#dancing goddesses

This is the seventh in Char’s series she called “Goddess Boogie”.  She began to paint these trios of exuberant dancing goddesses soon after we got together ;-)

What About (Dancing) Goddesses?

Somehow the discussions of monotheism always assume a male god. And yet, logically, origins of life (and the universe, and everything) could more easily be represented as female.

Let’s acknowledge that goddesses can be fun to discuss, too. The individual dancing goddess images here are freely available, courtesy…

I’m wondering if this would fall under the category of the string skirts that Elizabeth Wayland Barber discusses in The Dancing Goddesses?

“ … . European farm women’s traditional dress (”folk costume”–worn even today in some regions) includes in many areas a type of garment awarded to a girl when she reached puberty: the so-called string skirt. Of no use for warmth or modesty, since it consists simple of a belt band or apron with long, heavy fringes hanging from it, the string skirt carried cultural information–indicating to all that the woman was of an age to produce new human beings, a miracle utterly necessary for the survival of the group.  This marker occurs in a wide variety of cultures, Indo-European and not, from the Peloponnese in southern Greece to the fart northeast, almost to the Urals beyond Moscow.

But representations of women of obviously childbearing age wearing such a garment occur also in ancient times–in Hellenistic Greece ca. 300BC, Arcahic Greece ca. 600 BC, Bronze Age norther Europe ca.1000 BC, Neolithic Balkans and Ukraine ca. 4000 BC, and Palaeolithic France and Russia ca. 20,000 BC.  As if that weren’t enough archaeologist have found remains of such skirts on women’s bodies in Denmark and Slovakia ca. 1400 BC, and the Tarim Basin of Central Asia (among intruders with roots in eastern Europe) ca. 1800 BC.  A lengthy reference to it occurs in our earliest preserved European literature, Homer’s Iliad (14.166-328), around 800 BC.”

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