Madonna's controversial crotch shot advertising a Luis Vuitton bag.
"Put it away, granny Madonna - you're too old to be flashing your crotch" admonished the title of an article in the 7/01/2009 issue of the Mirror.co.uk, reflecting similar expressions of disgust by a number of respondents to Madonna's crotch shot for luxury goods maker Luis Vuitton.
Contrary to those expressing disgust at a 50 year old woman displaying her elegantly covered crotch in public, that pose is ancient,has sacred,primordial and even numinous connotations, and is part of a continuity from prehistoric times in various cultures,from Yorubaland,to India and England, about the power of female biology as expressed through the assets Madonna so generously and kindly displays.
The Madonna crotch shot is an archetypal pose that recurs in various cosmologies,in visual and verbal art,ancient and modern,from Africa,to Europe and Asia,where it evokes the correlation of the erotic and the procreative in bringing humanity into being and in sustaining human existence,thereby imaging the cosmic processes through which existence comes into being,ideas evoked in the English Sheela na Gig,the Yoruba Ille,the Hindu Kali,among others.
Ancient Sheela na Gig at Kilpeck,England described by Wikipedia as an example of "figurative carvings of naked women displaying an exaggerated vulva [which ]are found on churches, castles and other buildings, particularly in Ireland and Britain, sometimes together with male figures."
Imagine it.There is a Bini saying that no one sights a vagina and remains unsmiling.As one kneels before the v shaped pudenda,monogramed in a red veil,graciously revealed to us by the representative of the goddess,what does one think before taking advantage of permission to explore the cave of delights?Imagine the sheer ecstasy of anticipation as one visualizes the drops of dew that begin to crystalize on the soft growth pf bush that waits beyond the delicate veil,the doors that flank the passage into the kingdom into which one enters to return a changed person....
Lingam (penis of the god Shiva) in contact with yoni (vagina) of the goddess Shakti, a Hindu Tantric image symbolising the creation and sustenance of the universe through the creative force of which sexuality is an expression.The painting is suffused with symbols that develop this basic idea in complementary directions.The sun and moon evocative of masculine and feminine energies,are inscribed on her breasts,indicating the channels of progression of the kundalini in the human body,the cosmic/physical force unfolding like a snake from its coiled position at the base of the spine.
For Carolyn Hillyer,the space between a woman's legs becomes the Oracle of Nights,the darkness of which is the space of self exploration,a space in which you leave your name behind as you enter, in order to find a new name as you proceed deeper,encountering guardians who embody the journey of humanity in its struggle and seeking; one reaches the end of the cave,understandable as the back of the vaginal wall and returns,tracing one's way back to light with a deepened sense of self,having integrated what one is and what others have also gone through as fellow travelers on the earth,travellers born of the blood and delight of that sacred place.
Vajrayogini,Tibetan Buddhist cosmic spiritual personage in the pose of nakedness symboling essential being devoid of misconceptions.The display of the yoni,the Sanskrit term for the vagina understood as erotic form and sacred space,might suggest points of entry into the understanding of ultimate reality embodied by Vajrayogini.
For Susanne Wenger,that sacred space is evocative of the passage through the primordial density of sacred forest ,in which one is reborn through immersion in elemental forms more ancient than humanity.For Kathy Jones,the circumambulation of Glastonbury Tor is the movement within the lines of the vagina of the goddess whose body is the hill.For Mark Dunn,it embodies as well as symbolises gateways between dimensions,enabling entry to parallel realities in space and time.
Modern Sheela na Gig at Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim, Norway.
Why should Madonna not be seen in relation to such archetypal forms?
The interior of the Arugba gate created by Susanne Wenger and her school at the Osun forest in Nigeria.The interior of the gate,as described by Ulli Beier,is shaped in a manner that suggests the energising life and nurturing concavity of the womb,evoking the rebirth the Arugba symbolises and undergoes as she carries the sacrificial pot of the female orisa-deity, Osun on a ritual procession to the river that is the orisa's material expression.
The Madonna photograph could also be seen as evoking forms of power,erotic and monetary,as suggested by the crotch display,the luxury bag she is promoting,and the underlying correlation of the erotic and the monetary,a correlation often significant to relationships between men and women.
Woman in pose that foregrounds the yoni.The pose resembles or is a yoga pose,meant to limber and energise the body as well as stimulate concentration.The yogini-femaleyogi,might,th
The economic nexus evoked by the Madonna image could be understood as related,though at a distance,to the understanding of existence in terms of the metaphor of exchange in Yoruba and Igbo cosmologies,in which the world is understood as a market place, which we visit for a time to achieve certain goals achieved through exchange of value of one kind or another and return to the world of origins.In that context,therefore,the entire image,in its projection of the convergence of monetary interests and the human self,as focused on the evocative value of Madonna's delightful crotch,suggestive even in middle age,evocative of the meeting of erotic power and the flowering of self through time,becomes an Orisa tradition opon ifa,a template of exchange in which the relationship between being and becoming as dramatized in human activity becomes manifest.
Madonna is selling the delight generated by the taboo value of exposing a part of the body that is private.I like the image but I am not likely to do that myself or encourage anyone to do so.Nor do I think that Madonna is worse off for it,since she has built a personality that is shaped around such self display and is able to have a reasonably balanced life.I would not be able to guess,though,how her children would see this.
My response to this image is therefore contradictory.It is delightful but disturbing in some of its ramifications.It evokes archetypal symbolism,empowering and celebratory of the meaning of human biology but it is also not something one would readily do.
The Vagina of the Chameleon, a gate in the sculptural and architectural complex created by Susanne Wenger and her school at the Osun forest in Nigeria.The ambulatory penetration of the gate is evocative of cognitive penetration into the levels of meaning embodied by the forest. As the chameleon harmonises with landscape, so the navigator through the forest is encouraged by the forest art to enter into the being of the forest,which itself embodies the cosmos.Ideas of sexuality and the nature of the gate as both dividing and unifying space, evokes ideas of transformation,spatial and psychological liminality, ontological mediation and the convergence of cosmic and terrestrial wisdom in the context of spatial navigation as actualised in moving through the animistic space of the Osun forest, itself embodying the cosmos.
Opon Ifa,divination tray from the Orisa tradition Ifa system.The centre of the tray,as the space where divinatory transactions are initiated,is a space of becoming,a yoni-womb-space,to adapt Soyinka,where new understanding and new possibilities of experience emerge.
Ifa divination tray held aloft by a woman backing a baby and kneeling.The kneeling poisition,the chilbearing position in tradtional Yoruba society and the baby she carries, evokes the connection between the feminine principle,the maternal possiblities of women as embodying a privilged expression of ase,the cosmic force that enables being and becoming and Ifa,who,though Odu,the feminine pole of Ifa,embodies that feminine force.
