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| The Bernera Goddess |
Her home was once the sea (she is carved from the vertebra of a whale). Her expression is as ambiguous as the Mona Lisa’s smile.
The Bernera Goddess is an artefact so mysterious that there’s
almost nothing to say about her. Her provenance is hearsay. Even her name has
come to her as an arbitrary guess.
The gentleman who acquired her for Inverness
Museum was told only that she had been found in an unnamed burial cairn somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, and
that she was cursed. That’s her story in its entirety, with no details left out.
It’s tempting to believe the poor man was the
victim of a hoax. And yet the Bernera Goddess has a striking presence, and a
beauty that transcends the crudeness of her features. If you lean close she may
even whisper something you find you needed to know. She seems wise – or is that
a trick of the museum lighting?
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| My friend Sine in conversation with the Bernera Goddess |
It’s difficult to believe her capable of harbouring a curse, this goddess with the gentle smile. She’s remarkably serene for a cursed object. You have to suspect that the supposed curse was thrown in by the vendor just to swing the sale. But then you never can tell….
Whose hand was it that carved her, and for what
purpose? To her maker what was her significance? Does she even have any significance
at all? It seems unlikely we’ll ever know anything more about her than we know now.
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| The Bernera Goddess's enigmatic smile |
She is a beautiful enigma. The most non-specific of deities. She asks us to believe in nothing, to buy into no mythology. She brings us no scripture or doctrine. She just exists.
In an era of ‘alternative facts’ and fake news, when
information comes at us too fast and from all directions, it can be difficult
to know what to believe, or whether it’s possible to ever really be certain of anything
at all.
Perhaps the counsel of a vague goddess is exactly
what we need, to remind us that our hearts and minds are free. And that we do know
after all what’s right.
