Great Goddess Research Articles

Античные изобразительные и письменные источники в решении проблемы интерпретации памятников искусства доисторической Европы

European cultures of the Neolithic and Copper Age dating back to the 7th–3rd millennia BC present a huge array of art objects, first of all of various forms of small clay sculpture (figurines, miniature models of houses etc.). The idea of connecting the majority of these finds with cults of fertility and the “Great Goddess”, which was confirmed in the 20th century, ought to be rethought. Analysis of antique, particularly Roman material gives close structural analogues to European statuettes of the Neolithic Age. In extant texts groups of gods associated with home and family are mentioned: Genii Familiae, Lares Familiares et Compitales, Penates. Related to them household cults originate from worshipping family or community ancestors. Some features of Lares’ and Penates’ cult and its iconography give grounds to draw a parallel with certain groups of early agriculturalist statuettes, which can be interpreted as images connected with ancestors’ cult. The study of the Bronze Age plastic (III–II millennia BC) also meets important problems. Further studies in the designated area would allow us to reach a new level of interpretation, making the contents of European prehistoric art clear and disclosed.

Les multiples visages de la Grande Déesse à Kition. 1000 ans d’images (XIVe-IVe s. avant J.-C.)

In her pioneer work of 1977, JK assembled the evidence for the existence of the cult of a female divine entity, so called Great Goddess, as seen in the artifacts of everyday life and the imagery depicted on these objects. Our paper, informed by a new understanding of cultural and political regional identity, takes the case of the coroplastic production in the area of Kition, from the Late Cypriote period to the Hellenistic times, in a survey of the historical and archaeological continuity over the longue durée, compatible with the integration of outside influences and new trends or techniques. Over this long period of time, the many different female terra cotta figurines from Kition give their many faces to the local concept of the Great Goddess.

A NEW ANALYSIS OF THE GENDER ATTRIBUTION OF THE “GREAT GODDESS” OF TEOTIHUACAN

AbstractThis study explores the identification and gender attribution of the “Great Goddess” of Teotihuacan through re-examining what purportedly constitutes feminine and masculine in these representations. Recent efforts to reattribute this deity's gender have not offered satisfactory re-interpretations, but instead reify a binary model of Western ideas of gender. Transcending this binary model, I propose that one of the key figures identified as female—the central figure from the Tepantitla mural at Teotihuacan—can better be said to show characteristics of a mixed gender, a tradition for which there is significant precedence in the Americas.

Une tête féminine archaïque en terre cuite de Yialia (district de Paphos)

The terracotta female head presented here in honour of Jacqueline Karageorghis was found in Yialia, close to Polis Chrysochous, ancient Marion/ Arsinoe, where I excavated a sanctuary of a female divinity, apparently dedicated to the Great Goddess of the island. The head belongs to a medium size terracotta statue and can be dated stylistically to the late 7th/ early 6th century BC, which is the earliest phase in this cult place. The study of that figure, its manufacture and style, aims to contribute to filling the gap that exists in our knowledge concerning terracotta production and iconography in that particular area and to reopen the question on local styles and female figure representations in the west of the island.

THE PRACTICE OF BIRD HUNTING IN THE AEGEAN OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM BC: AN INVESTIGATION

Among the hunting scenes that the Aegean iconography of the second millennium bc offers us, representations related to bird hunting seem to be absent. Newer information has emerged, however, from the restoration of the frescoes from Xeste 3 in the Late Cycladic I / Late Minoan IA settlement of Akrotiri on Thera. On the first floor of Xeste 3, a community sanctuary whose function has been connected with initiation rites, the Great Goddess of Nature (the Potnia) was depicted appearing among young crocus gatherers, possibly during a religious festival related to the regeneration of nature. Two pairs of mature women with sumptuous dress and elaborate jewellery, carrying lilies, wild roses and crocuses as offerings to the Goddess, were rendered on the walls of a corridor that led into the room where the seated Potnia is located. Among the women in the corridor is one holding a sheaf of white lilies and bearing a net pattern with small blue birds on her upper arms. The net has been viewed as a bodice with embroidered miniature swallows. However, specific details of the net pattern indicate the depiction of a real net with captured small, possibly migratory, birds, to be offered to the Potnia. The subject of trapping birds with a net perhaps refers to a ritual act that would have taken place during an autumn or spring festival, given that the trapping of migratory birds takes place during these two transitional seasons. The particular importance and symbolic value of the subject, which enriches the Aegean sacred iconography, is also suggested by the representation of a net with a captured bird on a Late Minoan IB sealing from Agia Triada, which comes from the bezel of a signet ring, apparently made of gold, as well as the rendering of what is possibly a net on the back of a Late Minoan IIIA2 clay male figurine holding a bird, found on the bench in the Shrine of the Double Axes in Knossos.

