About the Piece

Yoni with Serpent depicts a yoni birthing a serpent, and speaks to emerging, active, feminine energy.    The serpent represents the feminine wisdom inside of us that can strike at the truths and falsehoods in others and ourselves. The vulva is sometimes described as being passive, receptive, and a vessel.  By adding the serpent I am affirming the power inside of women that is active, sharp, penetrating, and that can strike when needed. 

Snakes are often linked mythologically to women and their wisdom. Leonard Shlain (1998, p.55) writes about snakes in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. “So connected in the Egyptian psyche was beneficent serpents and goddesses that the hieroglyph for goddess was the same as the one for serpent.  The uraeus, the coiled cobra atop every pharaoh’s headdress, was the crowning symbol of Egyptian royal power.” Barbara Walker (1988, p.387-389) also writes extensively about serpents and their relationship to women in her Women’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects.  

Women can go weeks, years, a lifetime without looking at their own yoni.   The vulva is sometimes split off from the integrated whole of a woman.  Woman view their vulvas as the other, or “down there”, instead of as a wellspring of wisdom and energy. Additionally, our culture can oversexualize the vulva, or teach us shameful and harmful myths about it.  By looking at the vulva in an integrated way we can also begin to demystify it and see it in a positive, joyous context.  This piece aims to take away the secrets, the shame, the oversexualization of the yoni; sex is a part of the vulva’s function; moreover, it is our source of creative energy.

 

References:

Shlain, Leonard (1998) The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Viking, New York.

Walker, Barbara G. (1998) The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. Harper Collins, New York.

For questions or comments about Cydra's art, please email: womansculpture@icloud.com