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Editor’s note: This article
originally appeared in RSCJ: A Journal of Reflection, Vol. VI,
Winter, 1985, No. 1, pages 135-142. It was written by Madeleine
Sophie Cooney, RSCJ, who was also the editor of the Journal at this
time, and whose erudition and wisdom pervaded both its content and
its organization. Pictures appear as full page illustrations on pages
136 (Mater window at Stuart Country Day School, Princeton, New
Jersey, no photographer noted) and 139 (Mater in the House of St.
John at Ephesus copy by M.M. Nealis, RSCJ (done in 1935) of painting
by Pauline Perdrau, RSCJ (done in 1883); pictures here follow the
article and the color version of Perdrau’s painting was provided
the National RSCJ Archives.
In 1883, nearly forty years after she
completed the fresco of Mater Admirabilis on a corridor wall of the
Trinita dei Monti in Rome, Pauline Perdrau painted another study of
Mary—one much less famous than her earlier work. Though its
aesthetic qualities leave much to be desired, this later Mater, which
is known in the United States chiefly through the copy made by Sister
M.M. Nealis in 1935, rewards careful study and comparison with the
Trinita fresco.
In both works we are faced with the
puzzling paradox of a mediocre painter, a woman who seems to fit
comfortably into the romantically pious atmosphere of the nineteenth
century Church, an apparently childlike and innocent soul untainted
by any critical or historical sense, who was at the same time a
creative artist, integrating, by means of technically poor and quite
amateur work, a complex of related themes.
These universal motifs revolve about
primeval concepts such as mother, matter, material,
maternity, and matrix; about divine, feminine,
prophetic spinners of destiny, such as the Greek fates: Clotho, who
spins the thread of each human life, Lachesis, who determines its
length, and Atropos, who cuts the strand of life at the moment of
deathi;
about Ariadne, whose saving thread led Theseus from the mortal danger
of the labyrinth; about female competition in weaving and embroidery,
such as the contest between Athene, patroness of womanly arts, and
Arachne, who wove such a marvelous tapestry of divine love affairs
that she aroused the jealous ire of the goddess and was turned into a
spider doomed to spin a web from the stuff of her own body; about
Penelope’s weaving and unweaving of a shroud, the obverse of
swaddling bands, since grave wrappings swathe the body destined to be
reborn from the tomb; about the ominous purple carpet of Clytemnestra
and the flaming shirt of Herakles; about the peplos, or newly
woven garment, gift of the maids of Athens, offered annually to
Athene in the Pan-Athenaic procession; about the doomed Lady of
Shalott and her magic web; about the harpweaver in Edna St. Vincent
Millay’s ballad; and about spindles, such as that which wounded
Sleeping Beauty, the Spindle of Necessity in Plato’s Myth of Er,
and the spindles, entwined with maidenhair, offered by the virgins of
Delos to Eileithyia, weaver and midwife, helper of Leto, goddess of
childbirth.
The act of spinning or weaving
represents the temporal and the developing, the incremental and the
cyclic, and is analogous to the growth of the child in the womb. One
wonders whether, in her study of art history, Pauline Perdreau
examined any of the thousands of Byzantine icons of the Annunciation
in which Mary is holding a spindle from which a scarlet thread passes
across her body. The spinning of red thread obviously suggests the
development of the arterial system in embryonic life, especially
when, as in some icons, the unborn infant is dimly seen through his
mother’s flesh. In the Apocrypha, the young Mary is
described as living in the Temple and weaving the Temple veil, and in
the liturgical hymns for the feast of the Sacred Heart, the piercing
of the heart of Jesus is equated with the rending of that veil on
Good Friday. As the author of Hebrews reminds us: “Through the
blood of Jesus we have the right to enter the sanctuary, by a new way
which he has opened for us, a living opening through the curtain,
that is to say, his body.”ii
The “curtain” is, among other things, the veil of the new Holy of
Holies to which generations of mystics have found their way through
the wound made by the lance at that moment the Society of the Sacred
Heart regards as the kairos of its own mystical conception.