Madonna, Whore: Mary’s Sexuality in the N-Town Plays

The English compilation of biblical pageants that we call N-Town Plays comes from a time and place of intense Marian devotion; cult of Virgin dominated late medieval East Anglia, England's Nazareth. (1) N-Town mirrors East Anglia's veneration of Virgin: compilation includes many more Marian pageants than York, Chester, or Towneley cycles, including two episodes from Life of Virgin unique in European medieval dramatic tradition. (2) steals show: arc of Jesus' lifetime nestles inside larger dramatic frame of Virgin's progress from her Immaculate Conception and birth to her death and Assumption--just as late medieval vierge ouvrante (or cupboard Madonna) opens to reveal, inside womb of Great Goddess, a tiny Trinity. (3) Furthermore, N-Town has Jesus submit to his mother's authority, vowing: I shal yow folwe with obedience ... And owe to do yow hygh reverence (21.274-76). God Father and Holy Spirit follow suit: Dominus, three-personed God, tells Mary, Yow to worchepe, moder, it likyth hoi Trinyte (41.523). N-Town might very well represent zenith of late medieval English Mariolatry. Yet despite this zealous Marian devotion, N-Town Plays have long been infamous for their shockingly disrespectful treatment of Virgin. Detractors accuse of being a promiscuous adulteress: a scowte, quene, and bolde bysmare (14.182, 14.392, 14.298). Skeptics subject her to round after round of trials of virginity, including an onstage postpartum gynecological exam (15.218-21; 15.246-53). Most disturbingly of all, N-Town appears to play these insults and slanders for laughs. As A. P. Rossiter put it in 1950, Mary's persecutors inspire indignation and fear, and yet they are funny. (4) In other words, N-Town seems to invite reader to laugh at Virgin Mary. Nonetheless, in his influential 1966 monograph on The Play Called Corpus Christi, V. A. Kolve flat-out denied this possibility: the audience never laughs at [Mary], he argued, because Mary knows she is pure, and so do we. (5) Following Kolve, medieval drama criticism has tended to interpret N-Town's seemingly blasphemous aspersions against Mary's virginity as crude, misogynist, carnal, literal, idolatrous, and malicious errors (6)--arguing that because larger framework of each pageant neatly inverts, trumps, and conquers these slurs by ultimately proving Mary's chastity, it is responsibility of good reader to carry out this hermeneutic process of inversion as errors unfold. (7) As David Bevington puts it, God gets the last laugh--and, thanks to criticism's eschatological allegorizing, every laugh. (8) In other words, we are not supposed to take N-Town's dirty jokes about seriously, and we are certainly not supposed to laugh at them. Yet rather than simply rebounding off to strike and discredit her detractors, N-Town's seemingly slanderous accusations resonate with positive theological significance. When N-Town uses pantomimes, metaphors, exegetical comparisons, and obscene insults to represent as a guilty adulteress in a divine comedy (dallying with Trinity, angels, and mankind in kaleidoscopic combinations), this is not necessarily or exclusively insulting. That is understood to be an irresolvable paradox, both virgin and mother, is so well known that it is almost not worth repeating. In a late medieval context, she is both virgin and mother and Madonna and whore. Mary's promiscuity has hermeneutic power to symbolize her marriage to Trinity, her redemption of Eve's fall, her supersession (or cuckolding) of Judaism, and her advocacy for indiscriminate mercy--all staples of late medieval Mariology, a theological system that enables N-Town's audacious and exuberant spin on good news (euangelion, glad tidings, gospel). In N-Town's Joseph's Doubt, Joseph explicitly and extensively accuses of adultery. …

