Emmy
Posted: August 28, 2025 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, What is an Art Farm 2 Comments
Among soulful females, Emmy stands alone.
Rescued in West Virginia, she joined our home in September 2014 and helped us raise our children.
Extraordinarily gentle, she welcomed other rescue pets into our home.
Now, she has passed on and the loss is profound.
Maria the Jewess
Posted: August 22, 2025 Filed under: Art & Healing, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: alchemy, art, philosophy 1 Comment
In the 1st century CE, when Roman polytheism reigned supreme, the Jews were persecuted for their monotheism. In that age of male heroes, women were relegated to a second class. An alchemist would have been further still from conventional thought, but it was a trailblazing Jewish woman alchemist who began the intellectual tradition that Sir Isaac Newton would follow 15 centuries later.
Sir Isaac Newton, the paragon of the rational scientific male, in his day was a leading alchemist, when same was considered heresy, punishable by death by public hanging. Compelling then was this Jewish woman’s tradition. Newton transcribed more than 10 million words of notes, consisting of 16 folios, on the subjects of alchemy, religious and historical studies. And they were burned. So who was Mary the Jewess, also known as Maria Prophetissima and Maria the Copt and what did she know?
The Jewish Women’s Archive explains Maria “…was the first non-mythical Jewish woman to write and publish works under her own name. Maria is generally regarded as the first actual alchemist who is not a mythical figure. According to Zosimos of Panoplis, she started an alchemical academy in Alexandria, Egypt, and reportedly excelled at the process of transmutation of base metals into gold. Zosimos wrote a brief account of Maria’s philosophy, called The Four Bodies Are the Aliment of the Tinctures. Maria the Jewess invented several important pieces of chemical apparatus and was also known for a variety of mystical and alchemical sayings.”
Highly inventive, she used ovens made of clay, metal and glass, and formed gaskets using wax, fat, paste made of starch, and clay mixed with fat to seal the joints. Glass allowed the viewer to see the reactions, and allowed work to be done with mercury and sulfurous compounds. She may have been the first person to mention hydrochloric acid, and invented the double-boiler, known even today as the Bain-Marie, as well as the tribikos, a distillation still with three spouts, and the kerotakis, an extractor with a metallic palette inside a vacuum container holding vapors. According to Zosimos, she ground cinnabar [mercury (II) oxide] with mortars and pestles or lead and tin. Her fame endured in both Arab and European alchemy. The Kitāb al-Fihrist (Book Catalogue), by Ibn Al-Nadim in the late 10th century listed her among the 52 most important alchemists.
Her inventive spirit was surpassed by her writings. The “Axiom of Maria” states, “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” Carl Jung used this as a metaphor for the principium individuationis, the means by which one thing becomes distinct from other things. From Aristotle through Schopenhauer to Nietzsche this has been a fundamental concept in philosophy.
Concerning the union of opposites, Maria wrote: “Join the male and the female, and you will find what is sought.” As yin and yang define the whole, Maria was ahead of her time. Zosimos of Panopolis, the alchemist and Gnostic mystic, claims that Maria was a peer of Hermes Trismegistus who famously wrote, “As above, so below.” It is said that Maria taught Democritus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher, renowned for formulating an atomic theory of the universe. Reportedly they met in Memphis, Egypt, during the time of Pericles.
For the Greek alchemists ὕδωρ θεῖον, was both divine water and sulphurous water with the alchemical vessel imagined as a baptismal font, and the tincturing vapours of mercury and sulphur likened to the purifying waters of baptism, which perfected and redeemed the initiate. It would seem that the Christian rite of baptism bears alchemical roots.
All rivers lead to the sea, so too the River Jordan, where a woman Jewess holds a baptismal place at the delta basin, whereto wisdom flows down like the rain: as above, so below, indeed. Peace to all.
