Great Mother Goddess Research Articles

A STUDY OF FEMALE IMMORTAL IMAGES IN THE "CHAOYUAN XIANZHANG TU"（朝元仙仗图) FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE MYTHIC-ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM

This paper intends to apply the mythic-archetypal critique to study the concept archetypes of human collectives and the archetypes in Taoist literature and mythology corresponding the feminine immortal images in the "Chaoyuan Xianzhang Tu." By means of image and word juxtaposition, the study investigates the emotional impacts of female immortal images on modern audiences as well as their contribution to current feminist movements. Aiming to clarify the several metaphors and underlying logic of the development of Taoist female immortal images as a symbolic system, this study analyses the Song Dynasty Taoist painting "Chaoyuan Xianzhang Tu," based on the mythic-archetypal criticism, attempting to visually reproduce mythological archetype images in the portrayal of characters in the image. The study examines the various metaphors in Taoist imagery related to the mythic-archetypal perspective, forming three hierarchical functions: "Great Mother Goddess- The Queen Mother of the West (王母) - Flowers and Fruits," "Anima-Female Immortal Worship-Female Immortal Head Portrayal," and "Eternal Life-Feathered Being-feathered sleeves," all of which allude to the ideological implications of Taoist female immortal worship. Frequently, the symbolic, artistic, and meaningful aspects of Taoist art surpass the literal intent of the surface. The "myth-archetype" theory can be used to interpret these images, thereby guiding contemporary viewers to obtain insights into themselves through Taoist visual arts and providing a potential solution to death anxiety. Additionally, the interpretation of female immortal images offers a novel possibility: the integration of yin and yang, which eliminates traditional male dominance and the concomitant "one-sided, self-centered" feminism. This perspective is applicable to the development of contemporary feminist theory. Keywords: Taoist painting, female immortal images, mythic-archetypal, feminist movements,

The Great Mother Goddess on the Thracian Coast of Pontos Euxeinos: Forms and Traditions

Abstract This paper focuses on the worship of the Mother Goddess in the Greek colonies on the west coast of the Black Sea from the Archaic to the Roman period. The epigraphic and the archaeological evidence demonstrate the importance of the Milesian colonies in the spread of the cult. The political aspect of the Goddess’s personality is prominent and reminds of her Phrygian position. A Great Goddess very similar to the Phrygian Matar was worshiped in Thrace and on the western shores of the Black Sea before the arrival of the Greeks in 7th century BC. The Greek colonists and the Thracians were able to recognize simultaneously the continuum and the distinction in the forms and characteristics of their respective Great Goddess.

News from the Muse: The Muse of Free Women

On June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court hit the women of America with a gut-punch in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe vs. Wade. This paper is a response to that ruling, which essentially decrees that women have no constitutional right to make personal decisions about their own bodies. The angry ghosts of women who died in back alley abortions howled in America’s soul. The Muse of Free Women went on retreat. Those who have taken their right to decide whether or not to bear a child for granted saw their world turned upside down. Those who remember the bad old days when abortion was illegal all over America watched the country pivot backwards. The Supreme Court has appropriated our wombs as vessels of the state. But when it comes to the work of tending the fruit of our wombs, those in the so-called “pro-life movement” are nowhere to be found. An underlying misogynist mother hate—an inability to empathize with the reality of women’s lives and bodies—reared its ugly head. Hadn’t we rid ourselves of that painful shadow with the Women’s Liberation of the 1960s and 1970s? Apparently not. The antidote comes in the form of Motherline stories, which flesh out the joys and agonies of being the bearers of new life. Myths about the Great Mother Goddess from many cultures in the world help women see themselves with more complexity and nuance and offer images of power and intelligence beyond the patriarchal paradigm.

