The Snow Queen & Madonna with Child -- Two Images of Winter Mother Archetype

Wooden Madonna Statue and Snow Queen Mask

The faces of the Winter Mother are the Snow Queen and Mary swaddling the infant Jesus.

The Snow Queen seduces boy-children and turns them into ice sculptures, forever frozen in the beauty of youth.

She also incarnates as the Ice Maiden, an image of forever virginal womanliness – frigid, perfect, and unattainable.

She is colloquially as pure as the driven snow.

Perfection Depicted as Frozen, Cold

This element of frozenness is mirrored in sculpture and masks.

The masks of Carnivale translate ice crystals and snowflakes into bejeweled and feathered art on faces as frozen in perfection as that of the Snow Queen. Snowflake Compared with Madonna Statue in Rosette, Notre Dame Cathedral

Left, Madonna sculpture in rosette at Notre Dame, Paris, completed by snowflake shape.

Mary, by contrast, is the luminescence of the young mother, beatified by birth and holding the incarnation of innocence in her arms.

The Snow Queen and Virgin Mary are the progenitors of perfected images.

The Snow Queen preserves youth and innocence of boyhood by freezing it in time.

The Madonna preserves the idealized vision of mother and infant boy for all eternity by transcending time. She embodies the purity of virginity, even after giving birth, with the warmth of motherhood.

Snow Queen Embodies Our Culture's
Fear of Aging

The Ice Queen is usually depicted with pale hair – white or white-blond.

This is the hair of the crone, but our youth-obsessed culture has excised this from contemporary images.

The Ice Queen must be beautiful, and only youth is beautiful in our time.

The Ice Queen, the archetype of winter, would by rights be aged -- for Winter is the old year dying, the last season before the concupiscence of nature for fulfillment starts anew.

More appropriately, the feminine archetype of the winter mother should be a mature woman of wisdom.

Madonna sculpture against sky. Beautiful mask, Venezia. Istock photo

The Madonna completes the immanence by giving birth to the son of the old year, who will grow and flourish through spring.

The great Medieval master painters often depicted the Assumption into Heaven of the Virgin Mary.

Mythic Meaning of the Assumption

This is the legend of the ascension of her pure body into heaven after her death. She is routinely shown surrounded by white clouds, sometimes with a crown of stars. White Sweater at Peruvian Connections The visual relationship is striking between stars and the snowflakes that cling to the eyelashes and hair of the Ice Queen.

This is one of the dialectics encountered by womanhood – we must be pure, but to be pure puts a woman at risk of being untouchable, cold, sexually frigid and, ultimately, a bitch.

The archetype of the Winter Mother, expressed in the images of Snow Queen (Ice Maiden) and Virgin Madonna, offers opportunities for observation and self-reflection in the Winter of our lives.

Popular culture conflates the Snow Queen and Madonna in this image of a woman in a white sweater, right, Peruvian Connection, winter catalogue, 2009.

Every good Christmas story, it has been said, is about new life springing from death.

Winter’s death is different from the desolation of drought, in which life withers and turns to dust. Instead, life hibernates amidst in the sparkling diamonds of ice.

Mother Winter
Brings Hope

Winter gives us hope of the birth and rebirth to come.

One of Gordon, Lord Byron’s most famous poems expresses the sweet inaccessibly of the Winter Mother’s untouchable purity.

She walks in beauty, like the night

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.


One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o'er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.


And on that cheek and o'er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.
 Reference: Poem retrieved Dec. 25, 2009, from Francis G. Pelgrave (1875), The Golden Treasury, Great Books Online at Bartleby.com, http://www.bartleby.com/106/173.html

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