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Credit where credit is due: David Purpur, again. Elena Benham, again. While Gaia gifts us, abundantly…
Commanding Intellect
Posted: August 15, 2025 Filed under: consciousness | Tags: John Masefield, Queen Lili’uokalani, Smith College, Zitkala-Ša 2 Comments
Throughout history, women have exercised a commanding intellect in positions of leadership, two examples of whom would be Queen Elizabeth I and Catherine II of Russia. Both defined their political eras, and exercised power to a remarkable degree. Whether each embodied wisdom, though, seems dependent as much upon one’s political views as upon any objective facts.
Elizabeth had an unusually broad education with a linquistic prowess to communicate with foreign ambassadors in their languages. Her Religious Settlement unified both the Church and State of England, laying the foundation for centuries of British rule, while her defeat of the Spanish Armada became a symbol of British dominance on all of the oceans. Arts and culture flourished during the Elizabethan Age. She is generally regarded as wise.
Catherine the Great significantly expanded Russian territory, introduced reforms in education, law and administration, and embraced the Enlightenment thinkers. But also, she was a ruthless autocrat who maintained serfdom, the system of forced labor that kept much of the population in poverty.
Commanding intellect relates to sheer mental horse-power, problem-solving savvy, and the efficient processing of information, but wisdom relates to intelligence applied in a meaningful and beneficial way; the use of good judgement as it impacts others.
Zitkala-Ša, an indigenous woman, was a writer, editor, translator, musician, educator and political activist. She was the co-founder, in 1926, of the National Council of American Indians which lobbied for United States citizenship and civil rights. She wrote the libretto and songs for the first American Indian opera. She wrote several works about cultural identity, the struggle between the majority Anglo culture in which she was educated and the Dakota culture into which she had been born. Her later writings told the stories of her Native American tradition to the English-speaking readership.
Queen Lili’uokalani was the last sovereign monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, assuming the throne in 1891. In 1887, while still a Princess, she represented her Royal Family at the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria at Westminster Abbey in London. She composed many songs, including the iconic “Aloha ‘Oe,” which remains a cultural symbol for Hawaii. During her reign as Queen, she worked on a new constitution to restore the power of the monarchy while granting voting rights to the economically disenfranchised. Her goal threatened the oligarchy, and on January 17, 1893 the United States Marines landed on the island. The American backed coup d’état ultimately placed Queen Lili’uokalani under house arrest and the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898.
In my personal experience, Helen Benham is the exemplar of the twin virtues of the commanding intellect with wisdom. Born in 1911, she was unusually well educated for a woman of her times. At the age of 22 she was graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors from Goucher College. She became Assistant to the Dean at Swarthmore College and then for twenty-four years worked at Smith College, as Assistant to the Academic Dean until named the Registrar in 1960, a position she held until she retired in 1976. During her tenure at Smith, her keen intelligence and problem-solving abilities helped more than 15,000 young women prepare for careers, at a time when social norms resisted women in positions of power.
Her summa cum laude commanding intellect is best captured in the tale of a breakfast at McDonald’s with her Son-In-Law (my Father-In-Law), a Harvard PhD in Physical Chemistry. He explained an unsolved paradox of a colleague’s PhD dissertation, concerning the probability of a coin toss landing on its edge. The experiments produced results that defied the odds, which the colleague could not resolve. In the course of one cup of coffee Helen deduced – correctly – that air resistance was the mitigating factor, causing the aluminum coin to land more often on its edge than normally expected. Realizing that she was correct, the Son-In-Law prudently chose not to share Helen’s insight with his colleague, for fear that the elegant simplicity would be crushing to the young scholar.
Helen Benham loved the ocean’s broad vista, and spent summers on the Hawk’s Nest Beach at Old Lyme, Connecticut and later in Damariscotta, Maine. John Masefield’s poem ‘Sea Fever,’ captures her essence:
‘I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing sea rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.’
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Credit where credit is due: Photos by Elena Benham. Professor Kristy Giles provided invaluable insights, as did Richard Morgan Neumann.
Alexandra
Posted: August 8, 2025 Filed under: consciousness | Tags: Alexandra David Neel, Tibet 1 Comment
Imagine a woman, age 2, taken to view the Communards’ Wall at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the City of Light, where 147 soldiers of the French national guard plus 19 officers had been lined up and executed. The horrors of the modern world pressed upon her.
