Stuart Dean

E Pluribus Unum and The Unrecognized Black Goddess of Rome by Stuart Dean

E pluribus unum (‘EPU’), which first began to be used by the U.S. in the 18th century, comes from a poem entitled Moretum that until well into the 19th century was generally attributed to Vergil. During those centuries Latin would have been studied from what was the equivalent of today’s elementary school through at least high school. Because Vergil is to the study of Latin what Shakespeare is to the study of English, Moretum would have been read by anyone lucky enough to receive formal education in those centuries–mostly boys–including the white sons of slave owners.

Those boys, however, would have been motivated not just to read, but to memorize Moretum. That is because Moretum, through a variety of clues, encourages allegorical interpretations, one of which is that it celebrates the sexual intercourse of a single white farmer and his sole companion, his black female slave. Such an interpretation requires ignoring the clues that the author thinks of such sex as rape (as anyone other than a male slave owner would); those clues lead me to think the author may have been a woman.

Illustration of Moretum from a 1558 edition of the works of Vergil available here.

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Sappho, Frankincense, and Female Spirituality by Stuart Dean

White Howjary Frankincense (photo: Trygve Harris (www.enfleurage.com))

Sappho is the first Greek author to attest to the usage of frankincense. The word she uses to refer to it (libanos) is what comparative linguists call a ‘loan word,’ in this case from ancient South Arabic (the root meaning of which is ‘white’), the language spoken in the only region in the world still now, as then, where the trees grow that produce the resin that is frankincense (the finest being White Howjary from near Salalah Oman).

This was long before Amazon Same-Day Prime: that frankincense even made it to where Sappho was is astonishing given the thousands of miles of desert terrain that had to be covered. That fact plus the fact that Sappho chose to use the Arabic word for frankincense suggests it must have been of special importance to her. How important can be seen in the power she attributes to it. In one prayer poem (S.2, composite translation and very brief notes here) she completes a stanza by referring to frankincense burning from Aphrodite’s altars; she completes the very next stanza with a reference to ‘sleep falling.’ The parallelism implies a reciprocity: the smoke goes up, the sleep comes down and a stanza later, there is Aphrodite. Continue reading “Sappho, Frankincense, and Female Spirituality by Stuart Dean”

Aphrodite in Bagram Afghanistan & The ‘Friend of the World’ of the Flower Ornament Scripture by Stuart Dean

Stuart WordPress photo

In the 1930s two ancient storerooms in Afghanistan near what is now the Bagram US Air Base were discovered by French archaeologists and unsealed for the first time in about two thousand years. They contained artifacts from all over the ancient world, evidencing just how active trade then was along the complex network of routes known collectively as the Silk Road. Among the artifacts in one of the storerooms was a plaster statuette of Aphrodite (‘Bagram Aphrodite’).

BagramAphrodite Though it is not known what the motivation originally was for acquiring the Bagram Aphrodite, its presence in Afghanistan arguably evinces an interest in female spirituality–if not in the owner of the storerooms then among some of the people in the market for which she may have been destined. Evidence of such interest among Buddhists is to be found in the Flower Ornament Scripture (FOS), a compendium of sutras dated to approximately the same time (and possibly the same region) as the storeroom containing the Bagram Aphrodite. Female spiritual figures, both mortal and immortal, some portrayed as having official positions, others without any, are prominent in the final chapter of the FOS, so prominent that one scholar suggests Buddhist women of the time in some way influenced its composition (see Douglas Osto, Power, Women and Wealth in Indian Mahayana Buddhism).

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Sappho’s Prescription For A Healthy Heart & the Taoist/Buddhist Concept of Forget (忘)

Stuart WordPress photo A two line fragment of Sappho’s poetry (S.120) reads:

But I am not one to keep venting my anger:
Rather I let some things in my heart go unspoken

Sappho’s word choices here make this as difficult as any of her fragments to appreciate in translation. Yet, not only do those choices make attribution of this fragment to Sappho secure, they also manifest her importance in an area for which she rarely receives attention: early Greek medical thinking. One reason her importance in that regard is largely unnoticed is that Western medicine in general has abandoned its own tradition, retaining only the nomenclature and some of the symbolism of early Greek medicine. Continue reading “Sappho’s Prescription For A Healthy Heart & the Taoist/Buddhist Concept of Forget (忘)”

Buddhas In Snowflakes, Enlightenment In A Bathtub

This year’s Tibet House Benefit Concert coincided with a snowstorm in Manhattan and though snow is not uncommon in Manhattan (especially this past season), it is particularly associated with Tibet and its high, perennially snow covered peaks. The timing of the snowstorm was thus peculiarly appropriate, leading Robert Thurman, US President of the Tibet House, to muse in his opening remarks about there being Buddhas in the snowflakes.

