Mother Deer.

You can’t really tell yet, but that’s Elen I’m painting, the lost pagan horned goddess of British folklore.
She’s Mama deer, spiritual consort, Shamanic pathfinder of ley lines and a divine fertility being.

That’s quite a bad ass resume, except to say that like most Pagan figures, it wasn’t enough for her Christian brethren, who gave her a historical make over and renamed her St Helena.

Still, her new turn as a latter day Lara Croft, seeker of relics such as the Holy Sepulcher and Christs Cross is fascinating on its own merit. Even if it meant desecrating the Temple of Venus in 333AD (Jesus in Hebrew for anyone who wondered) and relinquishing her female empowerment card, by re-erecting what John Allegro in his book ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ called a ‘Phallic Symbol of ecstatic fertility and Resurrection’.

Its as close to Eve as I’ll get in my series about fallen Eden I suppose.

Having seen both ‘Annihilation’ and ‘Mother’ recently, it struck me that perhaps I’m plundering similar furrow as far as the cultural zeitgeist is concerned. Mankind being the great corrupter and pathogen in the garden and all that. Mother nature made barren by eschatology.  Although I didn’t really like either movie to be honest, and I suspect ‘Mother’ to be more of that directors bitter sentiments on being an ‘artiste’ in Hollywood.

Go tell it to Kubrick, Darren.

If my series, Purgatorium, ended with a piece featuring John Locke pointing the way  like a wise old owl, then Paradiso’s Fall is imbued with the myth of America as his Tabula Rasa.

One of the phrases from Miltons Paradise lost that jumped out at me as a foundation for the series was ‘The mind in it’s own place..can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

So much of our personal Eden’s will always be tainted by expectation.

It’s something to bare in mind as I’m bearing fruit.