Frog Goddess, Hacilar Anatolia 6th mill. B.C.E.
It’s a soft rain swept morning in Santa Barbara, perfect weather for aquatic beings and hidden creatures. The imagination finds footing in ancient imagery and the Frog Goddess rises up and out of Marija Gimbutas’ Neolithic world, fecund and symbolically paradoxical. Gimbutas writes that the frog was both a funerary and life symbol, equated to “the uterus of the life-giving, regenerating, and transforming Goddess”(Language of the Goddess, 251).
The archetypal resonance of regeneration and the female form is astounding, repeated through time and across cultures. Here this hybrid frog/woman ceramic piece is from the end of the 6th millennium BCE in Anatolia. Remarkable.
Here’s a parallel, dare I make it, to Lady Gaga and the egg she rode within to the Grammy Awards, only to emerge (hatched) on stage.
Lady Gaga emerging, regenerated...
Lady Gaga in Egg
(Lady Gaga is a pop Goddess of epic proportions drawn from the powerful line that includes Madonna, the Great Goddess of the 80’s and 90’s.)
A symbolic constellation presents itself – frogs, eggs, female form, fecundity, regeneration, renewal, archetypal feminine, and it is as ancient as it is radical and edgy.
