Finding Latter Day Goddesses

A Slide Lecture - Meeting Pangaea, Britannia, Lady Liberty and their Sisters

Goddesses of antiquity are well known modern pagans, but there are also powerful and wise female images from the last five hundred years – and these are not well known. This lavishly illustrated slide lecture will bring them to life, and we will meet goddess-like figures from recent centuries Christian Europe. Fleur Shearman will show allegorical paintings, symbolic works, monumental sculptures – a veritable feast for the eyes. We meet Nature and land as ‘Woman’ as shown in maps, engravings and book frontispieces, with female personifications of the earth’s continents and Pangaea. The talk then turns to Britannia, derived from the Roman goddesses of state power, most notably Minerva and Roma herself. Looking at art and writings on Britannia, we are able to see how she was (and is) perceived by British people over the the recent centuries. Lady Liberty is the final ‘goddess’ of the evening. Her origins are found in the reverse types of Roman coinage, where Libertas holds the cap of the freed slave, and she lives in the modern world in New York’s colossal statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. Liberty’s revolutionary headgear, the bonnet rouge, enjoyed a renaissance in the late 18th-century Revolutionary era, as a symbol of that terrifying but exhilarating tide of freedom. The evening promises to open up new perspectives on goddess archetypes in the modern world.

Fleur Shearman has been giving art-historical talks on goddess-related subjects for over twenty years, with essays and articles published in numerous journals and books over the years. She lectures from an inspirational and interdisciplinary perspective at the meeting point between art, history, poetry and myth. She is co-founder of Order of Minerva in the West (the OMO) with artist Stuart Littlejohn and poet and playwright Phillip Clayton-Gore.

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