By the age of 18, she had visited England, Switzerland and Spain, and was studying with Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. She wrote a treatise on anarchism, and then at the age of 27 studied piano and singing and, to help support her family, took the position of first singer at the Hanoi Opera House, where she interpreted works of Verdi, Gounod, and Bizet.
Later she befriended Maharaj Kumar, the crown prince of Sikkim (in present day India) and began an exhaustive correspondence with the 13th Dalai Lama. She learned Tibetan, lived in an anchorite cave, was possibly the first Western person to enter Tibet, and met with the Panchen Lama, among the highest ranking officials of Buddhism. She was allowed to consult the scriptures and visit temples, was introduced to persons of rank, to the Lama’s professors, and to his Mother. She received the honorary titles of a Lama and a Doctor of Tibetan Buddhism having “experienced hours of great bliss.”
She was then exiled for violating the no-entry edict, and so during World War I traveled to Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia. Dressed as a beggar she hiked back to Lhasa, the Forbidden City, in 1924, staying for two months exploring that holy city and its surrounding monasteries. When her disguise was uncovered, she was denounced to the Governor of Lhasa, but quicker than the officials, she had already departed east, heading to Gyantse, where the British maintained a garrison for training Tibetan soldiers.
She opened up Tibet to the Western world.
Imagine a country during the same time period that for 144 years did not allow its women to vote. The 19th Amendment was eventually passed, granting women suffrage, but the governing white men still practiced discrimination and large segments of the female population – indigenous and women of color, primarily – remained disenfranchised.
It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was outlawed, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (60 years ago this week!) prohibited racial discrimination in voting. As Churchill said “history is written by the victors,” so then America exceptionalism seems best understood as a myth perpetuated by the governing men, passed down generations.
Alexandra David-Néel is an exemplar of the trailblazing woman, so far ahead of her times. Remarkably bold and adventurous, she was compassionate and given the name “Yeshe Tome” which translates to “Lamp of Wisdom.”
Her memoir My Journey to Lhasa was published in 1927, released simultaneously in Paris, London and New York but critics were dismissive, refusing to believe her stories of Tibetan practices, such as levitation and increasing the body’s temperature to withstand cold. Living in a cave at 13,000 foot altitude requires a higher consciousness. She published more than 30 books and her home in Digne-les-Bains, France is now a museum, listed among the “inventory of French historic monuments.”
Alexandra seems worthy of mention in the Pantheon of Wise Women.
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Credit where credit is due: David Vernon Purpur. The lead photograph was provided by Elena.
Samsara
Posted: August 1, 2025 Filed under: Art & Healing, consciousness | Tags: Bardo Thodol, buddhism, samsara, The Work That Reconnects 1 Comment
One bright light has passed, one wise woman who lived at the vanguard. “A wild love for the wild” she lived and saw this time as “a great unraveling toward a life-generating human society.”
An environmental activist, author and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, her husband was a Russian scholar and they worked with the CIA in post-war Cold War Germany and then moved to India, where her husband was leading the nascent Peace Corps at the time when the very young Dalai Lama arrived into exile. A life was lived!
As a practicing Buddhist, she understood that life inherently is filled with suffering, that suffering arises from attachment and desire, but suffering can be overcome. Her path to the end of suffering became her teaching, which she called, “the Work that Reconnects.”
She has passed, and in the Buddhist tradition, the Bardo Thodol is now her path: “liberation through hearing during the intermediate state.” Known as “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” this describes the experience of consciousness at the immediate moment of death and the stages to follow during the 49 days of samsara, the “wandering through” between death and rebirth.
She is now – as I write – at day 11, immersed in the light, while her words speak still to we who remain on planet Earth. In a recent interview she said:
“I’m 92 now. I am in this 10th decade of my life. When I follow with rapt attention what is happening with the climate catastrophe, and with the mass extinctions of our siblings of in the creation of this world. I feel that there is, within me a sense that read through Rilke, the translations, and also very much through the work that I have been blessed enough to do called The Work That Reconnects, and that has starts the spiral journey that it is with gratitude. So much gratitude that what’s in it is that we are never abandoned. There is something for us to behold and be part of.