〈모아나〉에 나타난 여성 영웅 서사 구조와 어머니 여신 원형(原型)의 양가성

This study examines the Disney animation <Moana>(2016) as 9 stages of a female hero narrative model based on the ancient Sumerian Inanna goddess archetype, and analyzes the ambivalence of the Great Mother Goddess archetype. Moana dreams of sailing far away from the rules of the tribe, and wants to go out to sea like the her ancestors who were sailors. In the course of her quest to return the heart of Te Fiti, goddess of creation and life, with the aid of her mother goddess. With the help of the Mother Goddess, Moana sets out on an adventure to return the heart of Te Fiti, the goddess of creation and life. In the process, she takes on the lead role as a pure warrior and navigator, although she is helped by the male hero Maui. In the narrative of <Moana>, 9 stages of a female heroic narrative are implemented based on the myth of the descent of the goddess Inanna. In <Moana>, the goddess Te Fiti, the lava monster Te Kā, and the ‘sea’ show the ambivalence of the great mother goddess archetype. Moana is the mediator who unites and reconciles the ambivalence of the great goddess. She is also a mythical female hero who sets the world order right by restoring her original identity overturned by masculinity.

EVOLUTION OF STRUCTURAL CONCEPTUAL SIGNS OF THE CROWN IN THE XX–XXI CENTURIES

The purpose of the article is to describe the conceptual signs of the crown borrowed concept of the XX–XXI centuries period.
 Objectives of the article: 1. Determine the list of conceptual signs of the crown concept in a time period; 2. To correlate the motivating signs and conceptual signs of the period XVII–XIX of this concept with the highlighted conceptual ones of the new period.
 The relevance of the work lies in understanding the role of borrowed concepts that have entered Russian linguoculture at different stages of language development.
 The research material. Eleven explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language of the period of the XX–XXI centuries became the material of the research.
 The main research methods include descriptive, conceptual, interpretive, component analysis of dictionary definitions.
 Analysis of dictionary entries of the XX–XXI period centuries made it possible to identify 55 conceptual signs of the crown concept: ‘theotokos’, ‘crown’, ‘wreath’, ‘upper part / surface’, ‘sovereign person’, ‘power’, ‘outer part of the atmosphere of a celestial body (Sun / Earth)’, ‘outer part of a cluster of low stellar density’, ‘higher clergy’, ‘head’, ‘(newest) state / country’, ‘state’, ‘sovereign / empress: reigning persons’, ‘dignity (county, baronial, princely, noble)’, ‘precious’, ‘women’s headband’, ‘title (world champion)’, ‘sign’, ‘for merit’, ‘toothed hoop / tiara / hat’, ‘image’, ‘imperial’, ‘(state) treasury’, ‘rim (arched at the crown)’, ‘designation’, ‘of gold’, ‘of metal’, ‘of silver’, ‘royal’, ‘kingdom’, ‘edge’, ‘crown’, ‘monarch’, ‘monarchical / royal’, ‘on coats of arms / orders’, ‘award’, ‘worn on top’, ‘(visible light) halo (around the sun during an eclipse)’, ‘with precious stones’, ‘with carving’, ‘victory (in sport)’, ‘ruler’, ‘government’, ‘object’, ‘affiliation’, ‘regalia’, ‘symbol’, ‘constellation (Northern crown and Southern crown)’, ‘inflorescence in the form of a crown’, ‘dress’, ‘pattern’, ‘decoration’, ‘royal’, ‘kingdom’, ‘ceremony / wedding to the kingdom’. All motivating signs have passed into the category of conceptual ones, i.e. retained their relevance during the XX–XXI centuries. The conceptual signs of the crown symbolic concept of the XX–XXI centuries period are combined into 13 blocks: 1. Headdress (6 signs); 2. Dignity / title (12 signs); 3. Substance of manufacture (3 signs); 4. Form (4 signs); 5. State (7 signs); 6. Ornament (1 sign); 7. Value (1 sign); 8. Ruler (7 signs); 9. Award (2 signs); 10. Decoration (4 signs); 11. Successor of the Great Mother Goddess (1 sign); 12. Plant (2 signs); 13. Astronomical phenomenon (4 signs).

