Whale
goddess of the sea - innuit culture
she married a bird
her father was angry - killed the bird
she was clinging on to him
and he chopped of her finger
and the turned into wales.
N O T E S
- printed background
- underwater
- frequency sound
- blue whale protector of the seas and fishing boats
- sailors folk law - Aggie has book - 'sea-faring legends' from second hand shop £1...p292
- christian folk law - whale is devil
- native american myths
me: draw & text
agg: turn it into screen print and background
me: photoshop play/edit after
wales symbolism
emotion
creativity
inner truth
wisdom holder
keeper of history
emotional healing and rebirth
The Book of Symbols, Reflections on Archetypal Images; TASCHEN
"Whale is the spirit of the Deep, the creature that mirrors its incomparable size and swallow - as ocean, unconscious, memory, night, womb and underworld. Sometimes, glimpsing in the distance white pearls of briny exhalation, the breaching head and dark flukes, we have thought of the cosmos (be)coming out of the primeval waters. In a constellation of silvery stars in the dark abyss of space we have discerned the swimming shape of Cetus, the Whale, whose astral eye feels like the eye of an intelligence within ourselves that is more than the ego."
"Our ancestors called the whale "dragon", "sea monster", and giant "fish", projections that carried innate fears of how easily existence and reason are swallowed.
In the myth of the Night Sea Journey, the solar hero trapped in the "belly of the whale" harrows hell and overcomes death by finding a way out. With the help of a god of culture he is disgorged, or cuts away the heart of the whale or sets a fire, images of human consciousness severing connection with the matrix of nature.
Tikigaq Inuit whalers portrayed the soul of primal woman and primal whale as one; her igloo was a "whale," its passage of reassembled whalebones an "area of birth, death, danger and initiation"; in some stories "woman and whale are one and the same victim" (Lowenstein, 39). When the men hunted the bow-head whale, their wives remained inert and passive in a form of shamanic male-female magic with which to lure the whale into passively surrendering itself so that its death might reanimate igloo, community and landscape (Lowenstein, 37ff). The Hebrew "Leviathan" at first meant an attribute of the Creator and may have literally referred to the great crocodile, but the word symbollically came to represent an adversary of immense proportions and devilish ferocity, an image adopted and amplified by whalers...
"All the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified... in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down..." wrote Melville in his famous novel."
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