Mayan Ball Court Shows Ties to the Celestial

Mexico: Mayan ball court was celestial 'marker'

October 5, 2012 RSS Feed Print

By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican archaeologists say they have determined that the ancient Mayas built watchtower-style structures atop the ceremonial ball court at the temples of Chichen Itza to observe the equinoxes and solstices, and they said Friday that the discovery adds to understanding of the many layers of ritual significance that the ball game had for the culture.

The structures sit atop the low walls of the court, where the Mayas played a game that consisted, as far as experts can tell, of knocking a heavy, latex ball with their elbows, knees or hips, through a stone ring set in the walls.

The bases of the structures — essentially, look-out boxes set atop the walls, each one with a small slit running through it —had been detected before, but archaeologist hadn't been sure what they were used for. Since the ball court was built around 864 A.D., the boxes and the stairs leading to them had crumbled.

The government's National Institute of Anthropology and History announced Thursday that the boxes had been 90-percent reconstructed, based on the stone footings that remained. Late last year and early this year, a team led by archaeologist Jose Huchim confirmed that the sun shone through the slit-like openings when the setting sun touches the horizon at the winter solstice.

The sun's rays also formed a diagonal pattern at the equinox in the slit-like openings, which are about tall enough to stand up in.

Huchim said he knew of no similar structures at other Mayan ball courts. "This is the place where we're finding this type of pasaje (structure)," Huchim said. He said a stone structure atop a ball court at the nearby ruin site of Uxmal appeared to have been used as a sort of spectators' stand for elite audiences.

Huchim said the slits may have been used to determine when ball matches were played, given that the ball itself, as it was knocked through the air by the players, may have been seen as imitating the sun's arc as it passed through the sky.

It may have also been used "like a calendar, to mark important periods for agriculture," like planting the core crop of corn.

Finally, Huchim noted that old descriptions of the ball courts sometimes depicted people atop the walls, and that they may have been acting as umpires in the game.

Huchim said Thursday that stairways to the structures are being restored so visitors can observe the phenomenon.

Boston University archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli, who was not involved in the project, said the solar sighting lines were part of "part of Maya architecture and cosmology."

"The fact that the sun rise can be observed behind a structure should be understood in that sense, as reverence to the sun or other star, not necessarily as an observatory in the technical sense," Estrada-Belli said. The orientation of the structures "emphasized the sacrality of the ritual space."

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

Shake-Up in "Caveman" Gender Assumptions

Oh, those assumptions we all carry around with us.  Some of the most damaging are what we assume about the opposite sex, based on - smoke and mirrors, basically :)  Of course, the term "cavewoman" misleads people, thinking that this is much older than the Bronze Age.  In truth, since the tomb is dated to about 2000 BCE, it's around 4000 years old - HARDLY the stuff of so-called 'cave man." Ha!

Another assumption of the experts blown up!  I hear more explosions coming soon...

Article from The Austrian Independent

04. 10. 12. - 12:34

Cavewoman jeweller rewrites gender history

© europics.at

A skeleton uncovered north of Vienna is forcing archaeologists to take a fresh look at prehistoric gender roles after it appeared to be that of a female fine metal worker - a profession that was previously thought to have been carried out exclusively by men.
The Museum of Ancient History in Lower Austria says the grave originates from the Bronze Age around 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, and that the bones belonged to a woman who would have been aged between 45 and 60.
The museum says tools used to make metal ornaments were also found in the grave at Geitzendorf Northwest of Vienna, leading to the conclusion that it was that of a female fine metal worker who had been given the items to take with her into the afterlife.
The items included an anvil, hammers and flint chisels as well as some small items of dress jewellery that may well have been made by the woman herself.

In a statement Wednesday, museum expert Ernst Lauermann who led the examination of the grave said that although the pelvic bones were missing, examination of the skull and lower jaw bone that were found 145 cm under the surface showed the skeleton was a woman.

He added: "It was normal in those days for a person to be buried with the items that were part of their daily working lives."
He said the tools found would have most likely been used in the making of jewellery.
The grave was one of 15 found at the same site and currently being investigated by the museum staff.

Original Paper on the "Warrior Queen" of El-Peru Waka'

Published at Washington University, this is the original paper upon which recent news articles took their information.  It's in PDF format and - at least on this 'old' Toshiba laptop, took a few minutes to download.  "Wak" means centipede.  Queen K'abel herself, however, was a royal princess from the Clan Kan (snake). 

