Enchantment, Vitality and Agency: A Posthuman Reflexive Exploration of the Willendorf Goddess

During my science-based PhD at the start of the new millennium, I experienced what can only be described as an extreme enchantment with the Willendorf Goddess, a Palaeolithic female figurine found in Austria. This enchantment manifested itself as a visceral, compulsive need to shape her repeatedly, using clay and to sit with her form whilst being transformed through this embodied repetition. This reflexive paper explores that encounter as a lived entanglement with an ancient object. It does so through the philosophical lens of three theorists: Jane Bennett, Greta Gaard, and Val Plumwood. I position these clay figures, and the Willendorf idols that followed, not as mere representations of the Female Divine, but as co-conspirators and material entities that arrived to me and through me, each bearing their own mood, message, or metaphysical presence. To borrow Jane Bennett's term, the Willendorfs in my life radiated a vibrancy that unsettled the boundaries between subject and object, maker and the made. Through the lens of Val Plumwood's philosophical animism, I consider how this creative compulsion became a site of resistance to anthropocentric, patriarchal frameworks and dualisms. Finally, through Greta Gaard’s queer ecofeminist lens, the Willendorf Goddess is reimagined not as a passive fertility icon but as an earthbound figure of embodied knowing, inviting a queer and more-than-human mode of relationality through the act of attentive listening.