Sunday, 28 October 2007
Virgo is pictured as a slender, feminine figure, with one hand held out holding a cone, interpreted as one of the symbols of the Queen of Heaven, and, here and wearing a billowing skirt. Her profile and front are outlined by the River Cary. The feminine image suggests associations between the feminine figure of Virgo and earth mother figures of ancient goddess symbolism. At the point where the figure’s breast would be is the mound Wimble Toot. The geographical, visual, and, this time, cultural and etymological correlations again evoke symbolic associations which reinforce the earth mother connotations, since, according to Janet and Colin Bord, the Toot or moot hill was the point where people from all over the locality gathered to meet and receive spiritual nourishment. The lexical relationships of the word toot, which “equates with teat, as maybe does the Welsh maeth, which means nourishment” are invoked as validating these interpretations (p.220). One wonders, however, whether the Bords might not have allowed their enthusiasm for these ideas to make them overeager to justify these associations, on account of the suprising precision of their description of ancient British spirituality. As Bradley’s observation suggests a necessary caution “Any attempt at recapturing the ancient religion of the British Isles has been made conjectural by the determined efforts of their [Christian] successors to eliminate all such traces”(1993,p.viii).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment