen one night around midsummer, when it was light all night but an eerie light, with a group of women. We had borrowed a rowing boat and we went out to an island where there are a great number of petroglyphs on a great cliff that dips into the water. We got into tapping this cliff rhythmically and felt that we were communicating with the ancestral spirits indwelling in the cliff and that this was the actual purpose of the carvings. This painting came out of that magical experience.

Next: Kundalini Serpent Goddess…