Pregnant Materialist Natural Law: Bloch and Spartacus’s Priestess of Dionysus

In this article, I explore two neglected works by the twentieth-century Jewish German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left and Natural Law and Human Dignity. Drawing on previous analyses of leftist Aristotelians and natural law, I blend Bloch’s two texts’ concepts of pregnant matter and maternal law into “pregnant materialist natural law.” More precisely, Aristotelian Left articulates a concept of matter as a dynamic, impersonal agential force, ever pregnant with possible forms delivered by artist-midwives, building Bloch’s messianic utopia. And Natural Law resurrects the Stoics’ concept of natural law as drawing on a prehistoric matriarchal utopia, later channeled by earth goddess cults misconstrued by the nineteenth-century German anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen as political matriarchy. I then conclude by linking this pregnant materialist natural law to Dionysus as son of the Great Mother Goddess. Though stigmatized throughout homophobic Western history for his queerness and maternal dependence, Dionysus is also the patron god of Bloch’s hero, the slave revolutionary Spartacus, paramour of a priestess of Dionysus who prophesied his divine mission of liberation.

По следам потомков небесной матери: от мифа к семантике сакрального ландшафта

The article contains a cultural research and is reconstructive by nature. It offers the author’s interpretation of the sanctuary of the early Turkic era (7th—9th centuries), which is part of the archaeological site, the Bozok Medieval Settlement. The Bozok settlement is located on the territory of Kazakhstan’s capital city of Nur-Sultan, on the shores of the Buzykty Lake. The sanctuary is the key asset of the site, which was later on surrounded by the residential and industrial structures of the Bozok settlement (10th—13th centuries) and then, the elite necropolis of the 14th—16th centuries. The author’s interpretation of the sanctuary is centered around the factors of choosing the lake landscape, caused by the cosmological concept of water purity and the connection between the water and the feminine principle. Water as a source of life, resonates with the nature of motherhood, with the image of a swan and refers us to the cult of Umai, the Great Mother Goddess of ancient Turks, the patroness saint of warriors. The name of the BuzyktyLake also has a profound sacred meaning in the Turkic culture. The etymological study of the toponym “Buzykty” reveals its historical depth known from the ancient Turkic era and the complex semantics of meaning that traces its origin to the mythological characters of the Oguz Kagan and the Heavenly Maiden Umai. The uniqueness of the site (planigraphy, human sacrifice), its geocultural landscape, along with the analysis of the limnonym and the swan mythologeme, make it possible to create a hypothetical model of the rituals, which can explain the sanctuary as a site for secret warriors’ rites.

THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE and HANDS ON HIPS MOTIF

Symbols have become the most important tool for the human being’s self-expression from the first cave paintings to architecture. Each symbol has formed with values such as a message, thought and wish. In the memory of almost in every culture, the definition of weaving has been done over concepts such as eternity, immortality and plentifulness, however there is scarcely any data about their starting point. Archetype concept can be used to fill in these data blanks. Archetypes, propounded by the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, modelling the human character and collective unconscious relations, have been efficient in bringing the mythological elements to come in sight. Concepts such as great mother and mother goddess, showing similarity in many geographies, is the biggest example of the mythologies shaped with collective unconscious. Many motifs in weaving involve mythological elements. Therefore, the relation between motif and archetype will provide benefits for defining the output sources of symbols. One of the most important archetypes developed by Jung is the “Mother” archetype. The motif which corresponds to mother archetype is the Hands on Hips in Anatolian weavings. Literature survey has been conducted in this study, emphasizing the relation between one of the symbolic building blocks of Turkish weaving arts; Hands on Hips motif and the mother archetype and as a result of the study, it is surmised that mother archetype has been a precipitating element in motherhood concept in reflecting to the motifs. Key Words: Hands on Hips Motif, Mother Archetype, Weaving, Carl Gustav Jung.