A veil, not only a symbol of wrapping,
of hiddenness, and of mystery, is, like the seven veils of Ishtar,
related to the orbits of the planets and the structure of the cosmos,
whose meaning is gradually un-veiled only through time and space and
history. The climactic moment of the Incarnation occurs when God is
veiled in the flesh woven by woman; surely the prime example of
concealment/manifestation.
Many of the Journal’s readers have
been familiar since childhood with the symbolically charged objects
surrounding the young Mater Admirabilis: the distaffiii
and the spindleiv;
the lilyv
of purity, innocence, youthful freshness, suggesting the Immaculate
Conception of this child and the virgin birth of the Child to come;
the book of the Scriptures, source of revelation, including the
Messianic prophecies, surely the subject of this elected young
woman’s profound meditation; the work basket, another example, both
in its woven form and in its contents, of woman’s work of
fashioning from the raw materials of nature fabrics and textures
which protect, enhance, and enrich human life.vi
In the later painting one can observe
the significant changes in the symbolic structure; these
modifications assure us that the artist held a continuing and
consistent view of the archetypal quality of the “woman’s work”
of spinning and weaving.
Mary, looking as young and fresh as in
the Roman fresco, is seated in the house of St. John at Ephesus, in a
courtyard much like the first one. In the background is a chapel with
altar, lamp, a vase of lilies, and a drawn curtain, which gives
access to a little sanctuary. Behind Mater, and out of her reach, are
the distaff and work basket of the earlier picture. She is seated as
before, except that she is in the act of completing an altar cloth
whose finished length is rolled up on a stool before her. In her left
hand she holds a spindle attached to the final thread of the woven
cloth. In her right hand she holds a small pair of scissors, with
which she is cutting that thread. Her head is raised and she looks up
with a joyful air, as if saying, “It is finished.”
The study of this aspect of the Mater
tradition might bring many who have loved the earlier picture, as it
probably brought Pauline Perdrau, full circle. The significant detail
of he Atropos shears marks this work as a commentary on aging,
retirement, diminishment, and death. The young Mater’s work,
interrupted by a moment of profound recollection, could be
interpreted as the spinning of the thread to be woven into the Temple
veil, a symbolic pre-enactment of the spinning and weaving of the
body, including the heart, of Jesus. The aged mary, instead, fashions
an altar cloth for the infant church. The light, rather than the dawn
of the Roman fresco, whose rosy flush presages the coming of the Sun
of Justice, is the sanctuary lamp denoting the Eucharistic presence.
There could hardly be a clearer indication that the little Madonna of
the Lily of Pauline’s noviceship days has become the fully mature
Mother of the Church and is involved in the weaving of salvation
history.
Overlook the obvious confusion
concerning the actual processes of spinning, weaving, and sewing. The
painter ws not interested in technical details, or perhaps had not
the artistic skill to portray them. What she very obviously achieved
is a contrast between the young Mater and the old; between the
student of the Hebrew Bible, looking forward to the coming of the
Messiah, and the contemplative before the sacramental presence of the
Lord, engaged in work related to the liturgical life of the growing
Church. The pious fantasy, as in the case of the imaginative flights
of Ste. Therese of Lisieux, is decked out in contemporary garb but
reflects an authentic and ancient mystical tradition. Every
revelation has a veil in the middle of it, and the contemplative
spins her own fabrics and fabrications, all of which, of course,
partake of the nature of the veil of Maya—the illusion and
distortion present in all phenomena and in all interpretations of
phenomena.