Savitri, the Unshackled Shakti: Goddess Identification, Violence and the Limits of Cultural Subversion of Widows in Varanasi

In Hindu cosmology and life-worlds, women are described as being Shaktis, personifications of cosmic feminine power or shakti. However, the shakti of Hindu widows of all ages, because it is no longer directed into reproduction, is feared as being rampant, likely to incur disgrace, polluting and dangerous. Hence, widows, deemed culpable of having failed in their primary wifely duty of protecting and preserving the health and lives of their husbands, are often ill-treated in an attempt to weaken and disarm the reservoir of power that they continue to embody. This article focuses on a case study of a young widow, Savitri, who strove to support her children and maintain her self-regard in the face of frequently-violent hostility from her neighbours due to her creative yet subversive circumvention of the religio-cultural prescriptions and proscriptions her widow status demanded. The article explores social and psychological processes through which identification with the great Hindu goddess, Mahadevi, might enable marginalised widows to sustain the self-experience of being imbued with power—shakti—like their goddess is, albeit within the constraints of the wider community.

Mountains and Stones in Prehistory of Humanity (Explanation of Wide Spread of Great Goddess Heart-Like Images Worldwide since the Stone Age)

This report is aimed to demonstrate unification of heart-like images of an anthropomorphic face (presumably, the reflection of Great Goddess), noticed by us, on the ancient petroglyphs, stones and mountains as well as on the artifacts of the Stone Age and later times across Eurasia, Africa, Oceania and America. This image/face of Great Goddess has stable and recognizable characteristic features, namely, a triangular cut in the center of a forehead and a triangular low part. This combination has been steadily repeated throughout the time and across different continents, thus proving the hypothesis about migration of the representatives of a unique and powerful ethnos which had an influencing religious cult and who spread the canonical representation of their main divinity on the material artifacts everywhere on their ways. In this article we present not only the early sources of that kind of image—on the mountains, megaliths and stones but also, put forward a statement about the possible initial place where from this image was spread.

The Sacred Almone River of the Appian Way Regional Park in Rome: ancient myths, a ritual link between Rome and Asia Minor and water uses in the modern age

Although the Almone River, which runs for 6 km between the Roman Via Latina and Via Appia, inside the present Appian Way Regional Park, is a short tributary of the Tiber River, it played a crucial role among the cults for protection of the ancient city of Rome: the rite of lavatio (a ritual washing) of the lithic symbol of the Great Mother-Cybele goddess from Pessinus (the present village of Ballihisar, southwest of Ankara, Turkey) in the cold and fast-flowing water of the Almone River. In later times, the Almone River lost its sacrality and its flowing water got a new useful and hydraulic meaning. So it deeply characterised the local area and human settlements, enhancing their artisanal potential, especially in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and in part until the 20th century. The river area has records of water mills and ‘valche’ (from the Longobard word walkan, rolling), i.e. wool-fulling mills. One of the latter (converted into a paper mill in the early 20th century) has been restored and is now used as the headquarters and visitors' centre of the Appian Way Regional Park, of which the Almone is one of the key attractions for its tourist, natural, historical and cultural value.

