The Magdalene Cycle

Many Goddesses have played key roles in the mythologies of the
world. These imagined presences, portrayed in art, worshipped in
ritual, woven into stories and myths have served humans as
depictions of the Sacred Feminine. None is more ubiquitous, for
example, than the Great Mother. She is Kali, Sophia, The
Shekhinah, Isis, Demeter, Persephone, Innana, Guadeloupe. She is
the Black Madonna– a being of this world, of the Earth, and in some
sense, the Earth, itself. She is dark, like the soil, she represents
sexuality, procreation, fecundity, the physicality of this world, its
matter. In her loving aspect she radiates benevolence for all living
things. In her guise as devourer, she “takes away”, brings death,
dances on your bones. Moving through her cycles, she is the Spring,
the force that generates new life.
In Christian mythology the principal “goddess” is the Virgin Mary, the
mother of God. Her presence is powerful in art, ritual, and in the
myths of many countries. Mary is a chaste goddess. She bears
none of the fierce and passionate qualities of older goddesses. She
belongs somehow, to the “risen God”, to the sky.
However, there is another sacred woman, — intriguing, defamed,
controversial, her role and image trivialized in the books of recent
Christianity: Mary Magdalene. In the old, now disused Gospels, she
is said to be a disciple of Jesus, even perhaps his wife. There is even
a claim she may have borne him a child. She has largely been
banished, in the recent Bible, reduced to the status of “prostitute”.
She is the one who is “forgiven”, who “repents”, who needs to be
“saved”. Painters through the centuries have been inspired to portray
her as corporeal, voluptuous, and passionate. Like Jesus, she too
spent forty days and nights in the wilderness. Images of her, with her
long red hair and transfixed gaze are found in these works. Within
Christianity, then, is an image of the Black Madonna, divine, yet of
this earth, an image of the Sacred Feminine who dwells in the matter
of this world.
The“Thirteen Moons of the Magdalene” cycle of paintings is a
meditation on Mary Magdalene.

These works form a kind of prayer for her journey of return. I do not
imagine her as a personage, as a figure. She is one with the
elements, she is an energy of renewal, and she is the dark soil of this
world, the ground, a locus of reverence. The Magdalene is
represented abstractly–the blue is the blue of Earth, the red is the
blood of life, the gold is the precious soil, and the black is the
darkness into which the Magdalene plunges with courage in order to
return with her urgent message, to awaken us to our crisis– (as well a
crisis of consciousness). Will we become alerted to the plight of this
brilliant, endangered ecosystem, to the beauty of the world that is our
home, to our mandate as its stewards, before it is too late? Will we
ever live in a manner consistent with belonging to the “unity of all life”,
Rachel Carson’s impassioned reminder?
My art seeks to address the lack of a strong image of God as
Feminine in our religious pantheon. It attempts to rebalance the
“story” by which we live, a story rich in the lore of “father and son” but
weak in the presence of God as a woman. I sense a shift happening
now in the world, a shift in consciousness. Images of the Sacred
Feminine are returning to us, coming back to us through
archaeological research, through such writers as Riane Eisler, Merlin
Stone, Marion Woodman, Sylvia Perera, and Marija Gimbutas,
Barbara G. Walker, Andrew Harvey, who write eloquently of the
Goddesses lost to us for many thousands of years. These mythical
personages mediate the mystery of this world for us in myriad ways.
They come from the ground.
Religious myths exert a powerful influence on cultural forms, on art
and architecture, family structure, politics, the designs of our cities,
how we behave and think about each other, how we define and
regard the earth, itself. The “father-son” mythology of the Judeo-
Christian tradition preaches compassion, yet reveres above all the
notion of “eternal life”, of transcendence, of movement upwards,
away from Earth. This image of a “perfect world” elsewhere has
resulted in a disconnection from Earth, a disdain for natural cycles,
and an alienation from our fellow creatures. The consequences of
this worldview have been very great: we have imperiled the
environment and its creatures, ransacked Earth’s resources, we have
tolerated the abuse and subjugation of women and children, we
glorify war.

In reconnecting to images of the Sacred Feminine, both men and
women may regain in the words of Robin Holcomb, “ a fundamental
reverence for the natural world and profound awareness of man’s
responsibility when living in it.” Ms. Holcomb speaks of writer Rachel
Carson, of her “protest on behalf of life”. I join both Ms. Holcomb and
Rachel Carson in a protest for life, in a passionate prayer for an
awakening to our fundamental status: we are of the Earth, it is a
sacred place, we are its stewards.
In making this work I asked myself, Can images bring healing? Are
there ways to create art that provoke thought, but that in no way limit
the viewer’s process, nor stop the flow of imagining? Can The
Sacred as Feminine be contained in form without concretizing these
ephemeral energies, limiting them, encasing them, as it were, in
hardened molds that, in the end, stifle or make banal the life force
and promote yet another version of idolatry? My goal was to achieve,
in this art, a delicate balance between the weight and density of
matter and the ephemeral nature of things imagined.

Fran Bull