Monica Sjöö

Who was Monica Sjöö?

Monica Sjöö, was a Swedish painter, writer and a radical anarcho/eco-feminist who was influential in the Goddess movement. She first came to Britain in the late 1950s, and eventually settled in Bristol where she lived for many years, but she also kept a home in Wales. Sjöö died of cancer in 2005, aged 66.

Sjöö was an artist, a writer, and one of the early visionaries of the Goddess movement. Her 1987 book The Great Cosmic Mother helped revive what she considered the "hidden history" of the Goddess, and her paintings transformed ancient images and symbols into contemporary icons of female power.

Sjöö's work and beliefs centered around her respect and care of the Goddess, or Mother Earth. The Goddess was "the beauty of the green earth, the life-giving waters, the consuming fires, the radiant moon, and the fiery sun". Sjöö's respect for nature and the environment was not mere belief but, for her, a spiritual truth. The Goddess / Earth is to be respected as the life giver. This respect is to be found not only in her imagery, but in two texts which chronicle her journey through the written word.

Sjöö used imagery in her paintings which often makes reference to birth, the female body, and nature. All of these images were central to her beliefs regarding her "Cosmic Mother". She described herself as among the pioneers in this movement of reclaiming female divinity - along with many other writers, artists, poets, and thinkers. In her art, she attempted to "holistically express" her growing religious belief in the Great Mother as the cosmic spirit and generative force in the universe. This was a critical component of her artwork. She claimed to enter a "state" of being or of mind where knowledge was available from past, present, and future. Yet, these abstract beliefs were grounded with a firm foundation of action and activism. She was involved with the anarchist and anti-Vietnam War movements in Sweden in the 1960s and was active in the women's movement in Britain. Her political activism always grew out of her spiritual understanding of the earth as our living mother, similar to the beliefs of some Native American peoples.