Primitive Female Statues Featuring Women

¶ … primitive female statues featuring women with pendulous breasts and engorged stomachs are nowadays named fertility images. This may, however, be a misnomer since the design may have represented various meanings foremost among which may have been female health, or the ideal picture of female beauty or some symbolic, transcendental, or spiritual meaning. Relating them, therefore, to fertility may be mislabeling them and according people the wrong idea of their use. On the other hand, being that parts significant to reproduction are singled out and that other less significant parts are abstractions, it may well be that these statues did serve as wishful instruments for fertility.

The label fertility idol when applied to these images is, as Gardner (1991) notes, subjective, being that these statues existed in a prehistoric period before written records existed, we can only guess that they are fertility images and that their purpose was likely to serve as some sort of amulet or positive omen for fertility. This, however, is a well-educated guess rather than certainty and comes from the markings and representations of the figure. Moreover, one could argue that the figures were a primitive way of illustrating women in general. Other contemporary female figures, for instance, such as the 'Woman from Ostrava Petrokovice' and the 'Woman from Brassempouy', although not fertility images were also created in an abstract manner, whilst the artist was won't to create in a way known as a 'memory image' focusing on generic shapes. In fact, oen of the states was named the 'Virgin' possibly indicated an ideal of female beauty.

The female statues, therefore, could have served multiple purposes including as artifacts of what was then considered ideal female beauty; as abstractions of particular ancestors or historical female models; as images of health; or as models for feminine roles for young girls (Stokstad, *). Since the topography of the body indicates that many were created by pregnant women (Gardner, 1990), they may also indicate the state of mind, or serve as 'mirror', of the artist.

On the other hand, it is quite likely moreover that these statues were fertility statues for given the circumstances of the times when due to policies uncertainties as well as situations of health and socio-economic difficulties, death of women during childbirth was rampant, as well as miscarriage and other pre and post natal incidents common. Primitive people, before the days of scientific and empirical resigning, turned to nature as their explanatory factor. The word was unpredictable and frightening; the forces of nature, in the shape of gods and other powerful figures, all-omnipotent and the precursors of positive and negative events. Possibly, as means to escape from their fears and uncertainties and as instruments of achieving their desires, humans sculpted their supplications in tangible form, and abstract wishes, therefore, took the form of carvings.

It is in this way that the word 'fetish' comes from the Latin word 'factitious' meaning 'not true' or 'artificial'. The images were contrived and conceptual abstractions but this doesn't mean that they didn't convey some sort of reality in that it portrayed a symbol or indicated some reality via its essence.

Nonetheless, in more ways than one they served to 'reproduce' the image of 'Fertility' which, from the Latin meaning, means a 'reproduction i.e. To carry or to bring forth. In this way, the female bodily forms most conducive to 'bringing forth' were emphasized.