Incase you’re new here… Hi, I’m Elise of Lusicovi Creative. I create and sell original, divinely inspired artwork and stories, including everything from canvases and watercolors to digital art printed on demand on mugs and shirts and home goods through Etsy and society6, to hand poured hand painted candles (currently on sale through IG stories/highlights) and print on demand bullet journals. And I research and write and run Oracle Poetry workshops and offer one on one sessions of Intuitive Oracle Poetry.
For now though, I want to tell a magickal story about the name of my business.
Those who know me know I am very proud of my Armenian heritage, and my grandpa who was 100% Armenian and born in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. I have a tattoo on my arm that says “ancestors” in Armenian. It’s always been a big thing for me. I also am rather obsessed with the sea and the stars and so in short the name of my business comes from some Armenian words that I squished together into my made up “Lusicovi” and from that love of the stars and the sea, which was especially perfect I thought for my underwater photography (more on that in my forthcoming book! Descent: A Dive Into the Mythical Waters of Human Nature through Ancient Stories and New Art).
I named my business when I was right out of college ten years ago and first diving into the actual business side of this whole “art degree” thing. I got my degree in photography but knew that I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself into JUST photography, because even then my soul was telling me that the art was the key.
I knew I wanted to honor my Armenian heritage, so I sat down with my grandpa one afternoon and asked him how to say about three dozen random things in Armenian. “Family, photo, art, design, ocean, stars, water,” etc etc etc.
Eventually I landed on “lus” for “light” and “covi” for “sea.” It had a nice ring to it, and that was that. Done.
Several years later I had a realization that the sea and the stars were the two main subjects of my art, and my biggest inspiration, and wasn’t it cool that without meaning to I had sort of named my business after those two concepts? The sea and the stars. The light and the sea. Neat!
“You are made of the Sea and the Stars, and one day you will find yourself again.” Click to read about my current available print collection.
But it’s so much deeper than that.
As I have worked to refine my true WHY, it has become increasingly apparent to me that my purpose on this Earth and with this business is to rediscover the sacred divine feminine through my art and stories and academic research even, and through my personal experiences (hello childbirth and motherhood). For creation is of course tied to the divine feminine archetype.
Everyone who’s body has built and then birthed new life is a fucking goddess of creation. I knew that intellectually before I did it myself, and now I know it in a fully embodied way. I know it deep in my bones. That death of the maiden and birth of the mother in a terrifying beautiful dance on the edge of life itself is the pure creative goddess force of the universe right there.
And while it may not be as bloody, any piece of creation— any creative endeavor where something is pulled into being from the realm of ideas and becomes greater than the sum of its parts—is also the same goddess energy at work.
Any time anything is intentionally made beautiful for the sake of beauty, that is the divine feminine.
Any time there is the magic of a community coming together- that sense of community that you can feel but not articulate- that’s the magic of the feminine.
Any time you are “in flow” and dancing with a new thing on the edge of creation and possibility, that’s the feminine.
Any time the human, the body, the soul, the earth, the intuition, the whole, the healing, the patience of true teaching and learning is honored above efficiency and productivity and gross mindless consumerism, that’s the sacred feminine.
And it’s time we give Her Her due.
And here’s the real magick of this story:
Ten years after naming my business “Lusicovi Creative” (because “it flows well,”) and seven years after realizing it also describes my main subjects and inspirations, and three or four years after really solidifying my call to “rediscover the divine feminine and share Her with the world through my art and stories,” I have very recently realized (this week actually, at the prompting of a question posed in a magickal business group I’m in), that every single part of the name “Lusicovi Creative” actually means “divine feminine.”
The feminine is archetypally and metaphorically tied to water: She is the waters of childbirth, the flow of magic and synchronicity and “flow states,” the grace and calm and depth and sparkling allure of the ocean, the ebb and flow of the tides connected to the moon, and the nourishing life giving force on earth.
In a word: She is water, or the sea. Covi.
The divine is the Light. And I don’t even mean that in a new agey “love and light” “positive vibes only” kind of way. (The true feminine embraces the dark actually, as much as the light, but that’s beside the point.) The divine is the love and the divine is the Light and the divinity/Source/Spirit/God is One/Love/Light. Jesus was the way, the truth, and the light. Yes. But I mean it in the ancient so far back that we only call it “THE book” kinda way.
