Female Centered Houses as Areas of Sacred Protection by Toni Truesdale
Historically, the homes of women are spiritual places of prayer, safety and sustenance. The female centered house, with the kitchen as the apex of feminine activity, has
always held sacred symbology.
Throughout
time women’s alters within the house, often set inside the kitchen, reflect a
relationship to the ancestors, protective spirits, saints and household
deities. Generation to generation, the hands of women have carefully chosen
material images and made offerings; as they passed on these traditions, mother
to daughter. This simple practice of honoring links us not only to our maternal
ancestors but to each other as woman across human migrations, into all
civilizations though time itself; creating a common culture of women. (image:
Grandmothers House)
The culture of women exists with each prayer; centered in
the hearth with our daily bread.
The family is sheltered within the home, protected with
feminine presences,
Shrines to ancestors, and beautifully evolving alters that
evoke the art of the household.
Embellishments can take on many
forms: flowers, candles, votives, food, figures, sea shells, seasonal
representations, small meaningful objects, photos of loved ones; all symbolic
gestures that show thought, emotion and devotion. In this way the home can
become a shrine itself full of sacred objects and offered prayers. Indigenous
rituals and symbology are obvious in sight practices. Yet women of all cultures
appear to share a love of beauty which emerges as the preparation and
presentation of food, hospitality, decoration, holiday adornments. Everyday
life is celebrated in what is still the domain of women, it is the legacy of
the hearth, central fire, alter within the home. (image: House Shrine)
The hearth, fire, food, and alters are metaphoric examples
of the importance that women have put into their daily life sustaining
routines. According to Jungian Enrich Neumann even the village is a symbol of
feminine “Natural nourishing principle” for “great round” is the center of the
circle of life that is dominated with female mysteries. The hearth signifies
warmth, food, love; it is the “original alter”. There too is a timeless
practice of sacred protection and invocation. Intentional too can be the
conscious construction of the house. This is reflected in the dwellings of the
matrilineal Dine (Navajo)Hogan that is dedicated to the four directions, the
Turkanoans of Columbia construction that evokes the very cosmos, the Dogon people
of West Africa who so inspired Aldo Van Eyck in his search for sacred architecture.
Meaningful even to the smallest item, an object takes on potential to transform
the mundane into spiritual connections. (Image: Basket*House*Village*Universe)
Baskets of women
Reflect nourishment
Physical as well as spiritual
Object to concept
Keeping sacred the spirit of
everyday life;
Within the home
Utilitarian
to universal
Dwelling
to village
Community
to cosmos
Each
human passage
Through
140 thousand years...
Birth
to death
The
finite to consummation
End
to beginning...
We
can draw a timeline from the ancient, approx.8000 years ago, from the
Canaanite’s in the Mid-East across continents into Modern times. The seeds of
Female ”folk religion” or “House Religion”, so called by academics, connects
women in creating sacred spaces for the same essential purpose of protection
against all that would harm their children and loved ones. “They placed
figurines that represented and invoked protective deities in front kitchens or
courtyards near doorways that provided access to the roof and interior living
and work areas.”-Eleanor Willet: Women and House Religion. (Image:
Ancient Kitchen) Archeology has uncovered the importance of devotional purpose
in the kitchens and households of ancient women. In Catal Huyak and Crete the
feminine was exalted and connections were obvious with the use of protective
Goddesses. But in early Palestine the finds are quite stunning. From 8th
century BCE, early Israelite households were discovered to find evidence of
household worship in the forms of votives, small female figures, incense and
lamps with looms, needles vessals, bowls in situ with feminine implements.
Amulets were used to protect and domestic cult rooms were found as well as
objects of devotion alongside of cooking bowls. Prayer was probably invoked on
a daily basis to combat the many uncertainties. (Image: Clay Prayers)
“Oh Ishtar,
merciful Goddess, I have come to visit you,
I have prepared for you and Offering: pure milk,
A Cake baked in ashes,
I stood up for you a vessal for libations,
Hear me and act favorably towards me”
Mesopotamia text
quoted by Akerman in Did God Have a Wife? By William Dever.
Devers
writes in “Did God Have A Wife” about the overwhelming evidence in ancient
Israel of archeological finds that the worship of Asherah ( probably connected
to the archaic Goddesses Ishtar, Hathor and Astarte) continued well into
Patriarchal religions and beyond.
Some
of the historical Household Goddesses invoked by women are well known:
Greek
Hestia of the hearth, sacred fire and home, Roman counterpart Vesta virtually
every home contained a statute of her sacred central fire that was never to be
extinguished, Ishtar Goddess of ancient mid-east, Asertah of Israel, Morrigan
(in one of her many aspects) from the Celtic, ( image:Clallileach) Callileach
pre-Celtic UK, Pacha Mama from Central Americas, Arani Hindu Goddess of the
Hearth, Ayaba of the African Fon, Brigid Celtic and Catholic of the sacred
fire, Esta who was Etruscan household Goddess, Huchi of the hearth in the
cosmology of indigenous Ainu of Japan, and many, many more from through all the
continents; different names for the eternal fire, the hearth, the sacred center
in the feminine divine.
Early
Christian too harbored the divine feminine; the church went through many
changes before finally sublimating the Sophia. To further this end the medieval
church began a feminization of the Christ figure; this was notable through the mystical
works of Hildegard of Bingen (image: Sacred Writing), Julian of Norwich and
Bernard of Clairviox. Christ symbolically become the house of God, Christians
entered it through the door, his wound. The body of Christ became his church. Christ
gave the milk of nourishment. Healing and miracles were attributed to holy shrines
and reliquaries, sixth century work on the life of St Symeon the Stylite, the
younger, refers to a woman setting up an image of the saint in her house that
worked miracles curing people of diseases.