Мифологема Мать-сыра-земля в русской языковой картине мира

The paper presents the study of the mythologeme Mat’-Syra-Zemlya (Damp Mother Earth) as a part of the Russian language picture of the world. Mythologeme is a phenomenon of language consciousness going back to a certain archetype. The authors have revealed that the linguistic consciousness of the Russian language native speakers firmly holds the linguoculturological meanings of the mythologeme under study, with most striking, firmly rooted in the Russian language picture of the world, the differential signs associated with this mythologeme being: ‘person (female)’ (48.5 %), ‘mother’ (26.3 %), ‘goddess’ (17.3 %), ‘surface’ (5.4 %), ‘grave’ (2.5 %). The mythologeme Mat’-Syra-Zemlya combines two differential signs: ‘birth’ and ‘death’. The earth is the birth womb and grave into which a person leaves after death. There is evidence of syncretism of sememes due to the change of religion: the adoption of Christianity when a new ritual practice of funerals came to Russian culture. According to the analysis, the mythologeme Mat’-Syra-Zemlya implements a complex of signs in the Russian linguistic culture, with the prototype being a more ancient mythologeme - Velikaya Boginya Mat’ (the Great Mother Goddess). The study has revealed the following associative meanings related to the mythologeme Mat’-Syra-Zemlya in the Russian linguistic culture: 1. Earthly life in this world; 2. Agricultural activities of man (plowing); 3. Family - earthly and heavenly; 4. Ritual practice (oath, frankincense; handful / pinch of land transported to a new land); 5. Death and funeral; 6. Birth and return to earth.

SEMANTICS ОF THE SACREDNESS ОF THE IMAGE ОF THE GREAT GODDESS IN THE ART ОF PRIMITY

An interdisciplinary study is devoted to the study of the semantics of the imagery of the cult of the female deity in the art of primitiveness. Based on the study of archaeological, historical, culturological sources, the preconditions of the cult of the Great Goddess are revealed, which include the foundations of social organization of people in close connection with the natural environment and the formation of consciousness. Analysis of the iconography of small sculptures of the female figure revealed that the origin and spread of the cult is accompanied by the emergence of a "female deity" in prehistoric and early historical Anatolia. A number of studied iconographies of Anatolian female figures, from the Pre-Neolithic to the middle of the Neolithic, testify to the existence of the cult of the Great Goddess. From there, the cult of the Great Goddess penetrated from the territory of Asia Minor to Greece and Rome, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Central Asia and was worshiped throughout the ancient world. The cult of the Great Goddess was a common feature of matriarchal societies. The goddess manifests herself as a symbol of the terrestrial and cosmic source of the universe. The archetypal image of the Great Mother Goddess is expressed in rituals, ceremonies, art, mythology. The archetype of the mother lives in the imagination of every person and is a symbol of protection, fertility and rebirth. At the same time, people have long been aware of the importance of water to ensure the stable life of society, so the rivers were identified with the female origin, and in India they were called mothers. A woman's natural ability is to give her baby breast milk, and in a semantic sense this image appears as a source of life. Under natural conditions, water nourishes all living things and therefore appears as a source of life for all things on earth. The associative comparison of these two natural images led to the synergy of the semantics of the water element with the mythology of the mother deity. The choice of research strategies to study cultural forms and artistic processes related to the semantics of the image of the Great Goddess, its significance in the mythology of ancient civilizations of the patriarchal deities allowed to find that in the iconography of Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, Egyptian gods Hapi, Nile and The verbal form of the Jewish god El-Shaddai, who later took the form of Jehovah, has features of the female incarnation of the Mother Goddess. Inertially, the function of motherhood remained in the image of the male god for a long time.