The Queen of El-Peru Waka' New Discoveries in an Ancient Maya Temple

During the seventh century AD the Wak (centipede) dynasty rulers were loyal vassals to the Kan (Snake) dynasty rulers. The Kan king Yuhknoom Ch’een the Great (600-686) conquered the Petén during his reign (636-686) and established an empire in the Maya lowlands. He was aided in this effort by the Wak king K’inich Bahlam II, to whom he married a woman of his family, the royal princess K’abel. K’abel ruled with her husband K’inich Bahlam for at least 20 years (672-692) although it is likely that she ruled longer than this. She was the military governor of the Wak kingdom for the emperor and she carried the title Kaloomte’, Supreme Warrior, higher in authority than her husband the king. She was the most powerful woman we know about in western Petén during the Kan Empire of the seventh century. She was of the same generation as the successor to Yuhknoom Ch’een, Yuhknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’. Experts in ancient Maya history believe that these two rulers were siblings and the children of Emperor Yuhknoom Ch’een. What is certain is that all three of these rulers figure prominently in the texts on carved monuments at El Perú-Waka’.

Kaloomte’ K’abel is well known in Maya archaeology because a beautiful portrait of her, El Peru Stela 34, was looted from El Perú-Waka’ in the sixties and is in the Cleveland Art Museum. K’inich Bahlam II on El Peru Stela 33 is in the Kimbell Art Museum and a replica of this monument will be installed at Waka’.
And here she is:

Okay, is it just me?  Doesn't the Queen have a particularly "European" nose???

Sooooo, as we know, the Serpent reared its head in the New World as well as the Old World, in unexpected ways, in the form of another powerful female.  Let he who has eyes, see....

State Budget Cuts Affect Access to Archives

Hola darlings!

Yeah, in the greater scheme of things, state budget cuts due - supposedly in response to the Great Depression II that we came out of in 2009 (according to the EXPERTS, ahem) means that the party of the Greedy and the Damned (Republicans) who are in control of various states' legislatures and governorships around the country (including, alas, in my home state of Wisconsin) keep cutting, cutting, cutting, while all the while their choice to run as President is telling us that if only we go back to the failed policies of the Bushite years that got us into this mess in the first place, we will be saved! 

Well, I read this and weep, people, because if it hasn't happened in your state yet, it will.  It's just another way of depriving people of their right to know guaranteed under state Constitutions that are now being trampled into the dust courtesy of the party of the Greedy and the Damned.  Just another way of dummying us down, too.  You know, 'Those who do not know their history....'

This story was originally posted at The New York Times.  It gets labeled as a - gasp! -  liberal bastion for pointing out inconvenient truths...

Budget Cuts to Hobble State Archives in Georgia
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: September 26, 2012

MORROW, Ga. — The Georgia Archives, which holds both historical curiosities and virtually every important state government document ever created, is about to become nearly impossible to visit.

 

In November, a round of government budget cuts will reduce the staff to three, one of them the maintenance man. Thousands of documents that pour in every month are likely to languish because no one will be available to sort through them, archives officials said. People who view accurate and open government records as the bedrock of democracy are outraged.

 

The move will make Georgia the only state without an archives open to the public on a regular basis. But this closing is simply the most severe symptom of a greater crisis facing permanent government collections in nearly every state, professional archivists say.

 

An amalgam of recession-driven budget cuts and fast-moving technological changes could result in a black hole of government information whose impact might not be understood for decades.

 

“When our humor gets black, we talk about this as a period of time that could be the Dark Ages for public records,” said Vicki Walch, the executive director of the Council of State Archivists. “Fifteen years on either side of the year 2000 is very dicey.”

 

Every state has an archive, which is mandated to hold the official records of government and, by default, the history of the state. Laws governing which records must be saved and for how long vary from state to state. But all archives offer a trove of information. One can track who met with a governor, trace the history of every state law, find out whether a particular person held a professional license and pore over tax records.

 

Genealogy is big business for archives, too. As part of a television series, the restaurateur and cookbook author Paula Deen searched for her family history at the Georgia building here and discovered an ancestor who once owned slaves.

 

The records are often used to settle legal disputes. When two Georgia counties were in a fight over the sales tax revenue from a lucrative Bass Pro shop that straddled their boundaries, they turned to the state archives to settle things.