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

She’s in My House

She’s in My House Translated by Andrew Schelling (bio) prasāde sā diśi diśi ca sā pṛṣṭataḥ sā puraḥ sā paryaṅke sā pathi pathi ca sā tadviyogāturasyahaṃho cetaḥ prakṛtir aparā nāsti me kāpi sā sā sā sā sā sā jagati sakale ko'yam advaitavādaḥ prasāde. in front (or, in the house) sā. she (is) diśi diśi. direction direction (in every) ca. and sā. she pṛṣṭataḥ. behind (west) sā. she puraḥ. in front (east) sā. she paryaṃke. on (my) bed, couch sā. she pathi pathi. path (after) path ca. and sā. she tad-viyoga-āturasya. (bv. cmpd. with me) of this feverish separation from her tat. (pronoun) from her viyoga. separation āturasya. (ātura) sickness, disease haṃho. (excl.) oh, ah cetaḥ. heart prakṛtir. Nature, primal matter aparā. apart from na asti. there is no me. for or of me kā-api. some woman sā sā sā sā sā sā. she she she she she she jagati. in the universe sakale. entire, whole ko'yam. so what (is this) advaita-vādaḥ. creed (vāda) of the Non-dualists [End Page 22] She’s in my houseshe’s west and eastshe trails behind me she goesout aheadshe’s in my bed on pathafter pathwhat a fever—I can’teven see Nature now that she’s left me—just she she she she she sheacross the whole wheeling planet.And Non-dualismthey say is for yogins. The Amaruśataka shows up in at least four versions, differing in what poems they present and in what order. Each version is associated with a region or direction in India. This poem only appears in a Western manuscript. If the entire Amaru collection were not comprised of erotic or love poetry, one could read this as a devotional poem to the Great Goddess. Its language plays off philosophical and religious terms. Prakṛtī (Nature) refers to primal matter or the feminine principle; a-dvaita is a principal school of belief, Non-dualism. Even the complaint at the woman’s (or Goddess’s) distance and the devotee’s obsessive illness, ātura, is completely in line with Śakta or Kālī worship. The poetry of Rāmprasād Sen and Kamalakanta Bhattacharya in Bengal of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rests on a similar edge between praise and complaint, sometimes called nindā-stuti, praise in the form of abusive reproach. The cry sā sā sā sā sā sā is unlike anything else I’ve seen in Sanskrit poetry. Repetition, however, is a standard practice in religious verse, as it is in song traditions. Repetition taken to non-sensical lengths is common to mystical and tantric texts, mantra and dharaṇi. I cannot tell if the poet is being ironic, or feeling devastated, devout, mocking, heartbroken, or is speaking from some extreme state in which all these emotions meet. [End Page 23] Andrew Schelling Andrew Schelling, born in 1953 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., has written, edited, or translated twenty books. Early opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, plus an encounter with India’s texts, set him on a lifelong engagement with Asian literature. He studied Sanskrit at the University of California at Berkeley, and began to translate from its classical poetry tradition around 1978. His first book, Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India, received the Academy of American Poets translation award in 1992, the first time the Academy had honored work done from an Asian language. Schelling’s own poetry and essays emerge from the Southern Rocky Mountain bioregion in which he lives. Recent books of poetry wrangle with the Arapaho language as a way of reading landscape and the natural cycles; they include From the Arapaho Songbook and A Possible Bag. He has edited The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature and Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Spiritual and Erotic Longing (forthcoming from Counterpoint Press). Living on the Front Range of Colorado, he is active on land-use issues and teaches at Naropa University. He also teaches regularly at Deer Park Institute, in...

Ḥamat la Grande

Like other ancient Near Eastern cities, Ḥamat was called rabbah: “the Great one” (Amos 6, 2). This title was also attributed to other cities, to queens of Ugarit and to the great goddess of Byblos : Ba‘alat Gubal. Represented as feminine personifications, towns have been called “Mother”, like in the Greek “Metropolis”, and their suburbs were called “Daughters”. The Semitic concept of the town as a “Lady” became, in the classical period, a constitutive element of the picture of the oriental Tyche as a woman wearing a mural crown. The head of the Amman Tyche is especially pertinent, since this city was called Rabbat-‘Ammon in the Hebrew Bible. A mosaic from Madaba represents three important cities as women wearing the characteristic crown of the Tyche.

