The Eyes of the Goddess: The Secret of Red Catherine

It all starts with this painting: Caterina Rossa  (Red Catherine) painted by the Neapolitan master Giovanni Ricca, probably around 1630. I saw it in Naples, a few months ago, and Caterina has been lingering in my mind ever since.

Now, when something makes this effect on you, it means that there is some meaning that you can't catch exactly, but it is there. So, I set Caterina's face as the screen background of my PC and I kept looking at it every day. I knew that, at some moment, Caterina would speak to me and tell me her secret. 

And she did. In part, the dark/white dichotomy of her face immediately hinted at the Moon Goddess. But there was more, it was not just a dark/white face that was staring at me. Penetrating that secret took longer, but I think that now I have it, although maybe not completely, yet. But something went through. 

The flash came a few days ago when I was visiting a museum that exhibited some medieval Madonnas. I looked at them, and the face of Red Catherina flashed in my mind; why that? And then I had it: the elongated eyes; a typical feature of Medieval Madonnas. Look at this one by Giotto. (ca. 1320, National Gallery, Washington D.C.) 

Not all Madonnas painted by Giotto have these elongated eyes, but several do and, in general, you can often find this kind of eyes in many Medieval paintings. Note also how  that these slant eyes are typical of female figures: male figures of saints and prophets normally have round eyes. 

It may well be that Giovanni Ricca was inspired by Giotto or by some other Medieval image when he painted her wife as such a richly symbolic figure. Yet, that leaves a question open. Why those elongated eyes in Medieval Art? Well, it turns out that they are a characteristic of Byzantine art, too, the main source of inspiration for Medieval Art. Also there, not all Madonnas have elongated eyes, but several do. Here is, as an example, the Theotokos of Vladimir, the much venerated Vladimirskaya, created by a byzantine medieval painter. 

So, there is a thread from Ricca, to Giotto, to the unknown author of the Vladimirskaya. But where is the thread leading us to? I toured ancient Roman and Greek art, but I didn't really find faces with elongated eyes. But, if we go further back, to Etruscan art, well, there is something. Here is the sarcophagus of the spouses, (Villa Giulia, Rome)

Look at how the woman has elongated, nearly elvish eyes. Also, the man has somewhat elongated eyes, but much less. Did that Etruscan guy marry a girl from China? Not very likely. That's not supposed to be a realistic portrait; it is an iconographic convention that had some meaning for the ancient Etruscans, although nowadays it escapes us. And here, too, women have elongated eyes, but not men.  

If we keep going backward in time, we may get to something even more interesting: here is the Venus or Lady of Brassempouy, the Lady in the Hood, from Aquitaine, is a fragmentary figurine made from a tusk or mammoth ivory from the Upper Palaeolithic and about 25,000 years old, possibly the earliest representation of a human face we have.

Did the people of 25,000 years ago have the epicanthic fold that we often define as "slant eyes"? Perhaps. They lived during an ice age and the epicanthic fold is supposed to be an adaptation to cold wind and snow. So, could it be that when Giovanni Ricca painted Red Catherine he was influenced by an iconographic element that originated during the last ice age? Maybe; but I think there is more. Much more. 

Now, take a look at this, one of the female figurines found in Ubaid, in Mesopotamia, that go back to 7000 years ago. 

Now, these are slant eyes! And if you look at the few male figurines found in Ubaid, they have different eyes, not round, but not so elongated, either. So, the conclusion is that the Goddess has slant eyes because those are the eyes of a snake. The goddess is a snake.

What that means still escapes me, but it casts the Biblical legend of Eden in a completely different light. Eve and the serpent, actually, were the same person. It was the Moon Goddess that disappeared from human consciousness for millennia, but that somehow resurfaced in the face of a Neapolitan woman named "Caterina Rossa" who lived during the 17th century and who was so splendidly painted by her husband, Giovanni Ricca. 

The liminal barrier of literacy: peering into the neolithic abyss

One of the lizard-woman statuettes found in the Al Ubaid archaeological site in Iraq. They date to about 7000 years ago and their meaning remains unknown. 

With her novel "Memoirs of Hadrian,"  the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar tried to bring back to life the mind and the personality of a Roman Emperor who had lived nearly two thousand years before her. She succeeded, within some limits, and reading her book we have the sensation to be there, to be talking with the ancient emperor, to see the world around him with his eyes.

But Hadrian, as ancient as he was, is still comfortably on this side of the liminal border of literacy, the barrier that separates the section of history for which we have written documents and the other side, the illiterate one, that vast span of time that goes from the earliest written documents all the way to the great barrier of ice of the Pleistocene. The ice melted down some 10,000 years ago, to leave our ancestors to gaze on a new world, appearing in front of their eyes: a fertile land that had emerged from under the great glaciers.

That was the start of the period we call the Holocene, and it meant at least six thousand years of human life on earth without any written records having arrived to us. Thousands of years of life, of songs, of poems, of myths, of loves, of hates, of battles and more. All disappeared, collapsed in that mythologized universe of Gods and Heroes that the Australian natives call "dreamtime". Of these thousands of years, there remain for us only dreams. 

But perhaps the task of interpreting that ancient dream is not beyond our means. The song that Sirens sang, it is said, it is not beyond all conjecture. The same is true for the attempt to reconstruct at least something of those ancient times, the times before literature.

One way to peer into those far away times is to look at the  earliest literature we have. Back to the third millennium BCE, we can see the slow development of cuneiform writing in the valley that we call Mesopotamia. Starting with lists of items defined by simple ideograms, cuneiform slowly developed into a fully fledged writing system; a way to record human thoughts, hopes, fears, and dreams. And able to write down the poems that, once, were only sung and recited.