“And to be there, a great moment is there for us to be present. To this incredible moment, we’ve got to realize, we will realize, that we belong to each other. That’s coming forward now. How could we not harvest that understanding in this moment?”
She continued…
“…this sense of opening to the reciprocity of life. It’s a living world. When we cannot be sure, or even have the trust, that complex life forms will endure beyond the next few decades, we’re seeing a huge shattering of life itself. And, and yet having been with Rilke, his trust in life is still with me. So I trust being with life, even though life, the web of life might crumble, but then I’m still with it. I’ll be with it anyway, even in the crumbling. The song is so deep in him.
“For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us. The utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. …As bees gather honey, so do we reap the sweetness from everything and build God.
“Well, it seems clear that we who are alive now are here for something and witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before. And so, we who are alive now and who are called to, who feel called, those of us who feel called to love our world, to love our world has been at the core of every faith tradition, to be grateful for it, to teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how, if it must disappear, if there’s dying, how to be grateful. Every funeral, every memorial service, is one where you give thanks for the beauty of that life or the quality of what. And so, there’s a need, some of us feel, I know I do, to what is, looks like it must disappear to say, thanks, you’re beautiful. Thank you, mountains. Thank you, rivers.
“And we’re learning, how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it. I kind of sound like I’m crying, and I do cry, but I cry from gladness you know. I’m so glad to recognize each other. You can look in each other’s face. See how beautiful we are. It’s not too late to see that. We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.”
She translated Rilke, the German poet, who saw death as an integral part of the life cycle, as a transformative force that can lead to spiritual growth. Rilke said, “But we must accept our reality and all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us. The courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.”
The soul last known as Joanna Macy met life with an extraordinary courage, and encourages us to follow that path. She has moved onward, to the furthest yet.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Marie Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy
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Credit where credit is due: David Purpur opened the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead so many decades ago, and expanded the boundaries of my thought. An interview with Joanna Macy from the podcast On Being can be heard here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000661063451
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Garlic now hangs to cure, onions and potatoes have been harvested and turned into German Potato Salad, cucumbers into Bread & Butter or Caraway pickles, tomatoes into a delicious balsamic relish. Abundance reigns.
The Sybil
Posted: July 25, 2025 Filed under: consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: Cumaean Sibyl, Delphi, Heraclitus, Lucius Tarquinius, Shakespeare 1 Comment
In the pantheon of wise women, the Sibyl – mysterious messenger of truth – ranks high, towering overhead on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Who was she?
In the beginning, at Delphi, in the 11th Century BCE, there was but one, the Delphic Oracle herself. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, is the first known writer to comment, “The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperformed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice bye aid of the god.” The Greeks eventually came to count ten women truth tellers located in Greece, Italy, the Levant and Asia Minor; they were known not by their name, but by the location of the shrine where they spoke.
Meanwhile, across the Adriatic Sea, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus reigned as the seventh and last King of Rome, 534 to 509 BCE. A man so corrupt and vile, he gained the throne through multiple murders of family, and his tyranny came to justify the abolition of the monarchy. Following his death the Republic arose and thereafter the Empire, which are the stuff of legend. The one enduring virtue of Tarquinius was his foresight to purchase the Sibylline Books. Even there, he almost failed.
The apocryphal story is told of an old woman, possibly a Cumaean Sybil, who offered nine books of prophecies to Tarquinius at an exorbitant price; he declined to purchase and so she burned three then offered the remaining six at the original price. Again he refused and so she burned three more then asked the original price for the remaining three. Tarquinius consulted the Augurs, who deplored the loss of the six and urged purchase of the remaining three even at the full original price. Tarquinius had them preserved in a sacred vault beneath the Capitoline temple of Jupiter.