Shot in the Dark: Blindness and the Zero Point of Photography

[Beavear] sees from the far side of darkness the lights we hold as we try to find our way about. The lights are not in our hands, but in our longings, which are never extinguished: above all in our longing to be seen from the far side of darkness. -John Berger' I climbed the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacim with the photographer Evgen Bavear, who is blind. The pyramid is rugged, irregular, and precipitous. Bavear taps the base step with his right foot and shrugs off assistance. He grasps the central steel railing, tilts his unseeing eyes to the top, and ascends without stopping. We stand on the basalt blocks of the pyramid's upper platform under a dome of sky and cloud. Bavear is dressed precisely, reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec's posters of singer Aristide Bruant (visualize the Parisian dandy transported from Montmartre to Mesoamerica). He wears pressed pants, a black felt hat, and a dramatic red scarf As always, a small, round, metal-rimmed mirror glints on his lapel. The sighted, he knows, don't simply see. They expect, in return, to be seen. Bavear's eye-like mirror captures our gaze and stares back with perfectly matched intensity. Evgen Bavear was born in 1948 in the small village of Lokavec near Trieste in eastern Slovenia. He earned bachelor's degrees in philosophy and history at the University of Ljubljana and taught geography, moving to Paris at age twenty-six arid completing a master's degree and a doctorate in the Philosophy of Aesthetics from the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne. Since his first significant exhibition in 1989, Narcissus Without a Mirror, Bavear has had over one hundred exhibitions of photography in Europe and beyond. Bavear carries three items with him up the pyramid: a flat rectangular package, a compact digital camera, and an image in the private gallery of his mind. Each photo I create must be perfectly ordered in my head before I shoot. He peels a strand of tape from the long edge of the cardboard package and removes a photograph. More accurately, it is a photograph of a photograph. Bavear had floated an image of a woman in a radiant, rippled stream and rephotographed it. At close range, Bavear frames images by feel. At distances beyond touch, he captures what he desires through the broader angle of view. On occasion, he will direct a sighted person's eyes to confirm his mental visualization. In all cases, he relies on autofocus and autoexposure camera technology and embraces the compositional gifts and marvels inherent in framing blind. In the photograph, sun-splashed water washes over the woman's face. He explains the iconography. The woman is an object of affection, unrequited, but Bavear remains hopethl. The stream is close to the Slovenian village where he was born. He remembers the water's luminous transparency from his childhood, before his two separate eye injuries at age twelve, before the farewell to light, before the doctorate from the Sorbonne, before Paris the City of Light named him the official photographer for its Month of Photography. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But the physical photograph is just a prop. It is required to make the more complex image Bavear has constructed in his mind's eye--a photograph of the photograph within a photograph, set against the iconic backdrop of pyramids and altars. We stand, Bavear knows, on the ceremonial platform of the pyramid of the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan, deity of water, fertility, the earth, and creation. Bavear's ultimate image is driven by the oldest motive. It's an offering to love. He holds up the photograph of the photograph of the woman immersed in the illuminated stream. In the liquid biting blue air of the high valley of central Mexico, he positions it at the pyramid's edge. His camera clicks. What do we make of this photographic hall of mirrors? How do we factor in the poignant fact that its architect will never see his own creation? …

The Predynastic Dancing Egyptian Figurine

Abstract In 1962, Peter Ucko wrote his landmark work, The Interpretation of Prehistoric Anthropomorphic Figurines, challenging and permanently changing the prevailing view of prehistoric figurines as representations of a universal great mother goddess. His work focused on the Predynastic figurines of Egypt, and concluded that there was nothing divine about them. They were probably dolls, ancestor figures, talismanic pregnancy aids, tools for sex instruction and puberty rites, twin substitutes in graves and concubine grave figurines. Since then, this group of figurines has received minimal attention. Using Ucko’s four-stage methodology, this study more closely examines these figurines in the context of Ancient Egyptian culture and religion, with specific attention to the contemporary Sudanese religious beliefs and practices, which may share roots with Predynastic Egyptian culture. This study concludes that some Dynastic religious beliefs and iconography relating to female deities can be recognised in many of these figurines, and can be traced back to prehistoric Nilotic rituals.

Hypostases et gestes religieux de la Grande Déesse identifiés dans l’art anthropomorphe néo-énéolithique du nord du Danube

Religious aspects and gestures of the Great Godess identified in neo-eneolithical plastic art to the north of the Danube. The particularity of ancestral religious gestures can be pointed out not only by analysing the behavioural sequences identified on the occasion of certain individual/ collective rituals but also by examining the archaeological context within which the traces of the cults are well defined. Ritual manipulation of symbols (signs-symbols) in the context of some key moments during the religious processions take into account the communication with the divinity, carried out by means of gestures, words and attitudes, suggesting permanent search for divine energy. The manifestation of the sacred through hierophanies lead to a diversification of behavioural religious gestures, words and movements expressing various forms of communication and communion with the Deity sometimes identified at archaeological level through artistic depictions. The spirituality of Neo-Eneolithic communities was based on "religion of the mother", where the male element, subservient to the great Goddess played a secondary role, which is why it is utilised in the specialised literature by the Goddess mother and her male acolyte syntagm.

