"When God was a Woman"

At the Chen Ancestral Village in Guangzhou, there is a museum at the side in the Chen Hall of Lineages that shows art and craft works by various members of the Chen Dynasty's ancestral lines.

The Museum Entrance

Absolutely amazing stuff in there, and all made by family. Very talented bunch, the Chens, and those talents clearly go back millennium; like zillions of years. Yes, I know they've only got The Very Best in here in order to impress but damn!, it works; I was so very, very impressed.

Anyway, a lot of the artworks are statues of Deities; ones made by ancestral family members way back in the mists of time, to grace the altars or alcoves of various family homes ...

... there's even one that's nearly 10,000 years old: an ancient and primal Goddess statue, about 18 inches tall and really quite African-looking; like with African or Polynesian tapa-patterns all over the base. I did photograph it but I appear to have merely got an image of the flash on the glass.

And it really knocks me sideways to think that these Deity statues have been serving their god-like "bless our family" function for such a very, very long time. And it also knocks me in the other direction to think that something simply made by a family member could be so completely amazing! Among the Chens, "homespun" is also "world class"! Ooh, that soooo blows me away!

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to share. I need to show you two of these Deities. The first is 6,000 years old while the latter is only 400 years old.

Here's the 6,000 year old one:

The Goddess in Repose

And here's the 400 year old one:

The God Buddha in repose!

Can you see the similarities?

I'm not quite sure yet what to make of this but I suspect it could have something to do with the Deity changing sex in the previous six millennium! And we all already know that, don't we! And if we don't, it means we haven't been reading our Merlin Stone!