The Feminine Divine in Boston: Knowledge and Wisdom

When you enter the Boston Public Library from Dartmouth Street, you are confronted with six brass relief doors. They are epic and subtle at the same time. Each door features a different image: Music and Poetry to the left, Truth and Romance to the right, and Knowledge and Wisdom in the middle. The middle doors are generally open.  This makes them harder to see, because of the lighting and foot traffic, but it also puts them in dialogue with each other. While I’m sure the artist intentionally put them together as a pair, I don’t know if he intentionally thought about them facing each other when the doors were open. Either way, I love it.

Knowledge is depicted as a masculine figure. He holds up on his shoulder a large bound book with his left hand. With his right hand he holds up triumphantly an astrolabe. He can read and calculate numbers, skills we are not hardwired for, but must labor at. He looks out at the viewer with a penetrating gaze. This is an outward looking, intellectually rigorous way of knowing. He wears a laurel wreath on his cocked head. He is proud of his accomplishments. His robe barely covers him and looks like an afterthought. He seeks to hide nothing and uncover everything.

Wisdom is depicted as a feminine figure. Her robes are intricately woven. They almost cover her entire body and she has them pulled over her head. This is an inward looking way of being. It requires humility (which is a good thing and different from humiliation which is not). She holds in her right hand a caduceus. Two snakes, symbols of life and death, are bound together and are the source of the staff’s power. In her left hand she holds a covered chalice. The chalice is a vessel of transformation, growth, metamorphosis. Think of communion wine transmuted in the cup, the new human that grows in the womb, the powerful potion in the witch’s goblet. She travels deep within mystery and is transformed by it.

We live in a world that generally values masculine Knowledge over feminine Wisdom, and that, predictably enough, contains a few who have rebelled against this by rejecting Knowledge in favor of Wisdom. What I think Wisdom knows, what she says to Knowledge while standing across from him all day long is what the caduceus teaches her. We need both, and we need them bound together. 

The next time you go into the Boston Public Library I hope you pause a moment to look at these images. I hope you are blessed by them as you walk between them. I hope you find both Knowledge and the inspiration to seek Wisdom in the books and music and movies and art and quiet and noise that that beautiful old library contains. 

The Bacchante at the Boston Public Library

Deep inside the Boston Public Library is this statue - the Bacchante, she’s called, a female follower of Bacchus. We know Bacchus as the Roman God of wine and merriment, but he was actually much more than that. In the early period of Roman history his name was Liber Pater, the free father, and he was associated with the inherent freedom and dignity of the individual man. (He had a female counterpart named Libera,) Later the Liber Pater was associated with the Greek god Bacchus, who was often portrayed as a young, feminine male, one of the ancient deities that blended and defied gender norms. As Bacchus he was worshiped by people, including women, who found in his communities of worshippers a relationship with the divine that was separate from the state and the family. Bacchus represented the ecstatic aspect of human experience and he was worshiped in that spirit. In countless Roman carvings his worshippers follow him in processions, wild and merry and fey. There's was a full-bodied worship free of inhibition, a wild state of being. The Bacchante statue is a reminder in the Boston Public Library, a temple to the intellectual and carefully executed, that we cannot just live in our heads, but also freely and wildly in our bodies. To experience the Feminine Divine is to know ecstasy.

I was here some years ago with my daughters. My younger daughter was five and had just spent a year in Catholic preschool. We were sitting at a table having a snack and she kept glancing over at the statue. Finally she said “Mom, I’ll be right back.” She walked over to the edge of the fountain and sat with her legs folded underneath her and her hands in her lap staring up at the statue. And I realized, after a moment, that she saw this statue as Mary holding Jesus. What a wonderful idea that is to me- the Bacchante as Mary- a fully-embodied, uninhibited woman holding her son and showing him the grapes, showing him his future, with joy on her face.

The Feminine Divine in Copley Square

 

This stained glass window resides in the Gordon Chapel at Old South Church in Boston. The red shape behind Christ is called a mandorla. In Italian the word means almond. It is a womb symbol, a symbol of the creative and transformative aspects of the Feminine Divine. It is also a symbol of the universality of the Feminine Divine. In our patriarchal culture, we still think that the masculine is for everyone and the feminine for women. For example, books with main characters who are girls or women are marketed solely to girls and women, while books featuring main characters who are boys or men are marketed to everyone. The womb symbol reminds us that the Feminine Divine concerns all of creation. The shape is created by overlapping two circles - one male and one female, just as the male and female parts are brought together in a womb to create a new being. As our belly buttons attest, we all began our earthly lives in a womb.

This mandorla frames the resurrected Christ. Christ steps out of the tomb, which is itself a second womb in our Mother Earth. The symbol draws a line from the Cosmic Womb of the Feminine Divine through Mary’s womb within which Jesus was incarnated to Jesus’s tomb in our Mother Earth within which Jesus was transformed into his resurrected form.