For thousands of years in Egypt, She was honored as the Goddess of Writing, the creator of the written word. She was known as Mistress of the House of Books, a deity of Wisdom, Astronomy, Astrology, Architecture, and Mathematics.
She was also called upon as “Sesheta” which means hidden things, mysteries, secrets.
I found an amazing chart in Gimbutas’ The Language of the Goddess. It’s a hand drawn set of symbols that have been found on hundreds of Bird-Goddess figures and objects from the Vinca culture, 5200 – 4000 BCE. Vinca symbols, our earliest proto-writing, predates even Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform by thousands of years.
The most amazing thing to me was the chevrons, < > . I’d been hoping to begin to find a relationship between early written languages and those of code… and if I’d MADE THIS UP it couldn’t have been more perfect ! All of our computer languages use braces (chevrons). The character < tells a program that a line of code is beginning and the > character ends the function or snippet of code.
I thought I was doing a painting of a Neolithic Goddess, using the Vinca symbols, thats what I set out to do. But in the end it was a portrait of Marija Gimbutas herself.
Gimbutas fans should also check out the wonderful Signs out of Time.
Some school systems are caving to the pressure from rightwing lunatics.
I sent an email to our school superintendent today, thanking him for his SANITY. He answered me immediately, with a thank you for your support.
Have people gone completely insane ?!? How can there be THIS many ignorant hateful people around me ?
Reading the comments online about this on our local newspaper website has given me a splitting headache. I’m embarrassed for these people, and I’m also somewhat shocked.
There was a healthcare reform town hall meeting last night held by my conservative rep Sue Myrick, and Ron and I went. We didn’t get there early enough, so were not able to sit together. BIG mistake.
There were maybe 600 people there ( maybe twice that many ? dunno) and I only counted a half dozen progressives. All the things I’d read and heard in the news about the conservatives attending these meetings were so very true. The huge vitriol and anger is not actually about healthcare, it was about racism (including some raising of arms in heil hitler manner every time Obama’s name was mentioned), it was about anti abortion sentiment (the blood on the hands of liberal democrats from the murder of unborn babies and old people), lots of communist/socialist commentary, and a HUGE amount of time went to very frightening anti immigrant rhetoric. Death panels and books, bizarre fears about Obama czars and citizen militias, interment camps for conservatives (wtf ??) you name it, I heard every weirdo thing mentioned, all accompanied by thunderous applause and rude awful things being shouted.
I almost took my teenage daughter with me but she stayed home to do homework. I’m now glad she wasn’t there, it felt a lot less safe than I was expecting, even though there was a huge police presence.
There seemed to be some non local orchestrated people present, but that was not at all the whole of it, there were many many local people. All in all it was WAY more frightening than I was expecting, the hostility of that crowd was unbelievable. I did not go intending to speak, but once there in that crowd felt I needed to stand up and be counted.
I stood in line to speak, one of only four non-conservatives who spoke. If there were more of us in the crowd who didn’t speak I understand why, it was a scary scary room ! By the time I was close to the mic in line I realized that the energy in the front of the room was just as bad as it was in the back where I’d been sitting. Fear and intimidation works. There were many things that I passionately believe that I would NOT have risked saying aloud in that environment. I’m no chickenshit, and trust me, I was scared.
I identified myself first as a small business owner and person of faith, said that my support of universal healthcare is because I consider this a moral issue. I made a few other points, but the room was so very hostile and scary, I was way too nervous to remember things that were in my head. One man was escorted out by police when he wouldn’t stop screaming at a woman with liberal views who spoke before I did. I also called the crowd out on their rude hostile behavior, which I actually got a little less of than the 3 liberal people who spoke before me. I tried to be kind and gracious when I spoke, that helped too. There was what seemed to be a stunned silence when I was speaking, at least at first. Ron told me later that when one guy sitting behind him who was yelling at me to shut up and sit down etc. he (Ron) turned and used his best school teacher voice to tell him “that was RUDE” and that guy actually shut up !
I’m still reeling a little, I haven’t seen shit like that in a long time. I also don’t think I’ve ever been present for something like this where there were so very few other likeminded people present. It’s a very different thing to be so alone in that kind of crowd.
When we were at Wilson’s Creek I watched whitewater paddlers navigating tricky and dangerous rapids. Brave, I would never have attempted it. As we watched, the girls climbing large rocks for a better view I saw some of the paddlers noticing the us. It reminded me of the stories of Sirens, if the paddlers paid more attention to the girls than the river they would surely crash and burn. My glee at discovering the modern day white water Sirens stayed with me, so I painted them.
Sirens are an old old concept. Their first incarnation in our collective stories are as old as Bird-Snake Goddess figures and cave paintings. In old Greek stories the Sirens were the sister girlfriends of Persephone, growing wings to search for Her after the descent into the underworld. In medieval times they were referred to as Sirens of the Philosophers, revealers of the mysteries. There is a great deal of overlap between Sirens and Mermaids, in some languages the word is even the same. Images of Sirens/Mermaids as Goddess exist in multiple cultures and geographies, one of the earliest Siren images is of Freya, there’s also Derceto (Palestine), Yemaya (Africa), Tirgata (Syria), Aphrodite of course, and abundant images in Thailand, India, China…
