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.