I was lucky enough to attend that concert thanks to my wife and some of her colleagues being invited by Thurman to attend in appreciation for work they had done on a book consisting of a collection of speeches by the Dalai Lama, My Appeal to the World. Snow had been a topic of conversation at the dinner we had before the concert not just because of the coincidence of the snowstorm and concert, but also because one person in our group had recently broken her wrist slipping on what was left from an earlier snowstorm. She was lamenting being sidelined from her yoga practice, at which point I brought up the topic of the therapeutic benefits of bathing. As is typical of dinner conversations, that quickly morphed into a discussion of other issues; soon it was time for the concert and off we went.

Several weeks later, while taking a bath after my own yoga practice, as I often do, it occurred to me that being in a bathtub was analogous to being in a snowflake–a very large and warmed up snowflake. The basis for the analogy is that ‘buddha’ is not a name but commonly interpreted to be the past participle of a verb, the primary meaning of which is to awaken. The roots of Indo-European (IE) verbs only refer to bare existence or an action and as such can ‘belong’ to any noun (person, place or thing) of any gender (female, male or neuter). Any person of any gender can be ‘awake.’ As a participle ‘buddha’ is a hybrid–part verb and part noun–and thus specifies gender (masculine), but that is an artifact of grammar, a way of speaking, that manifests its interdependence with other elements of language and how that language is used at any particular point in time.

There are a number of fascinating implications in analyzing language in this way (what used to be called ‘speculative grammar’ in Medieval times), but the single most important is that by itself language is not particularly enlightening, but rather quite dependent upon the context in which it is used. It helps explain why the tradition of rejecting textual authority in favor of direct enlightenment, the ‘moment of zen,’ became particularly prominent in Chinese, Korean and Japanese Buddhism. The grammatical differences between Sanskrit and Chinese are relatively substantial compared, for example, to those between any one IE language and another IE language. Grappling with translating and interpreting first Sanskrit and then Chinese and then Korean or Japanese, seems to have heightened the sensitivity to the limitations of language, especially with respect to spiritual beliefs and practices.

This aspect of Buddhism can be readily demonstrated to share roots in an equally ancient tradition of Greek poetic culture. It seems, however, that the guardians of the text based religious traditions emanating primarily from regions controlled directly or indirectly, at one time or another, by Roman emperors, are more than happy to let that aspect of the Western heritage go unnoticed. Instead these guardians seem to emulate the command and control tactics of Roman emperors with what can be fairly characterized as intellectual imperialism.

Because of its importance to all such traditions, Song of Songs (Songs) is a useful example to cite. Only by walling off a substantial amount of evidence is it possible to prevent Songs from being seen to be in part or whole a product of female spirituality that celebrates sexuality in a manner a Buddhist would identify as tantric. Proof that is exactly what the guardians of the text based religious traditions have been doing is not hard to find, for the fact that few women have authoritative positions within any organization associated with such traditions is an artifact of just such a wall.

Such tactics ironically expose the vulnerability of these traditions to decline and fall. One way that might happen can be discerned in what happened to Buddhism as it spread east. It was creatively interpreted in harmony with a far more ancient tradition of nature worship associated with early Taoism, a tradition that privileges individual artistic expression, such as poetry, over textual study or ritualized recitation. That tradition is comparable to the Western philosophy of nature evidenced, for example, in the poetry of the ancient mystic Greek of Sicily, Empedocles.

Though I have referred to this philosophy in previous posts, I hope to discuss it in more detail in upcoming ones as it relates both to ancient traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism as well as to how spirituality might evolve in the future. Suffice it for now to say that what is essential is appreciating that experience itself is the ultimate, authoritative a priori of all spirituality. That can mean doing yoga, meditating upon snowflakes or sloshing about in a tub of water.