The sacred groves of ancient Greece

The sacred groves of ancient Greece

Fluid control: Orchestrating blood flow in the Durgā Pūjā

Tantric rituals are often concerned with the manipulation of life fluids. The Bengali Durgā Pūjā, an annual worship celebration for the Hindu Great Goddess, is an example of an essentially Tantric ritual with orthodox Vedic and Puranic features. Although the overt rationales for the ritual have undergone changes over the centuries, from its martial origins to socio-economic display, the liturgy offers an underlying rationale that reveals its Tantric interests. Ritual features, symbolic elements, and the states and statuses of the actors during the enactment of the Durgā Pūjā demonstrate its concern with orchestrating the flow of female reproductive fluids through a ritual manipulation of the divine feminine. This paper will articulate the most salient of those aspects. Although often overlooked, because of its non-Tantric façade, the Bengali Durga Pūjā points us to a valuable resource for the study of Hindu Śākta Tantrism.

여신 신화와 새로운 상징질서 찾기

Goddess is one of the most powerful symbols that challenges the power of the patriarchal male God, and the effort to resurrect her image parallels Luce Irigaray`s attempt to establish a new symbolic order for female representation. This paper investigates how studies on Goddess are inextricably bound with the questions of maternity and sexuality and argues that, in spite of her gradual suppression, the Paleolithic Great Goddess, or Earth Mother, has remained in our subconscious, her traces being found in figures such as Gaia and the Virgin Mary. Archaeological evidence of the prehistoric Goddess not only helps to free women and artists from a deeply rooted Judeo-Christian ethos that portrays female sexuality as evil, but also inspires them to affirm the female body as a source of pleasure and power. Serving as a muse for the arts, the image of Goddess is reclaimed as sacred iconography, and her revival in our culture lies at the core of an attempt to establish a new symbolic order for women. The paper also attempts at a contemporary reinterpretation of classical mythic goddesses by claiming that goddesses such as Artemis and Athena are representatives of independent and highly educated contemporary women.

An Archetypal Symbol of Water in the Amazon

Archetypal symbols traced on the thousand-year-old art of the moundbuilders of the Marajoara people support the assumption that some sort of ritual honoring of a great goddess took place at the mouth of the Amazon River prior to European colonization. An intriguing figurine, 30 centimeters high, seems to have played a central role in these rituals. The fish-like body of the goddess, covered in red, black, and white spirals, suggests the regenerating process of the waters. A double portal around the vulva is a gateway to undiscovered regions, perhaps associated to life after death, as corroborated by other symbols. Breast-shaped vases found at the same archeological site are covered in images of shoots, leaves, and scrolls in mandala-like symbols. These vases suggest that the cult of the goddess might have included the drinking of her milk, which was made of hallucinogenic plants. The cult of this “Lady of the Waters” may have helped to lessen the psychological hardships of tropical life in the ebb and flow of the tides and the recurrent season of floods, which brought aquatic animals with it. Frogs, snakes, fish, turtles, scorpions, and water birds represented in the ancient pottery were possibly part of the goddess domain. Today the same archetypal manifestation that influenced the prehistorical adaptation is present in the modern Christian devotion to Our Lady of Nazareth. Exploring the native and the Christian cults can help us understand what is missing in today's psychology and guide us to take right action toward water preservation around the world. The symbolic approach of this indigenous art can provide rich soil in which to nourish a sustainable connection with water, flora, and fauna.

Mammai Mataji

The theological and sociological implications associated with the existence (or non-existence) of ancient Great Goddess religions have been hotly debated for more than half a century, even prior the rise of recognizable feminist approaches to Archaeology and Religious Studies. This rare, if not unique, ethnographic account of such a theology as practised today is therefore a significant intervention, hopefully putting some clothes on otherwise naked speculation. The Sorathiya Rabari pastoralists of Saurastra, western India, hold Mammai Mataji as their Godhead. Mammai Dharma (religion) provides their path to salvation and a guide to right action in the world. It is a vital ingredient of Sorathiya Rabari identity and offers a structure for intra-caste political organization. Like most other Hindus, Rabari social values are unambiguously patriarchal, so how this coexists with belief in an omnipotent feminine Divine is explored throughout the article.