Venus of Laussel Tattoo Meaning
Fertility, the ancient feminine, and the oldest known image of the divine.
The Venus of Laussel is one of the oldest known images of the divine — a 25,000-year-old carving of a full-bodied woman holding a notched horn, painted in red ochre, one of the many Paleolithic 'Venus' figures that may represent humanity's earliest religion, centered on the female body as the locus of the sacred, fertility, and the measuring of time. To carry the Venus of Laussel is to carry fertility, the ancient feminine, and the oldest image of the divine — the 25,000-year-old goddess holding the horn of thirteen moons, the female body as humanity's first image of the holy, fertility and timekeeping joined in the most ancient sacred form.
The Venus of Laussel is an ancient image of profound significance: a bas-relief carved directly into a limestone cliff face in the Dordogne region of France around 25,000 BCE, in the Upper Paleolithic — the deep ice-age past of humanity. She is one of approximately 200 'Venus figurines' found across Eurasia, from France to Siberia, dating to the Upper Paleolithic, a remarkable body of the oldest known sculptural representations of the human figure and among the oldest known art.
The Venus of Laussel depicts a full-figured woman: in one hand she holds up a bison horn, marked with thirteen notches, while her other hand rests upon her swelling, pregnant belly. And she was painted with red ochre — the deep red pigment, the color of blood and life, which the Paleolithic peoples used in their most significant images and burials, marking her as sacred and connecting her to the blood of life and birth. Carved into the living rock, holding her notched horn, her hand on her belly, painted the red of life, the Venus of Laussel is one of the most ancient and evocative images humanity has left us. The Paleolithic Venus of Laussel is the 25,000-year-old cliff-carved figure of a woman with a notched horn, painted in red ochre. The Paleolithic Venus of Laussel is the goddess carved in the cliff — a bas-relief carved directly into a limestone cliff in the Dordogne, France, c. 25,000 BCE (the Upper Paleolithic ice-age past), one of ~200 'Venus figurines' found across Eurasia from France to Siberia and among the oldest known art, depicting a full-figured woman holding up a bison horn marked with thirteen notches, her other hand on her swelling pregnant belly, painted with red ochre (the color of blood and life), one of the most ancient and evocative images humanity has left.
The Venus of Laussel (c. 25,000 BCE) was discovered in 1911 CE by Dr. J.-G. Lalanne at the rock shelter of Laussel in the Dordogne, France — it is now in the Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux. The original carving is approximately 44 cm high, cut from the living limestone of the cliff face. The thirteen notches on the bison horn have been interpreted by researchers including Alexander Marshack (The Roots of Civilization, 1972 CE) as a lunar notation — thirteen lunar cycles per year. Red ochre (iron oxide) traces remain on the original carving — red ochre is the most consistently used material in Paleolithic ritual contexts globally, found at burial sites, cave paintings, and figurines across the world and across hundreds of thousands of years of human prehistory. The 'Venus figurines' as a category were named by 19th century male archaeologists who assumed they were erotic objects — subsequent feminist scholarship (including work by Marija Gimbutas) reinterpreted them as religious objects, images of a goddess or of feminine sacred power; the debate about their function continues.
Venus of Laussel across cultures
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