This work consists of a cross made from images of European women. Helen is Helen of Troy, the most beautiful and desired woman, whose abduction triggered the Trojan War. The account of that war, elegized in Homer’s Iliad, was strewn with the implied struggle between a newly dominant patriarchal warrior society, and the fiercely resentful matriarchal agrarian society, which had dominated Europe three thousand years ago.
Ironically, it is the “politically powerless” woman, and her choice to flee with the Trojan prince Paris, that throws whole civilizations into war. Woman’s power will nurture when appeased, but can lay waste when opposed. |
St. Helena was the mother of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor. Newly converted, she traveled to the Holy Land to secure relics of the early Christians and is credited with the discovery of Christ's True Cross. St. Helena is also the name of the island to which Napoleon was exiled after his final defeat.
The cross in flames initially appeared in stories of medieval Scotland by Sir Walter Scott. In books like Ivanhoe, the burning cross represented the deadly force the Christian Scots would use to protect their land and their women from the heathen hordes. |
Many American Southerners saw parallels to their own order, after their defeat in the War of the States, and used the burning cross symbol to intimidate black people from even thinking about miscegenation, or any sort of improper attention to their wives and daughters.
The sheer hypocrisy of this symbol is stultifying, since nearly every present-day African-American descended from slaves bears some genetic marker from a Caucasian source. The very men who compared themselves to noble knights had abused their female slaves as concubines, and had sold their own progeny as property. |
