maenad’s column
hotel corázon
Mallorca SPAIN 2024
Maenad’s Column
Each January, on the eve of the 16th, bonfires are lit across Majorca. Figures dressed as devils dance through fire and smoke in a ritual of purification, celebrating the festival of Sant Antoni, the island’s patron saint of animals. Legend tells of an Egyptian monk who resisted the Devil appearing in the guise of a woman by walking barefoot across embers. This act of resistance, retold through centuries, becomes ritual.
Yet beneath the Christian narrative lies an older stratum. Maenad’s Column draws upon the submerged memory of the Dionysian cults ecstatic, matriarchal, psychedelic. Before the saint, there was the priestess. Dionysus, god of wild nature and altered states, often appeared as a faun, an image later absorbed into the iconography of the Devil. Such transformations were not accidental. As Christianity absorbed and refigured earlier cosmologies, women’s roles as spiritual leaders, healers, and intermediaries with the natural world were systematically erased.
This work reimagines that lineage. It gestures toward a time when women led ritual practices that honoured seasonal change, death and renewal, and the intimate intelligence of the earth. Through sculpture, Maenad’s Column becomes a site of invocation a quiet monument to lost epistemologies and the radical, regenerative power of female-led communion with the land.