“From prehistory to the end of the Roman Empire, the Great Mother…..

CAMILLE PAGLIA QUOTES:

These quotes (some paraphrased) are taken from various sources, some direct from her book Sexual Personae p. 1990 and from various lectures on YouTube.

“From prehistory to the end of the Roman Empire, the Great Mother never lost her barbarism. She is the ever-changing face of chthonian nature, now savage, now smiling. The medieval Madonna, a direct descendent of Isis, is a Great Mother with her chthonian terror removed. She has lost her roots in nature, because it is pagan nature that Christianity rose to oppose”

“Liberalism defines government as tyrant father, but demands it behave as a nurturing mother”

“Our physicality is torment, our body, the tree of nature on which Blake sees us crucified”

“Natures fascism is greater than that of any society”

"Modern women are, by and large, disconnected from their animal nature, and so they are often in search of an ideal or a ‘perfect world’ which no society or culture can ever deliver."

"In the modern era, women have been given extraordinary freedoms and power, but they have become confused about what they want."

"Women need to reclaim a sense of their traditional role in society, and not pretend that the traditional functions of femininity are something to be ashamed of."

"The feminist movement has succeeded in creating opportunities for women, but it has also, ironically, alienated women from their own biology and sense of identity."

Camille Paglia has expressed concerns about the decline of religious influence on art and the implications of secular humanism for young people. Here are some of her notable quotes on these topics:

"Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy."

"Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and re-examine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms."

"We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system. They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death.”

“Egypt is the first to glamorize small breasts. The breasts as vernal adornment rather than rubbery milk sac, outline rather than volume: Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity, an advanced erotic art form”