‘MEMORIES’ OF MALTA

I sit here listening to the recording made in the Hal Salflieni Hypogeum by Jennifer Berezan, Returning, a haunting hymn to the Great Goddess which echoes from the very womb of the Mother. Across the room sits an unfinished carving of a seated Goddess, a version in stone of my own hymn—both to her and to my body.

In many ways I carry my most potent impressions of the islands of Malta with me in my daily life—in the music I am drawn to, in the carvings I am making, in my relations with my own body.

Though it lies in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Malta is a place of deep earth energy, drawn to the surface by the ancients who built their monuments there some 5,500 years ago. Walking into the great temples, formed in the shape of the body of the Goddess, is like walking into her warm embrace. The experience is beyond words, and unforgettable as the loving arms of your grandmother.

And then there are Her statues—from the fragments of a Goddess, which would have stood 8 feet high, to a tiny Goddess dreaming as she lies on her pallet. All show her in her voluptuous, corpulent beauty. There is something in seeing such a body not only not despised, but honored and revered, that changed my view of my own heaviness in a profound way. Shame cannot survive such an experience unaltered. For the first time I am able to create such a body in three dimensions, and find in it a thing a beauty.

I was also intrigued by the connections some of us could see to the ancient megalithic monuments of the British Isles. The spirals in the mound at Newgrange in Ireland are reflected in the limestone at the Maltese temple of Tarxien. The round shapes of the walls and little altars at the lovely lyrical temple of Mnajdra are echoed in the Neolithic remains called Scara Brae in the Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. In the outer ramparts of the temple known as Ggantija on the sister island of Gozo I could see a Stonehenge with the spaces between the standing stones filled in. All these places carry the seeds of the same deep and powerful energies, as well as portals to the past.

The Hypogeum, a deep and extensive collective tomb carved in limestone like a temple, was its own teaching. Its profound peace spoke of a culture which, unlike our own, had come to terms with death. Clearly burial was in every way a return to the Sacred Mother, who was in every way prepared to receive her children with love.

So I cannot really call them ‘memories’ of Malta. They are experiences that continue to shape my view of the world, the Mother, and myself.

Jane Nelson