Powrót Bogini? Przykłady funkcjonowania postaci Magma Mater w polskiej literaturze popularnej

Artykul „Powrot Bogini? Magna Mater w polskiej literaturze popularnej” podzielony jest na dwie cześci. W pierwszej cześci autorka przywoluje rozwazania zwolennikow i przeciwnikow teorii Wielkiej Bogini Matki. Wedlug wielu historykow religii i antropologow kultury kult zenskiego bostwa, lączony z matriarchatem jako systemem spolecznym byl powszechny w okresie neolitu. Koncepcje Bogini, kojarzoną z pokojową wizją Starej Europy, popularyzowali m.in.: Margaret Murray, Robert Graves, Marija Gimbutas. Psychologicznym kontekstem do jej przyjecia staly sie natomiast prace Carla Gustava Junga (archetyp Wielkiej Matki). Mimo istnienia przeciwnikow religii Magna Mater (w Polsce są to np. Aleksander Bruckner i Maciej Szymkiewicz), idea ta, spopularyzowana przez ruchy feministyczne, stala sie cześcią wyobraźni symbolicznej, ksztaltującej wspolczesną kulture popularną. W drugiej cześci artykulu autorka przedstawia funkcjonowanie postaci Bogini we wspolczesnej polskiej literaturze (glownie literaturze popularnej). Analizuje tworczośc Olgi Tokarczuk, Barbary Srebro, Magdaleny Kubasiewicz, Piotra Patykiewicza, Andrzeja Sapkowskiego, Anny Brzezinskiej. W ich utworach Magna Mater traci swe sakralne znaczenie. O ile Tokarczuk rekonstruuje psychologiczny sens postaci Bogini, o tyle inni autorzy, np. Brzezinska, sprowadzają ją do poziomu „pustego znaku”.

The Festival of Hermes Kriophoros in Tanagra (Boeotia): an anthropological interpretation

The subject to be considered is the festival of Hermes Kriophoros in Tanagra. A brief Pausanias’ reference (9.22.1) contains very few but remarkable details of the celebration as it was held in Late Antiquity. All indications concerning the procedure and the content of the festival inferred from Pausanias’s description are analyzed in combination with the attested characteristics and attributes of Hermes, as well as with the religious symbolism universally attached to the ram, the divine shepherd, and ritual circular movement. The ethnographic evidence for similar rituals is also adduced. It is concluded that the Tanagran festival originated in an ancestral communal ceremony of annual territorial lustration. That ceremony was linked to the increase of solar activity in midspring and therefore also included the parallel magical stimulation of the sun’s course. Gradually, that primitive magic ritual would have been elaborated in a more complex seasonal ceremony of stimulation of the generative solar power of the Great Mother-Goddess with the help of a young male ram-god and was eventually transformed nto a celebration of the sacred marriage between the Great Mother-Goddess and a young beautiful divine shepherd. In the process of the formation of polis, the festival became a more social celebration, which served to secure the city-state’s secure existence under the protection of Hermes Kriophoros.

Ptolemy IV as Gallos

An expertly carved, one-half inch high ring stone without provenance in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, bears a portrait bust clad in effeminate attire, which gives several indications of Alexandrian manufacture. The portrait can be identified with great probability as Ptolemy IV Philopator, dressed as a gallos - a devotee of the Syro-Phrygian Great Mother Goddess, Hera/Cybele. It is known that Ptolemy IV was devoted to that cult, arranging for the orgiastic 'Gallos dance' to be performed at the Alexandrian court and personally assuming the by-name 'Gallos'. The New York bezel must have belonged to the signet ring of a very prestigious individual at the Ptolemaic court.

Goddes in the frog's appearance - spirit of the hearth: Neolithic codes and modern Serbian painters

This paper deals with archetypal female principle and its representations in sculpture and painting from the Neolithic period to modern times. By the intertwining and equating the great mother goddess- mother, model houses and furnaces (which is closely examined by Chausidis) the authors have followed up on existing research and the later periods and individual cultures, including the Christian Middle Ages, and contemporary art. The authors sought to examine through a comparative analysis of the relationship between basic and archetypal motifs and women shape who have appeared over the centuries in the same or partially altered shapes in visual culture, and connection in visual culture with examples from contemporary art in Serbia. Given the complexity of the subject, the authors have chosen some examples throughout history for the purposes of this paper, as well as two contemporary Serbian artists: Mladen Srbinovic and Jugoslav Ocokoljic. The authors identify existing and unchanged relationship between ancient depictions of women as mother with contemporary visual arts, which indicates that the archetypal images of male and female principles have remained unchanged and that the need for their display still present.

