The Goddess in the Pin

A Berber woman fastens her cloak with a silver pin. On the pin: a circle, a triangle, a line. She's wearing a goddess and she may not say so out loud.

The sign is Tanit. She was a great goddess of the old North African world — the moon, rain, fertility, protection — and her mark is that simple: a round head, a triangle body, a bar for arms. Older than Morocco. Older than most things you could name.

Thousands of years passed, and the sign stayed. It turns up on the pin that holds a woman's cloak, in the border of a rug, on the chin of a bride as a small blue tattoo. The women who wear it know what it is. They don't make a fuss about it.

How she reached the Atlas in the first place, nobody can say for certain. Carthage is a long way and a long time from a mountain village. The trail is lost. What's left is the sign itself, still turning up on silver and wool, thousands of years on, long after the world that first drew her.

And she isn't the only one. Far away, in other weaving traditions, people made their own stylised woman — hands on hips, body a diamond — with no knowledge of Tanit at all. The figure keeps surfacing wherever people make marks, the way certain shapes just do. Tanit is the one who surfaced here. In the Atlas, she never fully left.