Elks in the city

Amsterdam has a special way of spoiling her inhabitants: she presents you with an amazing variety of exquisite buildings that are so rich in details that you can keep on finding new ones each day you stroll in her streets. The same detail can also transform itself in the specific light of a specific day since the weather can change even seven times a day in this cheerful city (I personally counted these changes one day). You can choose to create your mental archive but a real picture is worth a thousand words. One day I discovered this lovely and enigmatic decoration in a street close to Elandsgracht, the Elk’s Canal. It was not the first time that I had such a pleasant surprise but this decoration was so strong and delicate at the same time that I had to stop and take a very good look at it. I could easily make a connection to the Elk’s Canal but the story behind that decoration was far more complex and it blended perfectly with many other details in the façade of this small workers’ house. For a moment I was almost going to ring at the door and ask the lucky owner or tenant of that house about its real meaning but I ended up taking a picture and musing on its secrets. Associating it with the Northern Europe mythology was also quite obvious and with that in mind I started a quick search online. The search engine magic led me to this page on Monica Sjöö’s website and to the following paragraph of an article taken from the book “The Norse Goddess” by Monica Sjöö:

Many arctic peoples believed that the Great female Bear constellation Ursa Major, that circles the pole star, was the point of entry to the Upper world. Some believed that Ursa Major is the Cosmic Elk cow with Ursa Minor as her calf, and that the Elk ran out of the Heavenly Taiga and carried off the Sun on one of her antlers. These beliefs are rooted in hunting societies of great age in Siberia and elsewhere. The Elk cow and the Bear Mother are embodiments of the great Arctic Mother of the animals who was also an Amazon and a great hunter. In later times she was called Artemis/Diana.

You may argue that this paragraph does not really explain the presence of that Lady in the center and all those elks. For the time being I would like to create my own version of the myth: The Arctic Mother accompanied by all her beautiful daughters disguised as elks.

Simonetta Ronconi