Two Knights and a Goddess

Recent biographies of Sir Arthur Evans and histories of his excavations at Knossos have made it clear that Evans’s description of Minoan religion was not solidly based on the material evidence at Knossos. By the time Evans wrote The Palace of Minos he was fully committed to the belief that the Minoans worshipped a single Great Mother Goddess in many guises, along with a subordinate male deity, her son. There are two key questions about Evans’s vision of Minoan religion: first, when did Evans arrive at the conclusion that the Minoans’ principal deity was a goddess? And second, why did he prefer this goddess-centered explanation of the material facts when so many other stories could be told about the religious meaning of the same objects? The most common answers to these questions are that Evans thought Minoan religion was goddess-centered from the time he first began to explore Bronze Age Crete, and that he was drawn to the figure of a Mother Goddess because he lost his own mother when he was only six years old. Both of these suppositions are almost certainly mistaken. Evans did not bring the goddess thesis with him to Crete, and whatever his lingering feelings about his mother’s death, they were not responsible for his conversion to the goddess thesis for Minoan culture. This paper argues that by far the most significant factor in Evans’s creation of the Minoan Goddess was his exposure to the work of Sir James George Frazer, both directly and through the auspices of classicist Jane Ellen Harrison.

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.

Why do first kittens end up down the drain?: An iconic meaning of the lexema cat and litter

In the Slavic folklore, a cat and similar other small animals with soft fur and numerous litters/offspring, represent symbols of a young female, bride woman, female genitals, home and hearth, appearing thus in fertility rituals, connected with food, knitting, weaving, and magic, but they are also associated with female demons, such as 'devour-eaters', 'child and harvest stealers'. All these are the cha­racteristics of the Great Mother Goddess, in her terrifying, chthonic appearance. The origin of the saying 'the first kittens should go down the drain' (should drawn in water) hence should be explained by the existence of the fertility rites, where the first litter of the cult animals was sacrificed to the Goddess in order to ensure future fertility; that is, the litter was thus 'returned' to the fertile water, as a symbol of mother's death. However, a more complete explanation requires ascertaining to an iconic meaning of the lexeme cat and litter which is the subject of the second part of this paper.

Why do first kittens end up down the drain?: An iconic meaning of the lexema cat and litter II

In the Slavic folklore, a cat and similar other small animals with soft fur and numerous litters/offspring, represent symbols of a young female, bride, woman, female genitals, home and hearth, appearing thus in fertility rituals, connected with food, knitting, weaving, and magic, but they are also associated with female demons, such as „devour-eaters“, „child and harvest stealers“. All these are the characteristics of the Great Mother Goddess, in her terrifying, chthonic appearance. This paper points out to a possibility that the lexema cat [mačka in Serbian language] originated from the basis of mat- (in Serbian language: mati, majka, in English language: mom, mother): the motivation basis for the both expression/ word for cat/litter (in Serbian language: mačka/kot) could be connected with a representation of female genitals (womb, in Sebian language: materica), birthing, understood here as “expulsion”, and “unfold” of the large number of offspring. Actually, those are the meanings of the verb

Interpreting the Bucrania of Çatalhöyük: James Mellaart, Dorothy Cameron, and Beyond

ABSTRACTThe bucranium (bull's head and horns) has been recognized as the most prevalent three-dimensional art form found during the excavations of the Neolithic village of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. James Mellaart interpreted it as the symbol of the son and lover of the Great Mother Goddess, worshipped at Çatalhöyük. Extending this interpretation, Dorothy Cameron, friend and colleague of Mellaart, saw the bucranium as a symbol of life and regeneration—essentially a female symbol, representing the divine power of the human female reproductive system. Using archaeological evidence, and interpretations arising from the current excavations at Çatalhöyük, parallel examples from comparative religion, and supportive data from veterinary images, this paper explicates and challenges these theories, extending them into an alternative interpretation of the symbolism of the bucranium.

