Yield

The writer has always resisted deity worship but she found her senses sparking at the British Museum's gripping show about female superbeings – one wearing ...

Feminine Power belongs in a splendid line of British Museum explorations of the sacred, with Grayson Perry’s The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman in 2011 an outstanding example. But overall, Feminine Power spreads a feast of objects both precious and popular, ancient and new: it has something of the character of a cabinet of curiosities. It may also contain a dose of wishful thinking, as Feminine Power overlooks inherently troubling aspects in the interest of civility and inclusiveness. Some of the most exquisite art appears here: a wonderful miniature of talismanic calligraphy gives the full Surah Maryam, the Quranic story of the birth of Jesus; an image of the Madonna of Guadalupe – enveloped in a radiant scarlet aureole and green mantle – is made, if you look closely, entirely in minute straws laid side by side. Men’s interest in these manifestations of the feminine is not inquired into. The power of this image is reawakened in the next section, Magic & Malice, where Kiki Smith’s bronze sculpture of Lilith hangs high on the wall. In some cases, a finer object could have been chosen to illustrate the point: John William Waterhouse’s maidenly Circe only feebly conveys that founding sorceress’s magic. In the second, Love & Desire, the famous tablet of Ishtar-Inanna from the museum’s own collection shows the goddess full frontal, with eagle’s talons for feet, lions underfoot and a sentinel owl on each side. This is not the case: in Justice & Defence, the terror of Kali beams out from the huge effigy of the goddess, which the museum commissioned from Indian artist Kaushik Ghosh. Made in the bright daylight of India, this ferocious and garish apparition, with her lolling scarlet tongue, the slick of blood on her raised sword, as well as the dumpy doll-like Shiva pinned down under her trampling feet, could appear histrionic and might arouse horrid laughter if it weren’t displayed next to a real weapon, an impressively long 19th-century iron “sword-axe” with the all-seeing eye of Kali, from whom no wrongdoer is safe, incised on its surface. It would be a duller show and its narrative soapier if the negative stereotypes were all rehabilitated. Feminine Power: The Divine to the Demonic, a new show at the British Museum, gathers together an exhilarating array of goddesses, sorceresses and demonesses from living religions as varied as Tibetan Buddhism and Wicca, jostling side by side with cult objects from antiquity all over the globe. In the first section, Creation & Nature, a video follows vodun-like ceremonies held in high summer in honour of Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of fresh water and healing.