The form of the Yoni is all around us. It can be found in all kinds of shapes and images; in nature, art, and wherever you allow your imagination free rein. Post some Yonic shapes you’ve seen or intuited.
Here’s one of my favorites:
In central Asia Minor, where the Taurus Mountains edge the Konya Plain, is the Neolithic site of Çatal Hüyük. This was the world’s earliest proto-civilization, dated to 6,500 BC, known as a place of early Goddess worship.
In Turkish, çatal means ‘forked’ or ‘cleft’, and hüyük means ‘mound’. So, appropriately enough, Çatal Hüyük means ‘cleft mound’, and therefore forms a really big Yoni shape on the ground.
OK, fine, Chairman Pow. You knew what I meant anyway.
Come on, Dopers, you know if anyone asked for phallic shapes we’d soon have a long list of them. Phallic is so overly familiar by now it’s pretty well clichéd, and I say enough of that, already. This is an exploration in learning to see in a new way. Once you start paying attention, you can see the Yoni form all around you. Opening up a new consciousness by paying attention helps to open up your perception along with it.
If you have nothing to contribute to the thread, why even post in it? Especially when all you can do is negate the whole idea of it? If you don’t like my thread, leave it alone, and go start your own.
Take a look at the spokes (or the interposing spaces) on the wheels of the Acura CL. The older model (96-99) is more evocative. I used to work in the same office as the guy who designed it. We used to refer to it as the “P-wheel”.
Well, that depends on what your point here is. If you just want to say, “hey, we’ve been trapped in the phallocentric view and held in The Gaze” for far too long" someone will come and say, “hey, Burroughs found 23 anywhere, so what…the human mind is a gigantic pattern matching…you can find anything if you look hard enough.”
That last one may be funny in the context of this conversation.
Being the Straight Dope, and this sort of thing (“you’ll see it if you look for it”) coming up quite often, you should have expected it.
OTOH, you’re not saying that at all, and nobody’s read your response to my post.
When I notice that all my life people have been noticing this shape is phallic, that shape is phallic, etc., etc., but you hardly ever hear about yonic shapes, it makes me wonder why. When something has been overlooked, I take an interest in what has been overlooked, because of the possibility that something is being missed.
OK, what led me to realize that Çatal Hüyük had a Yonic name and form was an article about another archaeological feature from a comparable time depth: **Stonehenge.
Me, I refuse to wear certain seashells because I am afraid of the fertility they may grant on me ;). And my best friend knows of a mountainside that looks like a woman giving birth but I haven’t got the faintest where it is (well, it is somewhere in Western Colorado, but I know that is no help).
Now that is a real scorcher of a headline, and I have to wonder whether someone came up with the “vagina monoliths” thing and then had to go off and invent a story to go under it. I would, if I’d have thought of it.
The Sausage Creature, I take it you refer to cowries. You’re sooo right. Cowries are one of the most ancient Yonic symbols known to humanity. The 16th-century Indian poet Kabir had a sort of Tantric poem about the goddess Maya, “the great Thuggee”, with this line:—
jogi ke jogini hai baithi, raja ke ghara rani
kahu ka ghara hira hai baithi, kahu ke kauri kani
She sits with the yogi as the yogini, in the king’s house she is queen.
She sits as the gem in anyone’s house; she is the hole in anyone’s cowrie.
Cowries have to have holes bored in them to be strung, which is where that strikingly bold Yoni metaphor comes from…
As an artist and as a woman, I will tell you that there are a number of women artists who rely very heavily on the yoni as a design element. At a retreat some years ago, I was surrounded by large women in flowing clothes who went on and on and ON AND ON about goddess imagery and the yonic shapes in their work, and went on to further explain that their work was reflective of the great feminine voice of the earth that calls to them through their inner goddesses. When it was my turn to speak, I looked at my very geometric, straight-line, symmetrical designs and said, “I think my inner goddess is a dyke.”
NOT that I do not believe the female form shouldn’t be appreciated and celebrated - I just think for a lot of feminist artists, it has become a huge cliche.
LifeOnWry, yay for you and your dyke art, which I’m sure is brilliant, edgy, and vital. Send me the announcement the next time you do a show. I’m a longtime conoisseur of dyke art myself, going back to Sappho.
But you are an accomplished artist, active in the arts scene, and a trend that has been around for years, long enough to look like a cliché to you, might still be fresh and inspiring to someone encountering it for the first time. The Da Vinci Code was way more successful than other occult mystery thrillers, because it held the magic ingredient: the divine feminine. No amount of scoffing, like “Oh this is soooo 2003, been there, done that” (in a bored, blasé tone of voice) will interfere with the rebirth of Goddess spirituality, which has been growing steadily for about 30 years now and shows no signs of slowing. The two (the latest fashion vs. Goddess rebirth) are mutually incommensurable: fashion trends come and go faster and faster all the time; usually by the time I’ve heard of it, it’s already passé. But tectonic shifts in the religious landscape move in terms of millennia.
I am not actually a dyke, just my inner goddess is (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) You’re right, to me it is cliche and it might not be to younger artists, but it becomes an issue when art is deingrated for NOT being about a celebration of the female form, and trust me on this, there are plenty of women artists who regard work like mine as a betrayal.
What makes it completely comical to me is that the kind of art I do is functional - as was the art of many of the women there. We’re jewelry makers, potters and illustrators, and I just don’t find it necessary for my artwork to scream out my politics. Sometimes, a phallic shape is just a column, sometimes a yonic shape is just a bowl.
LifeOnWry, I have no inclination whatsoever to knock you for making art your own way. I’m for freedom and noncoercion; sometimes I get reminded that not everyone who shares my interests also necessarily shares these values. However, in feminism as I live it, these noncoercive values are totally feminist values to me, which I share with lots of Witches who are helping to undo authoritarianism altogether, not replace one form of authoritarianism with another (or at any rate with that sort of attitude). I know you from your intelligent and interesting posts here, and I say the best art you can make is that art which is true to yourself. I think my feminist Witch friends would back you up on that.
That said, I love Yoni art, and once fought a fierce online cyberwar in defense of Yoni art, with an abusive drunk guy who fancied himself an art expert. He hated anything feminine and preferred art that depicts rape. I am not making this up.
Considering that there are about three billion of them, that shouldn’t be too difficult. And if anything, I’ve been paying them too much damn attention already!
I have a good reason for taking an interest in Yoni art, first of all because of my Shakta religious beliefs. (No, that’s not Shakta Zulu; Shakta refers to the religion of the goddess Shakti.) If you look up “yoni” in the American Heritage Dictionary, the definition reads…
So Yoni art is a legitimate form of religious art. The Dutch artist Alice Buis has done some really lovely examples.