Blessings permeate and create sacred spaces with the help
of guardians; icons invoke ancestors, deities, saints. This protects us and the
loved ones within and as they cross into the outer (more dangerous) world.
These rites cross virtually every race and era. This commonality is part of the
“culture of women” which has always existed, secretly in sight many times,
separate from male dominated society and religion. (image: Daily Bread)
Little Blessings
Each and every daybreak;
We ask the spirits to watch over us
As we go about a busy day.
For our children to be well,
Healthy and thrive;
And our loved ones;
Sometimes far away,
To be protected please.
And for angels to smile upon this
beautiful day,
We ask for our
Little Blessings
The
formal religions of the Patriarchs build huge fixed structures that are
ordered, authoritarian, static that rise high to proclaim dominance; gatekeepers
of knowledge, social mores, aesthetics, history, the very structure of the
world.
Yet
women have enshrined their homes, gardens and nature with icons and offerings
to a spirit world that evoke prayers of peace, health and safety for family, community and even the
world through the entire history of organized religions. For each household embellishment
has an iconic value that flow and change with seasons, passages and feasts.
Even the daily bread had an intrinsic value created with love served with
beauty. Textiles are created to reflect
sacred images passing through each generation,
Connected by the hands of women;
Stories are told,
language and traditions learned, songs are sung in celebration of
The mythologies of imagery
that encircle loved ones and celebrate ancestry.
In commonality, all women have
brought comfort within
the loving walls
That holds who is dear.
To nourish with food, warm by fire, and clothe
in our handmade legacy.
Each day is a sacred exercise
in timeless feminine spirituality. (Image:
Culture of Women)
Many
modern and indigenous cultures hold the seeds of original civilizations and the
rites of women. For the N’Debele of South Africa the decorative aspects both
inside the house and the external murals echo the natural abstractions of the
natural world. (Image N’Debele woman). The Basotho also of South Africa have
constructed their own homes with beautiful paintings rich with vivid designs
that reflect the vegetal world, natural environment as well as the cosmos.
According to R. Barris, “ The Basotho house becomes the womb; the Basotho woman
becomes the house”.
“Within
those interior house spaces, ceremonial healings also happen. All houses are
healed periodically and fed cornmeal. Traditionally, some burials occurred in
the floor of the houses. Houses are deemed to be alive and have energies which
can bring harmony if recognized and treated with proper respect.” Santa Clara
architect Rina Swentzell is referring to the adobe dwellings that are often
many generations old.(image: Feast Day)
From
her signature work From Milk River, Christine Hugh-Jones says,” They
construct their houses to represent the universe” and “universe is a womb”. Kay
Turner in Beautiful Necessity, places an emphasis on the alters of
modern women, “a different alter, one that is not male dominated or dogma
bound. It is an intimate alter, a home alter, made by a woman, and dedicated
for her own personal devotion to the deities she chooses”. And further
“Cultures of the Goddess and her domestic alters were transformed and
diminished but never fully obliterated.”
Robert
Farris Thompson has documented alters of the African diaspora in Face of the
Gods, these link West African traditions, surviving slavery, to the modern
trans-Atlantic world. Carin Tunaker writes about the Hispanic house traditions
in the Matrifocal Household, “the
Mother as giver of food ( and symbolically the giver of life. This not only
locates the mother (or women) at the center of the household, but also ’epitomizes
how life in Nicaragua’s barrios revolve around this institution…the household
is where the stream starts, is sustained and also eventually ends’ S. Ekern, Street
power: Culture and Politics in a Nicaraguan Neighborhood.”
Woman’s
ritual in the home have remained constant even under the most repressive of
cultures, where inside the house may be compromised, Devers writes of the
Muslim households today that recreate ritual outside the house. Located in
external sacred spaces, meetings of women and children join in ”joyful gatherings with food and music away
from Muslim orthodoxy”.
Women
have always found a way to rejoice in time honored feminine rites; from the
table decorated with flowers and candles to the photos of loved ones set beside
memorabilia, we celebrate feminine values outside the sanctified church.(Image:
Dream of Houses)
Devers
writes that archeology has brought to light “Folk Religion” which is feminine,
fluid, personal as opposed to “Book Religion” which fixed, literal,
authoritarian. We can see now the unbroken chain of the simple everyday
practices of women. We can call them sacred acts that are still enacted all
over the world in the sanctuaries of women centered dwellings. (image: The
Return)
House Shrines, Feminine Spaces
and Women’s Alters
The body of the home is a woman;
Within, we build shrines to our
family and ancestors decorating
Constantly changing alters; in the
act of sanctifying.
Archaic houses too contained
The arts of women.
Stones, shells, bones, votives and
clay goddesses were
Placed for prosperity, health and
protection;
Evolving into dwellings with
flowers, candles and
Photos of loved ones with small
objects;
Images to keep, memories to honor;
Purposely and unconsciously evoking
Female divinity honoring spiritual
bridges to
Peace, hearth and womb, with neither
beginning nor end.
Nourishment is at the eternal center
of the house;
Sustenance from the body or hands of
mother and wife.
Clothing and utensils lovingly
crafted or chosen
for their beauty;
With archetypal images passed
through the generations
To connect genetically to our
primordial Mother.
As we continue women’s prayers to
our children,
In every culture, on all days, in so
many ways.
