Dowsing for Divinity

I’m very sad to see that the “trustees” of the Chalice Well Gardens in Glastonbury have removed all the statues in the gardens. There’s a change.org petition to reinstate the statues.

The Chalice Well Facebook post about it states that: “Our ethos is Many Paths One Source, echoing the pathways through the garden to the wellhead. It is because everyone is welcome, whatever their spiritual belief, and the beauty of the garden is enough, that we no longer have statues that could be perceived as a particular spiritual path. The garden is neutral, not multi-faith.”

It’s also because the Virgin Mary statue that was removed is a copy by Ganesh Bhatt of a statue by Eric Gill, and Eric Gill was a child abuser. There are many other statues by Eric Gill all over the UK, and the font he designed, Gill Sans, is on every Apple Mac. Are we going to remove everything that he ever created, and all works derived from his work? It’s not like his child abuse is encoded or represented in the statue: it’s a universal depiction of the Divine Mother. Many artists were dodgy in some way but their artworks remain on public display. Caravaggio apparently murdered someone and yet his paintings are still displayed.

I feel differently about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon because I think she explicitly defends abuse in it. However, as Liz Williams pointed out: people are adults and can come to their own conclusions. And it’s not like Gill is making money from his work, because he’s dead. That’s why I am boycotting Rowling: because she is still alive to spend her money on transphobic organizations.

It very much looks to me like someone complained about the Eric Gill connection and the trustees panicked and removed all the statues, and then made up a misguided excuse.

I would understand if abuse survivors wanted the statue removed. I’m a survivor of abuse by a “friend of the family” and I didn’t even know the statue was based on a design by Eric Gill until it was pointed out. As long as the statue is not excusing or promoting abuse, I am OK with it being there.

I was in favour of removing statues of racists and colonizers but this feels completely different. It was a very small statue in a niche.

A lot of people had strong emotional attachment to the statue and found comfort in it after they lost their own mother. There are some heartrending comments on the Chalice Well post on this theme.

For example, from Mel Finley:

No statues at all? 😭 I wish there had been time to visit. This statue and another have been hugely important to my healing after the loss of my babies, and i have visited several times a year for 16 years to remember them. This makes me so sad.

From Madeleine Parks:

As a mother who has lost babies I found that statue very moving and comforting. I don’t have a faith, my spiritual journey is eclectic, and the symbol of ‘mother’ is so universal surely it meets the ethos of the garden?!

From Paul Cairns:

Terrible decision. My partner and I used to visit every chance we got and she was always attached to the Mother and Child statue. We were then lucky enough to have children, but unfortunately my partner died, at no age, before they were old enough to bring to the gardens and understand. I have brought them back the last 2 years and without telling them anything they gravitated to that place, that statue and felt really connected to their Mam.
Is a mother and child not representative of every culture? This really saddens me. I can’t tell our children about this. ☹️

There are also many comments pointing out the universality of the symbol of a mother and child.

Removing all statues for spurious reasons of “neutrality” feels like the opposite of neutrality. If you wanted to remove everything with spiritual or religious significance, you might as well pave over the whole place. Everything in that garden is meaningful to one faith or another.

The gardens were founded by a mystic, and then restored in the 1950s by Wellesley Tudor Pole, a Christian mystic and the creator of the Silent Minute. He created the meditation room at the top of Little St Michael’s Lodge which is based on the room where the Last Supper of Christ took place. Are they going to make that space “neutral” too? There are many Pagan symbols around the gardens. There’s also a Buddhist peace pole in the gardens, and the whole place is steeped in spiritual symbolism. It felt like a meeting place of Christian and Pagan spirituality, and therefore welcoming to other faiths too.

I am a Pagan and I have zero objections to a statue of the Virgin Mary being in the Chalice Well Gardens. That style of statue was in any case based on earlier depictions of Pagan Mother Goddesses, with the child standing upright — there’s a statue of the goddess Isis and her son Horus in that position. It could be argued that a depiction of motherhood is universal. And there was also an Earth Mother statue and angel bench which have been removed. All of these items are very small and shouldn’t detract from the pan-spiritual ambience for those who are not a fan of statues.

Here’s a beautiful comment by Mark Fitzpatrick:

As a Pagan Animist of Irish Catholic culture, I can absolutely confirm that statues of the Lady are FAR from only a signifier of the Virgin Mary. They are so much more than that, polyvalent icons of Mother Goddesses, of Maidens, of Triplicities, of Powers … The Lady contains multitudes. She is the Lady of the Sorrows, the Star of the Sea, the Lady of the Harvest, the Queen of Heaven, the Blessed Virgin, the White Lady, the Black Virgin, and so many more… All of these may be conflated in the Catholic figure, but they may all be also understood as a grand pageant of Goddesses, Spirits, local Powers, even Ancestral Energies…
A simple statue of Her may be many of these things to many different people, and it is reductive and sad to interpret Her in such a narrow way.

The Chalice Well Gardens mean different things to different people and that’s okay. Erasing all specific meanings and symbols from the gardens is not the way. It will just create a bland neutrality with no resonance. Are they going to remove the Vesica Piscis symbol from the well lid? I hope not, but that’s a Christian symbol — with Pagan connotations. There are plenty of gardens that are just gardens that can be enjoyed in a spiritual way by anyone. The Chalice Well was one of very few places where many faiths could come together in spiritual appreciation of this very special holy well. If they make it “neutral” they’re taking that away. I always felt a huge sense of peace descending on me as soon as I entered the gardens, and I feel that this was because it was consecrated by the people of many faiths who love it, and the shared symbols of those faiths.

And to all those people who feel that it’s wrong to care about a statue when actual humans are suffering: the statue provided peace and healing for actual humans, and it is possible to care about more than one thing at a time.