Explore the Analysis and reception of this artwork.
Sjöö said the word God is crucial, because if she had used Goddess, the figure "could have been passed off as one of many Goddesses and/or a fertility image, not as THE cosmic creative power I intended to express". Doreen Valiente was a central person in Wicca and befriended Sjöö in the 1980s. In her book The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989), she called God Giving Birth "one of the most powerful images of the Mother Goddess to be seen in modern times". The art historian Andrew Hottle likens God Giving Birth to Cynthia Mailman's painting God (1978), which also portrays God as a nude woman, but distinguishes Sjöö's painting for its origin in Sjöö's dedication to the "Great Cosmic Mother".According to the feminist art critic Amy Mullin, God Giving Birth is about the spiritual and physical creativity of women, and the way it depicts pregnancy contests "both the dichotomy between bodily and spiritual pregnancy and the priority given to the latter". Although positive to its apparent rejection of mind–body dualism, Mullin is critical of the painting for several reasons: the woman looks unaffected by pregnancy, the fact that she is God may mean that she has not been transformed or challenged like a mortal woman, and the painting seems to valorise pregnancy only for the child that is its end product. The gender studies scholar Magdalena Raivio says she sympathises with Mullin's concern about "spiritual pregnancy", which tends to prioritise male creativity by de-emphasising the physicality of women's bodies, but she challenges Mullin's concerns about God Giving Birth by placing it in a "spiritual ecofeminist" context. Within this context, a central project is the "resacralization of the natural world", and Raivio interprets God Giving Birth as "a metaphor for a socially transforming physical and sacred process or change".
resacralization of the natural world Cynthia Mailman ecofeminist Wicca mind–body dualism Doreen Valiente feminist gender studies