Wet black earth, green sprouts, reaching reeds clatter, and feathers hush a child's cry.

Bird Goddess 22" x 26" acrylics on canvas

This goddess does not have any direct descendant in the Olympian pantheon, or any other. There are no myths which we can point to unequivocably as hers. She was apparently worshipped by pre-literate peoples of southeast and central Europe during the Neolithic. Her numerous images are described in The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas, always inscribed or painted with water signs such as zig-zags, meanders and flowing streams. She does have descendants, but they are refracted and scattered by the discontinuity of the Indo-European invasions. One must, I think, be in an Orphic myth. Nux, meaning Night in ancient Greek, was a goose or swan. Mate-less, she laid an egg. When it hatched, half the shell became the Earth, half the Sky, and Eros flew out of the middle. The waterbird as World Mother. Why a Swan-Mother? Probably, as Gimbutas says, because of the swan's migrations, always returning in the Spring, when nature is about to explode with renewed life, and because of its association with water, the source of life.