The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous Paratext

The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous Paratext Patrick Amstutz Translated by Gerald Moore Upon its publication, Le bain de Diane elicited few reactions on the part of criticism. Klossowski's name was still a secret and, despite its note among writers such as Bataille, Beauvoir, Camus, Parain, and Sartre and their public following, the number of readers to have read this fifth work remained confined to those already familiar with Klossow-ski the essayist (Sade mon prochain, Méditations bibliques de Hamann), or the novelist (La vocation suspendue, Roberte, ce soir). The discreet silence that characterized the first reception of Le bain de Diane would last until the end of the seventies, despite a reedition in 1972 by the same publisher. During this time three important moments made Le bain de Diane resurface at the heart of the literary world: first, in fictional form, thanks to a subtle but explicit homage paid by Henri Thomas [Le promontoire]; second, in the form of a penetrating commentary article by Michel Foucault ["La prose d'Actéon"], and finally, at the hands of René Micha and Catherine Backès-Clément, key contributors to the issue that the review L'Arc dedicated to the writer. The reedition of Le bain de Diane by Gallimard1 would significantly relaunch interest in this work which, one comes increasingly to realize, is a major text in the Klossowskian oeuvre: offering a reflection on the image and writing, it was Gilles Quinsat who would open this new period of critical reception. An Uncertain Identity Quinsat emphasizes the "series of 'tableaux' that glazes Le Bain de Diane" in accordance with a "circular" descriptive movement, he says, "from vision to commentary, attributed to the deferral without end of signs, and which feeds the entire work of Pierre Klossowski" [95]. And if he borrows the term "exegesis" from Foucault to describe the genre of the work, he immediately associates it with that of "narrative." A quarter of a century earlier, a commentary in the new Nouvelle revue française had already underlined the "disconcerting" character of Klossowski's book, by accentuating not only the strangeness of its thematic, but also the difficulties posed by the uncertainty of its generic belonging (which is echoed by the absent mention of a paratext): the critic, hesitating, suggested somewhat confusedly a typological kinship with philosophical commentary, theological scholasticism, prose poetry, series of paintings, historical narrative and even the analysis of myths [Amer 144]. In fact, this mythological "reverie," neither an essay nor a narrative, is, from this point of view, a typically Klossowskian [End Page 136] book, as Ian James has more recently reminded us [143]. Le bain de Diane mixes erudite commentary and narrative discourse so well that it entices its commentators into the traps of scholarly, historical, and philological annotation. Yet this would be to forget, as Maurice Blanchot has observed [92–94], that the written oeuvre of Klossowski belongs fully to the field of literature, even more so than to those of philosophy, theology, or psychoanalysis. When it comes to discerning the literariness of this literary object, which the different paratextual and intertextual stakes and levels underline, the principal difficulty consists in not losing oneself in a mythological labyrinth and innumerable variants of the cult of Artemis, which was one of the most significant, oldest, and popular cults of the Greco-Roman era and which plunges into a world on whose complexity historians and philologists have insisted on many occasions. The study of Klossowski's sources could lead one through multiple disciplines (philology, mythography, psychoanalysis, the history of religions, history of art, French literature—all centuries cobbled together, and so on) to overly vast inquiries: the goddess "of a thousand names" assumes a properly vertiginous semiotic richness, and the cult of Artemis, before being linked to that of Apollo, stretches back to time immemorial where, behind Artemis, can be glimpsed the Asiatic figure of a Great Mother Goddess, whose...