After the fall of the Kings, the Roman Senate kept tight control over the Sibylline Books. The men who governed held the women’s prophecies under lock and key. They entrusted care to two patricians, until in 367 BC, when the custodians were increased to five patricians and five plebeians. These ten, as directed by the Senate, consulted the Sibylline Books not for predictions of definite future events but the religious observances necessary to avert extraordinary calamities and to expiate ominous prodigies (comets and earthquakes, showers of stones, plague, and the like). The rites of expiation were communicated to the public, and not the oracles themselves. In the 4th century CE, The Sibylline Books were burned by order of the Roman General Flavius Stilicho.
About that time the Roman Empire came to its end, replaced by the Judeo-Christian world. The Sibylline Books were replaced by the Sibylline Oracles, a blending of classical mythology, early Gnostic, Hellenistic Jewish and Christian beliefs. The prophecies became increasingly apocalyptic, with even the Book of Revelations foreshadowed. There is something for everyone, it seems, in the Sibylline Oracles, and they came to reach ever wider circles. Over several millennia they have become more, not less, studied.
Michelangelo painted five sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the Delphic, Libyan, Persian, Cumaean and Erythraean, while Shakespeare mentions them in Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Troilus and Cressida. In contemporary culture, Sibyl was a 1976 film starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward about a musician diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. What was prophecy to the ancients is a crisis today.
But why are women the Sybils? Science tells us that the corpus callosum – the connective white matter that connects our left and right brain hemispheres – is more robust in women. A woman’s brain seems hard-wired to more rapidly access each hemisphere, integrating emotions and feelings with the logical functions of the left hemisphere.
Culturally women are encouraged to be receptive to inner thoughts and feelings, while men have been raised to focus on the external physical and rational worlds. Be that as it may, throughout the ages it is women who have been the Sibyls, towering figures of art, literature and history – mysterious messengers of truth – who stand tall within the pantheon of sage women.
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Credit where credit is due: David Purpur brought to my attention The Sibylline Oracles, J. L. Lightfoot, Oxford University Press (c) 2007.
The Queen Bee
Posted: July 18, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: beekeeping, bees, honeybees, Mother of All Living, nature, pollinators, royal jelly, the Shimmy, White Goddess Leave a comment
Honoring a good friend, who has a good friend passing; the ripples which cannot be denied that reinforce the web of our community, I write here of The Queen Bee.
The “bees knees” as slang means something excellent, of the highest quality. It arose during the “Roaring Twenties,” when flappers danced the Charleston, the Black Bottom and the Shimmy, their knees and elbows flailing wildly to the back beat of the jazzmans’ rhythms. It might be a corruption of “The Business,” 1920s street slang for something excellent, or perhaps it refers to pollen baskets on bees’ legs, the “good stuff” that worker bees carry back to their Queen.
In our quest for seven wise women, let us follow that “good stuff” back to the Queen Bee. In a colony of 20,000 to 80,000 bees she alone lays more than 1,500 eggs per day, an amount greater than her body weight. Coming of age at day 23 of life, her egg laying begins.
During incubation the Queens are fed protein rich royal jelly, secreted from the glands on the heads of young worker bees. Worker bees are fed a mixture of nectar and pollen – bee bread – but the Queen alone is fed the royal jelly, and as a result develops into the sexually mature female, the propagator of the colony. The colony’s future rests upon the fruit of her loins.
The Queen was selected by the worker bees, not through a democratic process, but through luck of the draw plus natural selection. The worker bees randomly choose a few larvae just days old, and begin feeding them the royal jelly. If multiple Queens emerge at the same time then they will fight to the death.
By genetics her stinger is not barbed, and so she is able to sting repeatedly. Sting she does, seeking out virgin queen rivals in her quest to kill. The Queen as nurturing mother sets firm limits; dominance is her key to control the colony. The Queen, to whom the worker bees bring “the good stuff” is the one and only; nature knows its rules and the colony falls in line behind its Queen.