In the Old Testament and in Ancient Hebrew, the word for god is “El,” or when plural “Elohim.” (This has been translated as the name of god when in fact Elohim simply means gods plural.) But when you look at the etymology of that word El, things get a little wild.
The word el comes from an ancient proto-European word: sawel. Sawel also yielded the Latin word sol meaning sun. The Hebrew word el was eventually transliterated into Greek as the first syllable of the word helios, also meaning sun. (And what is possibly the ancient Light of the Creator if not the sun itself?)
Additionally, there are a wide range of the oldest myths all around the world which all tell basically the same tale of civilizing beings called “the shining ones” who are worshipped like gods, and in fact in some of the Hebrew and Sumarían texts are called Elohim. In Sumerian the “shining ones” (literally Anunaki) are from whence the Egyptians almost certainly derive their name for the “city of the sun”- Anu, which was the center of worship for the sun god Ra, said to be the most ancient god in Egypt.
In pre Celtic Ireland there was a tribe called the Shining Ones which would later be associated with Faeries or Elves, both of which are known as magical beings of Light. Connected to this Irish tribe linguistically we find again in the Greek Pantheon that while the wife of Zeus was sometimes Hera, sometimes she was Diana. And Diana is a name which comes from the Proto Indo-European for “bright sky.”
Native Americans too have their own ancient stories of Bak’ Ti gods (literally “shining ones”) who came to their land and taught them how to build civilization. And in the East all through Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, there are records thousands of years old of “shining ones” who worshipped the “inner light inside themselves as if it was the sun itself.” Which really indicates both the ancient predominance of sun worship and the ancient world wide traces of these shiny beings that came to be known simply as “gods.”
So in all of the roots of the West (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Hebrew), we have the Elohim/the Shining Ones/ the sun/ Gods. In Ireland and the Americas we have ancient magical beings of Light. In the East we have magical beings of Light who worship their inner light like the light of the sun, in order to achieve enLIGHTenment (there’s a reason it’s called that folks). On top of that, we add the fact that nearly every non Christian tradition and pantheon (to say nothing of the Christian emphasis of the Son, the Light of the world itself) holds the worship of the sun or sun god as supremely important, regardless of all the connections to shiny beings (the sun does give us warmth and life after all).
What else can we conclude except that the divine is indeed the Light? Lus.
To finish it off, it is only in the past year that I am coming to learn that in a surprising number of ancient mythologies, before there was a sun god, there was a sun goddess.
Most interestingly, in the myths of my own heritage, the sun was a goddess. (I adapted that story actually, you can read it here.) And the ancient Armenians called themselves the “children of the sun.”
Armenian- the Children of the Sun Goddess.
Lus- The light. The divine. The sun. The goddess.
Covi- The sea. The feminine. The goddess.
Creative- The divine feminine. The goddess energy.
It’s all connected.
And when I sat down with my scratch pad of notes from that conversation with my Armenian grandpa ten years ago, and picked the words that just “sounded right” that “flowed well” and “looked good,” I had NO IDEA the depth to which these would be the most perfect words to describe my business.
But something did.
Something in me attuned to the subtleties of the universe outside of time and nudged me in the right direction. And thank divinity I was creative enough and intuitive enough and savvy enough to sit with it until it felt right.
That’s some crazy potent sacred feminine Big Magic my friends.
So I’m Elise. El- ise. Elise Diane, incidentally.
I was accidentally named for this work I think. (Because the name “sounded pretty” to my mom.)
Born for this even, as an Armenian, a Child of the Sun. And I accidentally-on-purpose named my business for it as well.
And through divinely inspired artwork and stories, through carefully hand crafted candles which are literal lights, and through intuitive Oracle poetry, I am here to help you rediscover and honor the Light that shines within you like it is the sun goddess itself. Because it is.✨
Book an Intuitive Oracle Poetry Session with me now and get a free small hand poured candle. OR buy a candle through my instagram stories this weekend and get 20% off your Oracle Poetry session!