Eventually, though, it leads within, to what the poet Holderlin calls ‘Innigkeit,’ a state of inwardness that is itself speechless, but which is the source of poetic/artistic inspiration. That is in an essay on Empedocles, but given what was then known about him, Holderlin was largely projecting onto Empedocles his own beliefs (shared with his friend Schelling) about nature, with “all her melodies,” as the ultimate source of inspiration. Decades after that essay was written, Schelling used Innigkeit in a lecture on mythology to translate a key term from the Bhagavad Gita: yoga, a term that as used there many scholars today think betrays Buddhist influence. Several other translations were then available and it seems likely Schelling’s unprecedented choice of Innigkeit was an homage to Holderlin.

As it happens, substantial new fragments of Empedocles’s poetry were discovered in the 1990s. In 2004, after piecing together those fragments with many of the other previously discovered ones, Richard Janko suggested Empedocles should be thought of as the Greek equivalent of Buddha. Be that as it may, there is no question who Empedocles would say is in snowflakes: Aphrodite.

Stuart Dean has a B.A. (Tulane, 1976) and J.D. (Cornell, 1995) and is currently an independent researcher and writer living in New York City. Previously he worked in a variety of other capacities, including 15 years as a corporate attorney.

Poppaea & Paul: Was This About A Female Challenge To Male Privilege? by Stuart Dean

Poppaea Sabina as portrayed on a Roman coin minted 62-65 CE.

As suggested in my first post on Poppaea it is likely she knew one or more of the women Paul refers to in Romans. Of particular interest is the woman Paul refers to as his ‘mother’ (Romans 16:13). If Poppaea knew her she surely knew about Paul. If that was the case, then it seems all but certain Poppaea was among those members of the imperial household to whom Paul refers at Philippians 4:22. Corroboration of that may have been in the source(s) of an anecdote Saint John Chrysostom tells, attributing Paul’s incarceration and execution to Nero’s anger at his interaction with a woman with whom Nero was erotically involved.

Though it is difficult to place much reliance on Chrysostom’s anecdote without more knowledge about his source(s), in the aggregate the evidence for Poppaea knowing about or even meeting with Paul is relatively strong, especially when compared to the sort of evidentiary problems with which ancient historians regularly grapple. Furthermore, it is easy to spot the issue Poppaea would have focused on (that precisely because it relates to sexuality could have led in antiquity to the sort of distortion or misunderstanding of her motivation in meeting with Paul) that may underlie Chrysostom’s anecdote: circumcision. The problem with understanding that issue today, however, ironically relates to modern perceptions of no relevance whatsoever to the ancient evidence. Continue reading “Poppaea & Paul: Was This About A Female Challenge To Male Privilege? by Stuart Dean”

Astrology and Its Relevance to the Jewish (and Christian) Belief of Poppaea by Stuart Dean

As a follow up to my last post on Poppaea Sabina, I want to focus on Poppaea’s interest in astrology, one of the few facts about her that can be confirmed independently of the hostile (and hence questionable) depiction of her by the Roman historian Tacitus, who, apart from Josephus, is the primary source of information about her. Indeed, she may have practiced astrology, for as Empress she was given a celestial sphere on her birthday by the poet Leonidas, who said it was a gift “worthy . . . of her learning.” Another possible indication of Poppaea’s special interest in astrology is the fact that a large banquet hall in the Roman imperial mansion built during Nero’s reign (recently discovered), probably conceived of and designed before Poppaea’s death (perhaps with her input), had some rotational feature, effectively making it a planetarium.