The Queen’s hive is a model of efficiency and output. She weighs about 0.007 ounces, twice the weight of the worker bees, but their combined efforts produce 30-60 pounds of honey, or even upwards of 100 pounds or more, per year. Honey is half of the proverbial “land of milk and honey” which is an ancient symbol of abundance and prosperity. “Bread and honey” is slang for money, the coin of the realm. The Queen controls the honey, which is to say “the money” because she produces the abundance.
All things come to pass, and the Queen eventually matures into dominance. Some virgins escape the hive to avoid being killed, to seek out a new hive whereupon another fight to the death begins. If the prime swarm has both a virgin queen and an old queen, the old queen will continue laying eggs, until within a couple of weeks, she will die a natural death and the former virgin, mated, will assume the throne.
Natural selection is a biological imperative, but wisdom is an insight, something metaphysical, the source, perhaps, of that biological imperative. Our quest then leads back to the creator, God the Father in the current era, but the Queen of Heaven in older times. In the ancient Near Middle East, the Queen of Heaven embodied themes of love, war, fertility and motherhood, of which all the Queen Bee is a master.
About the Queen Bee, her celestial connectedness and her poetry, the Irish poet Robert Graves wrote, “…a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust – the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.”
The Queen Bee, it seems, is one key to the wise woman.
Credit where credit is due: one wise woman suggested this topic; Master Electrician, Master Cabinetmaker & Humble Farmer Kirk provided the beekeeping photos and inspiration; the curly-haired Goddess with whom I live asked sage questions about natural selection.
It takes a village.
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In the garden now – thanks to pollinators – fruits form, vines reach ever higher; mid-summer is past and the dog days descend.
Wisdom Is…
Posted: July 11, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: Axial Age, Diotima of Mantinea, Goddess of Heaven, Jeremiah 7:18, White Goddess 4 Comments
By coincidence, I happened last Monday to go into our dark dingy basement and was struck by an amaryllis bulb in full bloom. The bulb has a long history: we gave it as a gift to a friend years ago, but when she moved to NOLA, she gave it back. It bloomed for us last autumn, then in December was put into storage where it was forgotten. With neither soil, nor water, nor light it pushed up again into its full gorgeous flower.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” With the flowering amaryllis as a miraculous symbol, we now search for seven wise women, and shall begin with Wisdom, itself.
In the beginning is the question, “Whence, wherefore and whither Wisdom?” “Whence” is an archaic word meaning “from where” which leads us to the “Goddess of Heaven.” At the beginning of civilization, throughout the Fertile Crescent – the Near Middle East – the Goddess of Heaven embodied themes of love, war, fertility and motherhood. Circa 4,000 BCE she was “Inanna” to the Sumerians, “Ishtar” in Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian cultures, “Astarte/Ashtoreth” to the Canaanites, later she was “Hera/Juno” to the Greek and Romans, “Nut” to the Egyptians. A Babylonian cunieform circa 1850 BCE references Venus as the “bright Queen of Heaven.”
Robert Graves, in his oracular masterpiece, “The White Goddess” writes, “…the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry – ‘true’ in the nostalgic modern sense of ’the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute.”
Taking the form of the Goddess of Heaven in the Near Middle East or the Moon Goddess in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, Wisdom was a celestial woman, worshipped. But then Abraham appeared circa 2100 to 1900 BCE and brought transformational change, slowly over millennia.
Karen Armstrong, the scholar of comparative religion, calls this “the Great Transformation” so that by the 9th century BCE the religious and philosophical traditions of our present day were laid down: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece.
Robert Graves had this to say, “The [poetic] language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilineal of matrilineal institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes. Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called Classical) was elaborated in honor of their patron Apollo….”
The Old Testament, Book of Jeremiah 7:18 condemns the Goddess of Heaven: “The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger” (KJV). Hellfire and brimstone has had it in for women since the beginning. Armstrong describes the epochal change as the Axial Age, when the monotheistic male deity arose and the Queen of Heaven and Moon Goddess recede.
