MUSEUM REVIEW
"God Feminine – A Hidden Side of the
Biblical God."Exhibition in the Museum für sakrale Kunst
(Jesuitenkirche), Heidelberg, Germany,
October 10 – December 19, 2010
Review of the Exhibit
Olaf Rölver, University of Bamberg, Germany
Translated by Robert Schick
Origin
The exhibit “Gott weiblich – eine verborgene Seite des biblischen Gottes” “God Feminine – A Hidden Side of the Biblical God” is a loanable, traveling exhibit that has been shown so far in the Museum für Kunst und Geschichte in Fribourg, Switzerland (2007/2008), in the diocesan museums in Rottenburg (2008) and Bamberg (2010) as well as in the Museum für sakrale Kunst und Liturgie (Jesuitenkirche) in Heidelberg. It is based on the collection of the project Bibel + Orient Museum in Fribourg, and was conceived by Dr. Othmar Keel, who was also the curator along with Dr. Thomas Staubli.Goal
The exhibit has a message that is primarily theological: against the dominant discourse of God as ‘Father’ and ‘Lord’ it seeks to show that the images of God that the Christians usually made have a flip side regarding God’s gender. God is not to be conceived as one-sided and exclusively masculine. Rather, feminine sides must also be integrated into any human attempt to conceive of the divine (fig. 1). Within church discourse, the exhibit places a provocative finger in the wound of continuing gender inequality.Figure 1
Such voluptuous anthropomorphic female figurines are symbols of the fertility of the land and of the life of people and animals. With sedentarization and the beginning of agriculture, that became the decisive aspect of human life, in need of divine protection.
Fired clay figurine of the Halaf Culture, North Syria. Pottery Neolithic, 6400-5800 B.C.E. Height 7.6 cm, traces of painting.
© Bible & Orient Museum at the University of FribourgObjects in the Exhibit
About 250 archaeological finds, originals and replicas are on exhibit dating from the Neolithic (ca. 9,000 BCE) to Byzantine periods (around 500 CE) and ranging from Mesopotamia, over the entire Levant, Egypt and Cyprus to Tunisia and Rome. The concept of the exhibit entails juxtaposing these archaeological pieces from the contributing museums with examples of regional provenience from the Middle Ages and modern times, such as representations of Mary or the saints, which bring expression to transformations of the divine-feminine.Arrangement
The exhibit is not laid out chronologically, but rather deliberately chooses a low-threshold entry that places the basic anthropological data of the feminine or specifically feminine rolls in the center. Correspondingly, the 14 sections bear such headings as ‘Hair – Staging and Covering’, ‘Life and Death – Motherhood and Lamenting for the Dead’, ‘Intercessor’ or ‘Virgin, Fighting Goddess’.Praise and Criticism
The organizers of the exhibit certainly have collected pieces for the most important aspects of the theme with regard to Near Eastern archaeology. Visitors meet stone-age fertility figures, Mesopotamian idols, the Egyptian goddesses Isis, Neith, Mut, Maat and Hathor, Assyrian and Akkadian cylinder seals and naturally the famous Iron Age pillar figurines from Judaea (fig. 2), among others.Figure 2
Such pillar figurines, most probably representations of the goddess Asherah, attest that in the period of the Monarchy in Judah another, feminine deity was worshiped alongside YHWH. Over 400 examples were found in the shadow of the Temple in Jerusalem alone. With a concentration on only one god, the masculine sides of God later became ever more prominent.
Judaea. Iron Age IIB-C, ca. 750-620 B.C.E. Fired clay, height 16 cm, traces of paint.
© Bible & Orient Museum at the University of FribourgThe original pieces from the collection of the Bibel + Orient Museum were carefully and appropriately supplemented with a few replicas. The thematic breadth and quality of the exhibit are very rarely seen outside of the Near East, and it is absolutely worthwhile.
The organization of the exhibit by themes, rather than chronology, represents a gain for people with no prior knowledge. Hair, breasts, birth and death, fighting or family can easily and in multiple ways serve as starting points for conversations. This hermeneutic of juxtaposition characterizes the exhibit and spurs one to reflect about the image of God shaped by each individual or by the church. A contextualization of the individual pieces, which allows conclusions to be made about the relationship of religious culture and societal reality, by contrast, is at best only hinted at in the respective text panels. Finds from Egypt stand next to Greek, Mesopotamian or Central European pieces from the Middle Ages. A history of discourse, which examines, for example, the development of mother goddesses originally connoted with fertility (fig. 3), through masculine and feminine deities of the Bronze Age and Israelite monarchy, to an increasing concentration on a God, then as a rule thought of as masculine, hardly comes into consideration.
Figure 3
The “naked goddess” appeared in Syria in the third millennium B.C.E. and, with minor iconographic variants, became widespread throughout the Near East in the second millennium. The thin figure with conspicuous private parts has strong erotic features. As a rule she is accompanied by plants and / or sheep and goats, which stand for joy of life, regeneration and fertility and which belong to the sphere of the goddess.
Scarabs and cylinder seals are a central part of the pieces shown in the exhibit.
Scarab from Palestine/Israel. Middle Bronze Age IIB, 1700-1550 B.C.E. Steatite, burned; 1.8 cm.
© Bible & Orient Museum at the University of FribourgThe exhibit dispenses with a cultural scientific differentiation of the varied religious symbolic worlds in favor of basic anthropological experiences. The continuity of some iconographic representations (e.g. representations of a ‘queen of heaven’ or the allocation of plants in the realm of the goddess or a nursing mother goddess) is surprising, but the question remains, whether similar representations also mean the same thing. In addition it is not completely clear, how at the end the juxtaposition of ancient goddesses and representations of Mary is to be evaluated. Is the veneration of Mary to be seen as a successful integration of feminine aspects in the religious system of symbols, or rather a signal for a deficient, because exclusively masculine, depiction of God?
The exhibit avoids the danger of reducing femininity to a few aspects out of the thematic circle of sexuality and fertility, which in ancient representations certainly played a dominant role, but again rather reflect the masculine perspective, by pointedly thematizing other rolls of women: the lamenting woman, the fighting woman, the woman who tames chaos (fig. 4).
Figure 4
Based on the social situation, certain human needs thrust themselves into the foreground, reflected in the representation of their deities. Feminine goddesses like Astarte and Anat also take up militant roles. The head of this figurine is original. The torso and clothes are reconstructed, based on a Late Bronze Age bronze figurine found in Kamid el-Loz.
Jordan, region of Amman or to the south. Iron Age IIB, 9th-8th centuries B.C.E. or earlier. Head limestone, 45 cm; figurine life-size.
© Bible & Orient Museum at the University of FribourgFor this reason depictions of feminine deities are not the only ones shown. Many pieces are figures of women, for which it is either questionable whether they represent goddesses, or even certain that they do not. In this way it is clear how religious symbolic worlds and societal realities stand in a relationship of mutual interdependence.
The exhibit organizers at each venue offered a supporting program which varied from place to place depending on their interests and resources. A 144-page long exhibit catalogue in German is available: Othmar Keel, Gott weiblich: eine verborgene Seite des biblischen Gottes. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2008. ISBN: 978357908444.
Summary
By means of exceptional archaeological finds, the exhibit raises theologically relevant perspectives and starkly places traditional plausibilities in question. With a picture sharpened in this way, feminine sides of God can also be rediscovered in the Biblical texts.
