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What is proved by the fact, authenticated though it seems, that women led the early clans who lived by agriculture; that the children they brought into the world belonged to them; that they continued to determine the inherited succession even in later, highly organized kingdoms; that they were the originators of all cults, of taboo and fetish, dance, song, and many early crafts? Doesn’t this harking back to an irretrievable ancient past reveal more clearly than anything else the desperate plight in which women see themselves today? If your first glimpse of the Minoan paintings (of their reconstructions) is a joyful shock, strange to say a shock of recognition: so the Elysian Fields do exist, you knew it all along – nevertheless, they do not lose their enchantment when you learn something more of the circumstances that produced them.
we meet them again in front of the female idols in the Heraklion museum, their almost tender concern for the clay figures of pregnant women and mothers with newborn children at their breasts, seem to have an irrational streak. But I, too, am deeply moved by these little terracotta figurines which are not the image of ideals like the art of classical antiquity but bear all the traces of everyday life, the prints of the fingers which formed them. They convey to me far more powerfully than any Apollo of Belvedere the feeling that at bottom these people who prayed to, or thanked, a goddess for children four or five thousand years ago and more were people just like us. They make me feel that it was they – or rather the thousands of generations before them, who sank away into the darkness of prehistory leaving almost no trace – who began to weave the basic network of human relationships, by which we gradually rose above the necessities of instinct and the almost animal tactics of survival. They began as well to weave that net whose warps still determine our thinking pattern today – and, I believe, the direction of our longings besides.
This picture so stirs the imagination of its discoverers and of countless visitors, not only because it was found later than other early cultures, but because here imagination feeds on man’s deepest layers.
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