Wisdom is not gender specific, so let us consider “wherefore” which means “an explanation.” What then is wisdom? Webster’s Dictionary, Second Edition, (c) 1947 provides this definition, n, 1. quality of being wise; ability to judge soundly and deal sagaciously with facts, esp. as they relate to life and conduct; knowledge, with the capacity to make due use of it; perception to the best ends and the best means; discernment and judgement; discretion, sagacity. 2. scientific or philosophical knowledge; erudition; learning; as, the wisdom of the Egyptians, 5. a person embodying wisdom; — used as a title of honor or respect. Archaic.
Wisdom is insight, not knowledge; understanding, not facts; nuanced, not either/or. Albert Einstein said, “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” Bertrand Russell said “To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” Socrates said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
Socrates, the paragon of Greek rational thought, was taught by a woman. Aspasia of Miletus taught him rhetoric and the art of dialectic, and her intellectual salons, frequented by Plato, Socrates and Pericles, are believed to have shaped his thinking. In Plato’s Symposium Socrates says that he was taught the “philosophy of love” by a woman.
Diotima of Mantinea taught that love drives the individual to seek beauty, first in beautiful bodies – earthly beauty – then as one grows in wisdom, to seek spiritual beauty. Diotima taught that the correct use of physical love is to direct one’s mind to the love of wisdom, which is philosophy.
The path to wisdom seems shaped by women. And so we come to “whither,” which is “to where” does the path of wisdom lead? Ralph Waldo Emerson said simply, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Rumi was simpler still: “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
In the coming weeks we will tell stories of wise women. An ambitious goal, a list of 7, but more likely 7 times 7, or even 77 wise women. They are more numerous than the stars in the sky. The queens of heaven, indeed.
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At our Art Farm, the lavender, coneflower and echinacea exclaim, a celestial harmony our eyes behold.
1/2 = whole
Posted: July 4, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, What is an Art Farm | Tags: law of attraction, portland cement, rumi, Zeno of Elea 1 Comment
Last October I was in Solitary Confinement, working in our Farmhouse crawlspace to stabilize the floor system of the Ell; a grueling but necessary task. This week I encountered Zeno’s Paradox as I began work on the foundation wall. The floor having been stabilized, I will now remove the entire perimeter wall and then rebuild from the ground up, while working below the house. “Pick your poison” as the saying goes.
Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher and mathematician. He was a student of Parmenides who taught monism – essentially, that all life is one – and as such duality and plurality are illusions of the senses. Zeno, a thinker of profound proportion, created logical paradoxes to demonstrate the absurd consequences of common assumptions about motion, change and plurality. The paradoxes of motion, considered his strongest and most famous, were summarized by Aristotle as follows, “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”
Suppose a Greek peripatetic Philosopher wished to walk to the end of a path. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before arriving halfway, he must get a quarter of the way. Before traveling a quarter, one-eighth; before one-eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. Thus one must complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility given that time is finite. I trust the reader will understand why beginning an Ell foundation rebuild seems like an infinite task.
In 1830 when our farmhouse was built, the carpenter/farmers foraged for materials. Using horse or oxen they would have gone out into the fields to pull boulders back to the job site. Heavy lifting, then a hole was dug (by hand) into which the rocks and boulders were stacked one on top of the other. Mortar and concrete were not used on the foundation, just “dry stack” of large stones in a hole. This is referred to as a “rubble foundation,” which Frank Lloyd Wright used extensively throughout his career.
On top of the rubble a course of bricks were laid, upon which the post and beam structure was built. Mortar in the 1830s was different from concrete today. In 1824 Joseph Aspdin, a British bricklayer, invented Portland Cement by heating clay and limestone at high temperatures to form a strong hydraulic cement. He named his discovery in honor of the stones of the Isle of Portland, in the English Channel, just off the County of Dorset. But South Portland, Maine was a long way from the Isle of Portland, and the makers of this home did not use Portland Cement on their bricks; the mortar they used has disintegrated over these 200 years. And so my challenge of tasks seems to expand, endlessly.