The earliest "modern" literature we have are probably the poems written by the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, going back to some moment in the second half of the third millennium BCE. It is a curious quirk of history that not only her name and many of her poems have survived all the way to our time. But we even have a portrait of her; perhaps a realistic one.

From what she wrote on clay so many centuries ago, Enheduanna comes forth to us; a human being like us. In the lines of her "Nin Me Sara" ("Lady of many virtues"), we recognize ourselves. We recognize our awe in front of the universe, the mystery that surrounds us and, at times, the desperation of being

nothing in front of it. When Enheduanna writes her prayer to her beloved Goddess, Inanna, she says, "If I am yours, why do you slay me?" It is like if we were seeing her in front of us, in flesh and bones, summoned by that mysterious spell we call "poetry".

If Enheduanna is still on our side, on the side of the literate world in which we comfortably stay, Inanna is a creature that has jumped over the barrier, but still carries with her plenty of baggage from an earlier age. From Enheduanna's poems, we can get glimpses of this earlier world, remote for her as it is for us. In the translation by Betty De Shong Meador, we read how Inanna wears "the robes of the old, old gods," before going forth to battle her enemies. This Inanna has nothing of the gentle bride of the shepherd Dumuzi, one of her later aspects. She is a terrible creature that destroys everything she faces, demolishing entire mountains with her mace. An elemental divinity, shrieking in the sky. How was she seen by those who worshipped the "old, old Gods?"

Beyond Enheduanna, crossing the liminal literacy barrier, we have only what archaeology has been able to dig out of lost cities and villages. And it is a strange world. A world of images that look alien to us. Think of the snake-women of Ubaid; think of the curious "eye idols" found in Mesopotamia. What should we think of the mouth-less "Urfa Man", perhaps the oldest human shaped piece of statuary ever found? Think of the Neolithic city of Catal Huyuk; a city where the dead were buried right under the floor of dwellings, sometimes under the beds of the living.

What kind of world was that? How did these people think? What did they think? According to Marija Gimbutas they were a peaceful and egalitarian society, dedicated to the cult of the Mother Goddess. Julian Jaynes has seen not completely conscious, hallucinated people who were really "hearing" the voices of the gods in the form of their statuary. Lewis Williams and Pearce see Neolithic art as the result of "Altered States of Consciousness."

Many others have tried to project themselves into the mind of persons living before the liminal barrier of literacy. Did they succeed? Most likely, we will never know. And, yet, these thoughts tell us of at least one thing: the infinite variety and fascination of the human mind, in history and all over the world. In a sense, they are all an enlarged exploration of Terence's line that "nothing human is alien to me."

The power of the snake god

The statuary pieces recovered from Ubaid, in Mesopotamia, are among the oldest known. And, surely, among the strangest. It is nearly impossible for us to understand what led these ancient Mesopotamians to represent snake headed women, with such prominent keloid scars on their shoulders. The only thing we can say is that they are part of the human fascination for snakes - creatures which have been the object of cult from the earliest times of human history. 

Perhaps Rudyard Kipling is the modern writer who best caught the human fascination with snakes. He did so in the story "Kaa Hunting", part of the "Jungle Book". It is a fabulous story, rich in symbols and allegories; not the least interesting one is the characterization of the "Bandar-Log", monkeys of the forest, a very transparent characterization of human beings. Here, Kipling describes how the great Python, Kaa, hunts the Bandar-log who have kidnapped Mowgli. It is a story that carries a feeling of the remote ages of our early ancestors who felt the fascination of the creatures of the forest and of the snake, the most alien and terrifying of them.


The moon was sinking behind the hills and the lines of trembling monkeys huddled together on the walls and battlements looked like ragged shaky fringes of things. Baloo went down to the tank for a drink and Bagheera began to put his fur in order, as Kaa glided out into the center of the terrace and brought his jaws together with a ringing snap that drew all the monkeys’ eyes upon him.

“The moon sets,” he said. “Is there yet light enough to see?”

From the walls came a moan like the wind in the tree-tops– “We see, O Kaa.”

“Good. Begins now the dance–the Dance of the Hunger of Kaa. Sit still and watch.”

He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right to left. Then he began making loops and figures of eight with his body, and soft, oozy triangles that melted into squares and five-sided figures, and coiled mounds, never resting, never hurrying, and never stopping his low humming song. It grew darker and darker, till at last the dragging, shifting coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales.

Baloo and Bagheera stood still as stone, growling in their throats, their neck hair bristling, and Mowgli watched and wondered.

“Bandar-log,” said the voice of Kaa at last, “can ye stir foot or hand without my order? Speak!”

“Without thy order we cannot stir foot or hand, O Kaa!”

“Good! Come all one pace nearer to me.”

The lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly, and Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with them.

“Nearer!” hissed Kaa, and they all moved again.

Mowgli laid his hands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them away, and the two great beasts started as though they had been waked from a dream.

“Keep thy hand on my shoulder,” Bagheera whispered. “Keep it there, or I must go back–must go back to Kaa. Aah!”

“It is only old Kaa making circles on the dust,” said Mowgli. “Let us go.” And the three slipped off through a gap in the walls to the jungle.

“Whoof!” said Baloo, when he stood under the still trees again. “Never more will I make an ally of Kaa,” and he shook himself all over.

“He knows more than we,” said Bagheera, trembling. “In a little time, had I stayed, I should have walked down his throat.”

“Many will walk by that road before the moon rises again," said Baloo. “He will have good hunting–after his own fashion.”