The Great Goddess

Essay Griselda Pollock

Article

No. 38 • June 2025

As one of the most influential voices in feminist art history, Holberg Prize-winner Griselda Pollock lends her insights to our Pretty Brilliant issue on Goddesses as a contributing editor. Pollock has transformed the art historical canon and served as ‘a beacon for generations of art and cultural historians’. For See All This, she explores how we can use the term ‘goddess’ to examine the long history of human imagination.

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text: Griselda Pollock

Who are the gods and goddesses that populate the human imagination – not just in myth and legend, but also in many forms of art across the globe, and in popular culture (in the guise of movie stars or pop idols)? Are they simply elevated projections of what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud viewed as the Oedipal – familial – foundations of all subjectivity and indeed of sexuality in relation to our parents? Or are stories and images of all-powerful gods and goddesses projections of a fundamental existential anxiety about our human vulnerability in the face of forces beyond our control, but upon which human life depends?

Is ‘the feminine’ nothing more than the negative counterpart of the potent, lordly masculine, reinforcing sexual polarity as a law of all being? Or does ‘the feminine’ offer us a way to imagine a non-patriarchal alternative to today’s psycho-social order – enabling us to envision less destructive, non-exploitative relations between ourselves and our living world? What, in other words, do the concept and aesthetic articulation of ‘the feminine’ through this concept of ‘the goddess’ help us to understand or even to invent? Can they help us to transform not some mythical realm, but existing social realities and our interdependent relations with others and unknown othernesses?

Current philosophies and artistic practices addressing the precarious and endangered survival of life on the only planet on which (so far as we know) living organisms have evolved, return us to a primary sense of helplessness and awe, while confronting us with the very real emergency caused by human action. Denunciations of the Anthropocene – the present age, in which human arrogance and suprematism are jeopardising life on the planet – are matched by both political and aesthetic realignments with the entangled connectedness between human life and the life of the planet itself and all its living inhabitants, of whatever species or form.

Art has long intersected with these issues of human imaginings, projections, learning and politics, and such issues are all implicated in this question of alliance, dependency, relationality and imagination expressed in myth, art and science. Sometimes this has inspired refigurations of our human selves in images of a celestial family of gods and goddesses. At other times, cultures have sacralised – and hence revered – nature itself and all living things, projecting onto them the reproductive polarities of male and female, or again imagining figurative narratives of battles between gods or goddesses and evil.

We no longer inhabit a mythopoetical world. Today we rely on science and academic research, although some still look fervently to religions for guidance. Where in all this is art and, in particular, art created – in Catherine de Zegher’s important phrase – ‘in, of, and from the feminine’?¹ Why bring together a collection of such contemporary artistic engagements under the sign of ‘the goddess’?

This essay is included in See All This #38. Order a copy here.