Two and a half millennia after Zeno of Elea posed his paradoxes, their essential truth still challenges the rational mind. It is noteworthy that they were resolved – dare I say – by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, more commonly known as Rumi. Essentially he was a monist, seeing the interconnectedness of all beings and the unity of existence. He embraced humanity – all humanity – and believed empathy can foster harmony and inclusion.
He currently ranks among the highest selling poets in the USA, and is revered around the globe; in a time so divisive, this is noteworthy. Consider this poem:
When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety;
If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without any pain.
From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me.
There is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it.
More commonly this is described as “The Law of Attraction,” which states “the good you seek is seeking you; you only need go halfway.”
And so we can resolve Zeno’s paradox through the mystical insight of the poet, and my foundational task becomes easier. I have hired a journeyman philosopher/carpenter far wiser than I, and hope to hire a crew of workers far stronger than I, so that as a team we shall overcome.
Seven Sages
Posted: June 27, 2025 Filed under: consciousness, Little Green Thumbs, What is an Art Farm | Tags: akpallu, Hammurabai, hokmah, kwan yin, saptarishi, Solon 1 Comment
The tradition of the Seven Sages is common to ancient China, India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. The sages, although different to each culture, always are the enlightened souls who brought wisdom.
To the Chinese, they were the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” a group of scholars, writers and musicians of the 3rd century CE. In India, the “Saptarishi” are seven of semi-immortal status, the seers extolled in the Vedas, the sacred texts “not of a man, superhuman…authorless,” revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense yogic meditation. To the Hindu, the seven stars of the Big Dipper represent these seven sages; the Dipper’s handle points to the North Star by which countless wise men have traveled the globe.
The “Apkallu” were the sages of Mesopotamia, the primordial beings, demigods, part man and part fish or bird, associated with human wisdom. In the 7th century BCE Greece, the seven were the philosophers, statesmen, poets and lawgivers renowned for their wisdom. Solon of Athens, a statesman and poet, is honored for his legal reforms, which shaped democracy. Pittacus of Mytilene governed Lesbos where he reduced the power of the nobility, to govern with the support of the common people. Thales of Miletus was a mathematician and astronomer, credited with predicting a solar eclipse, is said to have coined the aphorism “Know thyself,” which was engraved on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.
The “Seven Wise Masters” is a cycle of stories of Sanskrit, Persian or Hebrew origins, which through the “Seven Sages of Rome” was passed down to German, English, French and Spanish in the form of popular street literature published throughout early modern Europe.
A modern version of this tradition resides above the doors of the House Chamber in the U.S. Capital, known as the “Relief Portrait Plaques of Lawgivers.” Seven (sic) sculptors carved bas relief plaques, using white Vermont marble, to honor 23 governing figures across world culture: Hammurabi, Justinian, Solon, Suleiman, Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson rank among these lawmakers, while Moses holds center court.
Of note, across all of these cultures, all of the sages are men.
In my experience, women rank among the sages who have helped shape my path. It is rather stunning to pause and consider the inherent bias, among world cultures, over millennia, that males alone are the sages. Wisdom, as an abstract concept, would be considered gender-neutral. But grammatically, the word “wisdom” – “hokmah” in Hebrew and “Sophia” in Greek – is feminine. Personified in literature, such as in the Book of Proverbs, wisdom is depicted as a female, referred to as “She” and “Lady Wisdom.
I should like to undertake a summer project to compile a list of the “Seven Women Sages.” It seems a Herculean task to select only seven, but such could be a worthy first pass at this project.
I should like to invite my readers to weigh in on this topic. Over coming weeks I shall endeavor to find stories of great women who have walked among us. Some may be a grandmother, or school nurse, others may be dominant figures of their times, but all shall be told as a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom of the Seven Sages.
In these chaotic times we do well to restore balance.
Note: Thanks go out to David Purpur who helped with information on the Vedic rishis.
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Our garden pushes ever higher: the Cuke climbs its trellis, fruit forms on the vine, pole beans push tendrils ever higher, greens come daily, grapes reach outward, lavendar is lush, potatoes have been hilled.
an Art Farm 