Snake Goddesses and Poetry at the Freud Museum
We are delighted that our first public event of the ‘Many Lives of a Snake Goddess’ project was hosted by the Freud Museum in London on March 3rd 2023. Our archaeological event was part of the special programme for the museum’s current, temporary exhibition, ‘Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire’, and it provided a wonderful space for the first public reading by Ruth Padel of her series of poems on the Minoan Snake Goddesses, which were specially commissioned for our project.
Setting the archaeological context, the evening opened with an illustrated talk by Nicoletta Momigliano on behalf of the project team, introducing our audience to the discovery by Sir Arthur Evans of these now iconic figurines at Knossos in Crete in 1903. Appropriately, our audience was introduced to Freud’s Minoan connections, via his patient H.D., the bisexual, imagist poet, Hilda Doolittle, for whom he provided a ‘Minoan diagnosis’ (wherein he associated her symptoms with a pre-Oedipal, mother-fixated layer in her psyche - which in turn found its wider, psychic evolutionary home in the idea of a Minoan, matriarchal, Mother Goddess past).
Ruth Padel then read her series of 15 poems on the Snake Goddess figurines, talking also about her personal links to archaeology, Knossos, and Crete more generally (and indeed sharing her own experience of snake handling in India). Following the reading, she was joined by our panel - Nicoletta Momigliano, Ellen Adams, Christine Morris and Andrew Shapland - for a wide-ranging discussion with the audience on the archaeological, psychological and poetic themes within the poems and the wider archaeological significance of the Snake Goddesses.
Read more about the themes of the evening:
Freud and Minoan archaeology
Nicoletta Momigliano 2020, In Search of the Labyrinth: The Cultural Legacy of Minoan Crete. London: Bloomsbury.
Cathy Gere 2009, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
The Freud Museum exhibition, Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire runs from 25 February 2023 to 16 July 2023.
Ruth Padel, Snake Goddesses and Crete
For Ruth reading the poems listen here or you can read them here
Her most recent novel, Daughters of the Labyrinth (2021) which is set on Crete, explores questions of identity, mothers and daughters, family secrets and the little-known Jewish community of the island.
Into the Labyrinth of the Snake Goddess
Ruth’s poems were commissioned as part of the ‘Many Lives of a Snake Goddess’ project, but in particular as part of an exploration of the Snake Goddesses within different forms of spoken language: poetry; audio-description and mindfulness. We invite you to engage with this part of our project at this Website.