Maria Elena Stellato
Divine Feminine Energy
The Great Mother
Maria Elena Stellato is an ecofeminist artist from Naples, one of the most beautiful cities in Southern Italy. I was invited to show my portraits in a gallery in Naples some years ago, and I decided to stay in the city for a few days. Elena lived in an antique palace in the old quarter of town that had been remodelled into a set of large apartments. She shared one of these apartments with a group of girls, they kindly took me in during my stay in the city. They used to stay up late at night in the shared kitchen when the day was over, talking about their future projects, ideas, plans, and thoughts. During my stay at her place, I joined this nightly meetings every single day with pleasure. One night, we spent a long time talking about how humanity has changed drastically in the last 2000 years as a result of the rise and dominance of monotheistic religions that spread from Europe. Before this happened, people used to believe there were many gods... and goddesses.
Ancient civilizations worshiped some male gods, like the god of the Sun, but they also had deities that represented female virtues, like the Earth. Cultures that were very distant in time and space and never had any contact, belief systems from different continents and centuries, considered the Sun a male god, that fertilized Earth with its warm rays making life possible, and the Earth a female goddess, with the capacity of sustaining life and giving us all we need without asking for anything in return. The Incas called her Pachamama, the Greeks, Gaia, and the Hindus, Bhūmi. All these ancient cultures believed that life on Earth can exist because of the combination of the male and female energies. The Sun was considered the great father, and the Earth, the great mother. But the expansion of monotheism forced people to believe there we only one true God, the father who watches us from the sky, setting aside the relevance of the female energy, which became practically invisible for centuries.
The “witch” hunts and the destruction of the “pagan” wisdom started. This absolutist belief reinforced the patriarchal system which had already been gaining power for centuries. In this way, patriarchy reached religion, leaving nothing out of its reach. We took love out of our concept of God, and, in this way, God became a judgemental male figure. This not only gave rise to an unequal society, but also to a way of living that lacks any form of respect to all things associated with femininity in a broader sense. This has generated a destructive relationship with our planet. By depriving it from its sacredness, we started considering it an object with resources we can consume. We forgot our planet is a living organism formed by millions of microorganisms which are interconnected and interdependent. We don’t see the fragility of humanity and our dependence on the rest of life on the planet. We can breathe because trees generate oxygen, we can eat because nature provides all the food we need. We are alive because millions of years of evolution have created the conditions for humanity to be able to exist.
Our survival as a species depends on our capacity to switch to a sustainable energy production model based on respect for all living organisms around us, showing gratitude for all that Earth gives us. Gratitude is a very important feeling, it connects us with the best part of ourselves, and today humanity needs to connect to this feeling.
We are living times of change in which we are finally beginning to understand the primordial role of the divine feminine energy in life, but we still have a long way to go. The future of life is not based on competition but on collaboration. If we became a threat for our own survival, it's not because we are not strong enough, it's because we became too strong, too aggressive, too competitive. It is time to truly understand and celebrate the feminine energy of creation.
The only way of truly understanding something is going to the origin, finding the source, which raises the questions “What makes possible birth and life preservation?” “Why does a mother feed her baby?” “Why does Earth give us all we need to live?” If we reflect about this and try to find the answer inside us, we will come to the conclusion that the answer is universal and very simple: unconditional love. The love of a mother is not based on wanting or expecting something from you, but on nurturing you so you can grow, protecting you, making life possible. Only by understanding the true motivation that lies behind the creative power of the divine feminine can we finally understand it, respect it, and admire it.
After talking about all these things for a long time with Elena and her friends in the shared kitchen of their apartment in Naples, I asked her to make a portrait fusing her with her sculpture of Iyá Nlá, the Great Mother goddess of the Yoruba people in Africa. In Yoruba language, “iyá” means “mother” and “nlá” means “great”. She is believed to be the source of all existence and the “mother of all things, including other gods. This belief implies that human beings can relate to one another as children of the same mother. As we can see, the Great Mother archetype is present in cultures, religions, cosmologies and traditions around the whole world.
This portrait represents and reclaims the power of this universal feminine creative force. The red and green tones of her skin represent the land, the red sands of the African desert and the green lands of the tropical forest. The blue tones of the clothes and the background represent water. Her face and posture transmit the frustration of being forgotten and disrespected for so many centuries. We must recover the ancient knowledge from our ancestors we have lost along the way: the Earth is alive and it does not belong to us, we belong to it. We knew this thousands of years ago, but we seem to have forgotten it. The history of humankind did not start 2,000 years ago but more than 200,000... The time has come to awaken from our collective amnesia and remember the whole history of humanity.