Are the two paintings of Mater really
“about” these themes? Did Pauline Perdrau know the Greek Orthodox
tradition concerning the Annunciation scene? Had she read in myth
about the shears of Atropos? Was she acquainted with all the feminine
aspects of spinning and weaving?vii
It is difficult, if not impossible, to know whether her use of
symbolic motifs in the Mater paintings was studied or wholly
intuitive, a result of her imagination’s being closely in touch
with the anima mundi. But whether Pauline was conscious of the
total content of her pictures is not really important. What is of
consequence is that members of the Society of the Sacred Heart, of
whose rich tradition these paintings are a part, should understand
for themselves and share with others the meanings which Pauline
Perdrau’s legacy yields to reflection, study, and prayer.
i
The Roman parcae were also three, as were the Teutonic Norns who
appear weaving history and destiny in Wagner’s Ring of the
Nibelungen.
iii
Mary’s distaff, with its crown of pure wool (the golden Fleece of
the Lamb who was slain), is related to many other forms of the
cosmic or archetypal tree, such as the ladder of Jacob, the mystic
vine, the sacred mountain (e.g., Fuji and Thabor), the ladder of
perfection, the tree of life, the cross of Jesus.
iv
In shape, the spindle is a mandorla, the oval form used in the great
almond of light encompassing he body of Christ in medieval
iconography. But a mandorla is originally the two intersecting
circles that stand for heaven and earth and for the sacrifice that
renews the generating force of the universe. All spindle shaped
symbols represent this idea of mutual sacrifice and of interaction
between heaven and earth. In The Republic, Plato recounts the Myth
of Er – a description of the cosmos as the Spindle of Necessity, a
mandorla shaped reality with an axis or shaft surrounded by a whorl
consistent of eight concentric spheres. The outermost sphere is the
universe of the fixed stars and the seven inner sheres are those of
the moon and the planets, carried in a rotating motion within the
movement of the whole. This imaginative scheme is related to Dante’s
cosmic vision, beyond and above which he saw the Mystic Rose, a
symbol of fullness and perfection. Both spindle and mandorla are
powerful cosmic images.
v
The lily of Mater is the lilium candidum, the campanulate or
bell-shaped flower which holds a calyx or chalice of golden sepals
surrounded by a corolla or crown of white petals. These protect the
triple pistil, whose heart, in Trinitarian multiples of three,
shelters the life-giving principle of the flower, which has always
been a symbol of the virgo intacta, and is thus related to the
gardenenclosed and the fountain sealed. In the Roman fresco the lily
rises from a vase of blue crystal, like all containers of water, a
primitive symbol of woman’s power to give life—and thus related
to that living fountain appearing throughout the liturgy, the
Scriptures, and the world of poetry and myth.
vi
“The labor of the great material primordial mothers is likened to
the skillful plaiting and weaving which lends articulation,
symmetrical form, and refinement to crude matter.” Myth, Religion,
and Mother Right, Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, translated
from the German by Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series LXXXIV, Princeton
University Press, 1967, p. 56.
vii
The roll of woven linen in the later picture reminds the thoughtful
observer that the horizontal and vertical axes of woven material, as
they meet at right angles, bear the same symbolic significance as
the yin and the yang, the feminine and masculine principles whose
intersection and interaction are the motive power of life and
organic development. The Christian form of this meeting of vertical
and horizontal is, of course, the cross, seen in the warp and weft
of every woven fabric, as well as in the interweave of Mater’s
sewing basket.
Pursuit of these themes leads to the notion of
quaternity, the four directions of space indicated by the arms of
the cross and by the outer limits of a woven fabric; the four
elements; the four seasons; the four living creatures which evolved
into the symbols of the evangelists; the two equinoxes and the two
solstices, with their relationships to the quartet of zodiacal signs
associated with the change of seasons and the four cardinal points;
the intuited shape of things as the mind orders them in its need to
capture in an intelligible pattern the ever-elusive flux. “Quantum
theory forces us to see the universe not as a collection of physical
objects, but rather as a complicated web of relations between the
various parts of a unified whole.” Fritjof Capra, The Tao of
Physics, Shambhala, Boulder, Colorado, 1975, p. 138.
One last suggestion: Related to the themes of
spinning and weaving is the strategy of networking, a typically
feminine device for bringing about needed change in society. Perhaps
networking, with all that it involves in the context of
1985,--social consciousness, concern for others, cooperation,
communication, education, intelligent mustering of all the available
forces for good—is the contemporary form in which women can engage
in the weaving of destiny.
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