Vicki Noble: Current Projects

Recently we invited our advisory board members to tell us what is on their minds these days, to share their current projects, milestones, and emerging collaborations. Vicki’s report is the fourth in this series. 

Vicki Noble Portrait
Vicki Noble

The Covid isolation period has allowed sustained time for research and writing, which I have appreciated enormously. I’m excited about the Primordial Goddess collaborative book project I’m involved in with Miriam Robbins Dexter (see her blog for more details) and Laura Amazzone. We started this ambitious project more than ten years ago, mainly with the idea of meeting occasionally for fun and inspiration. Our decade of feminist scholarly synergy has produced an almost-finished manuscript investigating the roots of Goddess worship in India in the Bronze Age Indus Sarasvati Valley, comparing it with the development of civilization in Old Europe (the Danube Culture), and linking the two through millennia of cultural exchange and migration across Eurasia. For images, see the Home page of my website: vickinoble.com.

Motherpeace-inspired fashion from Dior

I am gestating a book that tells the story of Motherpeace Tarot, the project I co-created with Karen Vogel forty years ago in Berkeley, and which was licensed in 2017 by Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first woman artistic director at Christian Dior, for a special line of clothing and accessories in one of their Cruisewear collections. Through this fateful collaboration, the matriarchal and Goddess imagery that Karen and I so lovingly embedded in our drawings of the late 1970s were taken to a whole new level by artisans and craftspersons at Dior, who turned them into elegant high fashion dresses, bags, shirts, and shoes worn by women in every cosmopolitan center in the world. I want to track the history (“herstory”) of women’s sacred imagery and textile production from nine thousand years ago through all the subsequent millennia until now, culminating in the extraordinary global feminist vision of Maria Grazia, who agreed with the premise in my 1991 book, Shakti Woman, that women (and female expression) belong at the center of culture and civilization.

I’ve also been making podcasts during the pandemic with two interesting hosts, Sean Marlon Newcombe and Dawn (“Sam”) Alden, who produce “Making Matriarchy Great Again.” They have done numerous interviews with me presenting my research on Gimbutas, Old Europe, and most recently, “The War Against the Goddess,” as well as shows featuring many other interesting guests.