INTRODUCTION

During more than hundred years of research, many theories have been formulated in the subject of Mathura sculpture. Problems arise due to a tendency, apparent in various studies in this area, to seek images of deities belonging to the later mainstream Hindu cults, so-called “pan-Indian” figures, or to reconstruct the evolution of a deity from the so-called “local,” “unorthodox” tier to the level of official, orthodox worship. Furthermore, a very strong adherence to textual tradition and tracing any references to a given supernatural being in the literature of each period, and preferably descriptions of its corporeality, also cannot be accepted incontestably. While, of course, such fragments can help in the general understanding of the context of the character's appearance, they can testify to its presence in people's imaginations, and especially provide information about the nature of such presence (how and why a certain phenomenon was personified). Still, referring to descriptions as iconographic sources should not be uncritical. Nonetheless, it may be interesting to go back to older objects that appeared in the visual sphere at least several centuries before the Mathura centre came to the fore. They are interesting and significant for the discussed problem, as in fact, one can find among them many examples directly related to fertility, wealth, and abundance, and therefore dominated by female representations and plant motifs. S. Bawa aptly notices that filling the visual sphere with feminine characters has its own socio-religious background – i.e., first, an economy based on agriculture placed women in a special position as working in the field as well as controlling rituals and the reproduction of nature. Secondly, in early India, according to the researcher, women were worshiped in various local beliefs due to the strong connection of women with life-giving sexuality and because of the popularity of female socio-ritual practices during pregnancy and childbirth. A woman was nat-urally associated with fertility in the religious and artistic discourse, which has unquestionable biological foundations, and in the sphere of symbols, she is therefore connected with specific species of plants and animals, as well as particular depictions.