La Corúa, by Cheryl De Ciantis. Mixed media, 2024.

The Sonoran Desert Legend of La Corúa

La Corúa, a giant mythic serpent, is the hidden protector of waterheads in the Sonoran Desert. If the Corúa is killed, the water she guards dries up. Though now little-remembered, this is a striking image of the water crisis in the Southwest and surely retains a memory of past crisis in this region. Actively contemplating La Corúa’s image through my artwork has involved not only studying the archetypal snake divinities common worldwide, who generate rain, create fertility, bring healing and inspire wisdom; but also contemplating the paradoxes that deathly venoms can be healing agents, and that death fecundates life, both spiritually and materially. Though artists and writers fear the common experience of blockage when creativity dries up, aridity can be a crucial stage in spiritual individuation, as described by the mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila: even as we progress through intentional stages of connection with the object of our devotion, whatever that object or our means of devotion to it may be, we can sometimes encounter deprivation, desiccation, disconnection. Like the movement of water in the Tucson Valley, with its seasonal, cyclical and epochal intermittencies, its sudden and often dangerous appearances, the Element of water, like the feminine archetypes as well as the physical facts of female embodiment so closely intertwined with them, is a manifestation of power larger than ourselves that moves in many ways. Not just on/off; water’s ways are a both/and. If we can creatively re-member La Corúa, what vital lessons might the Water-Guardian bring?

The Goddess Ishtar

The goddess Ishtar is the oldest goddess we know from extant written evidence, in the form of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, created beginning nearly 5,000 years ago in Uruk, the chief city of the early Sumerian dynastic empire. The Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians all revered Ishtar as the goddess of love and of war. She was recognized as by far the most powerful female deity among the inter-related deities of the Mesopotamian pantheons, often surpassing her father and brother gods in the scope of her accomplishments. Her name appears more often in Sumerian myths than any other deity.

For all her ancient fame, the goddess is vastly distant from us in time and space. As the Mesopotamian politico-cultural powers waned, their material remains largely disappeared and remained mute to our understanding until the late 19th century. The stories that arose out of the Mesopotamian religious imagination were buried for nearly two millennia, and Ishtar vanished from the Western consciousness.

She’s back. And her myths illuminate a very different feminine archetype than we in the West have been socialized to. We have great lessons to learn from the stories of her ambition, sensuality, devotion, aggressiveness, vivacity and her powerful voice.

Gilgamesh CON/QUEST: The epic dramatized in seven scenes

Re-discovered only in the mid-19th century on a set of clay tablets in a previously undeciphered cuneiform script, the epic of Gilgamesh tells of semi-divine Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who is challenged, loved and transformed by Enkidu, the part-animal man who lives in the wild. Together they vanquish Humbaba, the Giant of the cedar forest, mock the powerful goddess Ishtar and slay the Bull of Heaven she sends against them. When the gods resolve to destroy Enkidu, Gilgamesh, grief-stricken, journeys to the ends of the earth seeking to comprehend his own mortality.

Gilgamesh CON/QUEST, first conceived by Mahmood Karimi Hakak and Ralph Blasting and performed as an experimental theatre piece in 1991, captures the grandeur and enigma of a civilization's epic poetry and the emotions of its gods, mortals, monsters and poets--four millennia distant from us in time and mind, but profoundly and timelessly human.Gilgamesh CON/QUEST gives us the words, the poetry, the script, the music, and the historic-linguistic and mythic/mythopoetic context of this sublime and immortal work of art.

With essays by Michael B. Dick and Cheryl De Ciantis.