This celebration of feminine sensuality was made with dancer Shina Degucci when she was an instructor at the S Factor. The S Factor was created by Sheila Kelley to free women from society's straight jacket of shame and connect them to their sensual selves. Shina's stories of the deep emotional blocks and barriers her students had to break to unlock their feminine sensuality inspired me to create this set of images. 

 

I first became aware of the ancient Mediterranean goddess religions while visiting my grandfather in Malta. Malta is home to several of the oldest temples in Europe, some dating back 7000 years, and were said to be built to the Goddess Hera. Studying Latin at school a few years later I discovered Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, and his anthology, The Greek Myths. He proposed that watching the High Priestess and her Temple Girls dance would have been a celebration of the divine feminine, and of course, would have kept the men true to the Goddess and her temple. 

 

By the era of Egypt’s pyramid building First Dynasty, over two thousand years later, the goddess religions were replaced by more patriarchally biased polytheistic ones. A thousand years later, during Egypt’s Second Dynasty, famous for the temples of the Valley of the Kings, Pharaoh Akhenaten decreed there would now be only one God, Atun. That was the world Moses was born into and fled from, and its monotheistic influence is clearly seen in today’s triad of Abrahamic religions. Their patriarchal dogmas have all cast the Goddess and the dance of desire from the temple to the gutter, shrouding it in shame.

 

As a young man that idea made a profound impact on me, and of course, influenced the images I made as a fashion and beauty photographer in my twenties and early thirties. However, it wasn’t until many years later, working in Hollywood in 2011, that I met Shina and was finally able to celebrate the Goddess’s dance of seduction with reverence. 

 

These images are intended to honor the dance that ignites the fires of desire in a man's heart and loins with elegance and grace. Visually the inspirations were Rodin’s sculptures and the erotic temple carvings seen throughout Asia. Carved in stone those works have become eternal, so being able to inscribe these images permanently into the Bitcoin blockchain with Gamma.io is the perfect way to honor this project.

 

© Andrew Macpherson 2024

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