The cult of the Mother Goddess is a tradition based on the belief that in the beginning God was a woman. Being earth-centered, the Mother Goddess focused on the regeneration of life and the harmonious interaction among animals, humankind, and objects. Woman's creative power, which could be benevolent or malignant, was expressed through women as they nurtured the family and sustained its ongoing domestic events.
In Mama Aos (1959), Leonora Carrington undoes the equation Mother Goddess = Mother Goose, and portrays her subject in one of its benevolent manifestations. As she nurtures, Mama Aos generates the feeling of safety that one only feels at home.

Mama Aos is portrayed as a hybrid, half woman, half bird. She moves about standing on a turtle's shell while feeding a household of heterogeneous personages. With her left arm she holds to her chest the Sun - as an infant. Her right hand extends a spoon to feed an owl in flight. Bats, flapping their wings, follow her, anxiously awaiting their turn also to be fed. A bull observes the domestic scene to the right of another hybrid: a self-contained half-table, half-head, alive and bodiless. On the tabletop, an apple, symbol of knowledge, an egg, symbol of life to come, and a chalice that holds Mama Aos' nourishing broth are balanced on the back of an outstreched snake.
The iconography of Mama Aos draws its roots from art created in such far-flung places as China, Egypt, and Greece, where gander were seen as mediators between heaven and earth; the broomstick she rides stands for the sacred tree, the severed connection between sky and earth. The English Celts - Leonora Carrington's ancestors - believed the gander was a messenger from the Otherworld.

Salomon Grimberg
Dallas, September 1995