Sacred Art: Mother of the Rocks

Inspired by Neolithic rock art

This is one in an occasional series in which I share my sacred art with you. You can find the other posts here.

Sometimes, like with the Minoan Seal Ring Project I talked about in a couple of previous sacred art posts, I create sacred art based on an idea I combine with research.

Sometimes, a project is thrust on me in a dream.

Today’s sacred art is that second kind. I had a powerful series of dream-visions in 2021 and felt compelled to seek more information. That seeking took quite a while, since I didn’t have either a word or an image to input into an online search. After a great deal of digging around, I discovered that what I had seen in the visions involved some Neolithic rock art from Tassili n’Ajjer, a mountainous area in southeastern Algeria that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Here’s the rock art, dated to 6000-4000 BCE:

This figure is usually called Running Horned Woman. I encountered her directly, not as art but as a sentient being, in my visions. And in those visions, she was called Mother of the Rocks.

In the original rock art, she is surrounded by small human figures, but in my visions, she was accompanied by a group of bird-headed spirits wearing unusual garb. They had wide straw collars over dapple-spotted cloaks that wrapped around them like tents and hid everything except their feet.

Eventually these spirit beings morphed into ostrich chicks, which I didn’t realize had spots until I had this vision… and then I went and looked them up to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. Sure enough, they’re spotted and pretty adorable:

In order to understand and process what I had experienced in the visions, I created the painting. It feels a little odd to me to see a “freeze frame” of what was an extremely vivid, motion-filled set of visions. But I had to “screen cap” the visions in order to get them down on paper, so to speak. And now, the painting serves as a doorway back into the visions whenever I want to make that journey.

Among other things, the vision led me on an exploration with my ancestors. I’m culturally white (race is a cultural construct) but I have African people among my ancestors, much as most of my biological family hates to admit it. However, those African ancestors, as far as I’m aware, are from west Africa and not from the region of north Africa that this rock art is located in. So I’m not really sure why I connected with this particular region and this specific work of Neolithic art.

I was honored to have some of my ancestors, both African and European, accompany me as I created this painting. It was a departure from my usual work in both style and content, but the process was a sacred journey that I treasure. It took me back to a time when that region, now a part of the Sahara Desert, was a tree-dotted savannah full of wild animals — including ostriches — along with humans and their livestock.

Sometimes we forget that the Earth changes in ways other than just Ice Ages coming and going. The “green Sahara” was a time when northern Africa was not a desert, but a green grassland with lakes, trees, and regular rainfall. That’s hard for me to picture, since my whole life, I’ve been shown images of that huge swath of desert across the top of the world’s second-largest continent.

But the people who lived in the green Sahara had thriving societies where they lived, raised their children, and buried their dead. They herded cattle, hunted wild animals, and built hearths. They made art, jewelry, pottery, and arrowheads. There’s no doubt they also sang and danced; I bet they made music with instruments as well.

And of course they had relationships with the divine, with the deities and spirits of that special place and with their ancestors, their Beloved Dead.

One of the things that making sacred art has shown me over and over again is that there are so many common threads to being human, and to having a human relationship with the divine, no matter the place or the time.

And we’ve always made art of one sort or another.

Every time I work on a sacred art piece, I feel connected not just with my own direct ancestors but with every human being going all the way back through time.

We are the painters of each other’s pictures.

May the pictures you paint in your life — either literal or figurative — be beautiful.

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About Laura Perry

I'm the founder and Temple Mom of Ariadne's Tribe, a worldwide inclusive Minoan spiritual tradition. I'm also an author, artist, and creator who works magic with words, paint, ink, music, textiles, and herbs. My spiritual practice includes spirit work and herbalism through the lens of lifelong animism. I write Pagan / polytheist / magical non-fiction and fiction across several different subjects and genres. My Minoan entry in the Moon Books Pantheons series is now available for pre-order and will be released on 26 August 2025. While that process percolates along, I’m working on an illustrated book of modern Minoan myths. I’m also an avid herb and vegetable gardener and living history demonstrator.