"Eye of Horus"

The All Seeing Eye of God

This painting is an invocation to the sacred union of the masculine and feminine energies that dwell within every one of us. Above presides the scribe, keeper of the left brain, who tracks and records the unfolding of events in writing, watched over by Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom and the written word. Below abides the high priestess, keeper of the right brain, holding the intuitive, the sacred, and the unseen. In her hands she bears the ankh, the cross of life, distinct from the Christian cross of death, for the loop of the ankh is the sacred womb itself, the uterus and its fallopian tubes, the very gateway through which life enters the world.

Between them flows the passage of the Book of the Dead, in which the soul is ferried across the Nile from the shore of the living to the shore of the eternal. On either side stand the great guardians who bear the ankh, embodying the divine masculine and the divine feminine, for the ankh itself unites the masculine cross with the feminine oval in a single sign of everlasting life.

Crowning the vision is the Winged Sun Disk, the golden sun of creation, its outstretched wings the omnipresence of the divine, flanked by the sacred serpents, the Uraei, protectresses who watch over all. And through the artist's license, the left eye becomes a birthing goddess, forever bringing forth new life, so that death and rebirth, masculine and feminine, writing and intuition are reconciled within a single sacred vision.

Created in 1990, under my maiden name, Mariela Cortés.