Though Tacitus thus would appear to be accurate on Poppaea’s interest in astrology, there is good reason to be wary of sharing his negative opinion about it. He never expressly explains himself on the issue, but it is not hard to spot what bothered Tacitus about astrology and hence Poppaea. Famous for his appreciation of freedom of speech, Tacitus wistfully looked back on a time when that was a freedom enjoyed only by men. By contrast, ancient astrology was but one part of a comprehensive philosophy of nature that viewed the entire cosmos as governed equally by male–and female–powers. Continue reading “Astrology and Its Relevance to the Jewish (and Christian) Belief of Poppaea by Stuart Dean”

Poppaea Sabina: A Victim of Domestic Violence– But Why Does That Matter Now? by Stuart Dean

It has been nearly 2000 years since the Roman emperor Nero kicked his pregnant and sick wife, Poppaea Sabina (hereafter Poppaea), killing her and what was probably the near full term fetus she was carrying. That Poppaea was murdered deliberately should not be doubted, for not long after her death Nero had her son by an earlier marriage, who was then still a minor, killed by being drowned (a fishing ‘accident’).

Given that domestic violence has a history that repeats itself with sickening regularity it is necessary to explain why this particular case should matter now. It is because at the time of her murder Poppaea was, with the sole exception of her murderer, the wealthiest and most powerful person in the world, whose attention was curiously focused not on Italy or Rome but on Judaea and Jerusalem. There is evidence to suggest that had Poppaea not been murdered the history of Judaism and Christianity would have been substantially different than it has been, especially with respect to the role of women. Continue reading “Poppaea Sabina: A Victim of Domestic Violence– But Why Does That Matter Now? by Stuart Dean”

Sappho and Ancient India: The Connection and its Implications by Stuart Dean

Stuart WordPress photo Sappho was a metrical virtuoso. Many of her fragments survive because they were quoted solely to illustrate otherwise unattested metrical forms. Indeed, there is no precedent or parallel in the poetry of other ancient Greeks for both the range of meters Sappho used as well as the individual characteristics of certain of such meters. The only obvious precedent is in the meters of the Vedic hymns of the Rsis of ancient India.

That may not seem to be a big deal, but it is. One takeaway is that Sappho represents a very old tradition of poetry. Exactly how old is impossible to say. The similarities between Sappho’s meters and those of the Rsis may reflect a poetic tradition common to each that is even older than their respective traditions.

One Vedic aspect of some of Sappho’s meters is that the first two syllables could be either long or short. Again, this by itself may not seem to be a big deal, especially compared, for example, to the improvisational elements of modern jazz. But it does represent an unusual degree of freedom compared to all other ancient Greek poetry. Continue reading “Sappho and Ancient India: The Connection and its Implications by Stuart Dean”

The Sphere: A Symbol of Ancient Greek Female Spirituality by Stuart Dean

Stuart WordPress photo Originally, in ancient Greek, ‘sphere’ simply meant ‘ball.’ Though its grammatical gender varied, it was primarily a feminine noun. It is in that sense and with that gender that it bounces into Western literature in the episode of the Odyssey where Nausicaa and her companions are playing catch on a beach (Odyssey 6.100 ff).

Nausicaa is said to be conducting her companions in ‘molpe,’ a curious term that seems to refer to dancing, music and poetry as a single form of performance art. Authorship (including possibly female authorship) and dates of individual episodes of the Odyssey remain debatable, but both from this episode as well evidence from other sources there is no doubt that in general what Nausicaa and her companions are doing here relates to an actual custom among Greek women that dates back to well before writing was adopted. Furthermore, molpe was spiritually significant. As the conductor of its performance Nausicaa is compared to Artemis.

The reference to Artemis as one of those who ‘holds heaven’ (Odyssey 6.150), suggests that the sphere with which Nausicaa and her companions are playing may have been intended (at least by the author of this episode) to be a symbol of the celestial sphere. That suggestion is bolstered by an appeal to what is to be found in the fragments that survive of the poetry of Sappho, who it is readily apparent considered herself as much a musician and choreographer as a poet. That is to say, whereas Nausicaa may be a fictional persona, with Sappho we have the only direct evidence of any substance directly from an actual woman of what constituted molpe. From how she refers to a female performer of molpe as goddess-like (S. 96), followed immediately by a comparison of yet another woman’s beauty to that of the moon, as well as other fragments of poems where either the appearance or movement of women in connection with a molpe performance is related to celestial events such as the appearance of a full moon or the movement of the Pleiades, it is clear that for Sappho choreography was in effect applied cosmology (see S. 154 and S. 34 and how it is surely echoed in a much later Latin poem here). Continue reading “The Sphere: A Symbol of Ancient Greek Female Spirituality by Stuart Dean”