 

“The archives are like an insurance policy,” said Richard Pearce-Moses, director of the archival studies program at Clayton State University, which is near the Georgia Archives Building south of Atlanta. “There is a good chance we might never need to know where the county line is, but when we do, we really, really need to know.”

 

Increasingly, government records are being produced electronically, and agencies use a variety of software to collect and store them. But technology is changing so quickly that few protocols exist on how to gather and protect digital records from tampering. That applies to those once produced on paper as well as new forms of communication, like government Web sites and Facebook pages.

 

As a result, governments have to decide at what point an electronic birth certificate, for example, will be considered an acceptable legal document.

 

“A lot of this is untested in court,” said Sarah Koonts, the director of archives and records in North Carolina. “What kind of metadata do we need to have around an electronic record to prove it’s authentic?”

 

As with paper, preservation is an issue, too. No one knows how today’s technology may hold up and which methods of collection may go the way of the floppy disk, leaving a pile of pixels no one can read in 50 years.

 

State archivists are scrambling to learn how best to handle digital records just as they are absorbing the largest budget cuts in recent memory.

 

City and county governments are shrinking, too, so local officials are either not collecting as much information or simply sending what they do collect straight to the state repositories.

 

The volume of paper records held by state archives jumped to more than 3.9 million linear feet in 2012 from about 2.5 million linear feet in 2006, according to a survey by the Council of State Archivists.

 

“It would be one thing if the archives could say we are going to quit collecting paper and just collect electrons,” Mr. Pearce-Moses said. “But we are getting more digital content on top of more paper.”

 

In South Carolina, where the oldest document in the archives was created in 1671, W. Eric Emerson, the director of archives and history, is trying to hold on. At its peak in the 1980s, his department employed 125 people. Now there are 28. He has had to give up on conservation completely.

 

“Budgets are being cut and staffs are shrinking at the exact time when we need to be adapting and spending on digital infrastructure,” he said. “If you are in a state that thinks government should be smaller, it’s just far more challenging.”

 

His fear, like that of other archivists, is that “20 or 30 years from now, this will be a period in which numerous government records were lost.” [You do realize what happens when records are "lost" -- the people who are left after the chaos can, conveniently, make up whatever they want to fill the void. And who is to gainsay them?]      

 

It’s more than just adding server space and storing files shipped in from other agencies.

 

“That’s like taking 200,000 documents, throwing them in a Dumpster and telling a researcher: What you need is in there. Go get it,” he said.

 

There are some bright spots. Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia has said he will push to restore some financing for the state archives in the coming budget cycle, and new federal grant money is available to train archivists in electronic records.

 

In August, the Obama administration issued a directive aimed at overhauling the way federal agencies manage and preserve records. Many state archivists hope those protocols will inform their work.

 

Meanwhile, debates over what to keep and what to throw away continue.  “Is the Twitter feed of Gov. Jan Brewer in Arizona a public record? Yes. No question,” Mr. Pearce-Moses said. “Whether or not it has to be kept and where to keep it is another question,” he added. “What it really boils down to right now is triage.”         

A version of this article appeared in print on September 27, 2012, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Budget Cuts to Hobble State Archives in Georgia .

GM Josh Friedel At Hales Corners Challenge XVI!

Do you want to try your moves against a GM?

GM Josh Friedel will be playing!

10 USCF Grand Prix Points 4SS, G/60. 2 Sections: Open and Reserve (under 1600). Wyndham Milwaukee Airport Hotel-4747 S. Howell Ave., Milwaukee-414-481-8000 (mention Southwest Chess Club for $79 room rate). EF: $35-Open, $25-Reserve, both $5 more after 10/17. Comp EF for USCF 2200+. $$ GTD: Open: 1st-$325, 2nd-$175, A-$100, B and Below-$75; Reserve: 1st-$100, 2nd-$75, D-$50, E and Below-$40. Reg.: 8:30-9:30. Rds.: 10-1-3:30-6. Entries to: Allen Becker, N112 W17033 Vista Court, Apt. D, Germantown, WI 53022; allenbecker@wi.rr.com. Questions to TD: Tom Fogec, (414) 405-4207.

Goddesschess Prizes for Females in Addition to Above Prizes, Open: $40 per win/$20 per draw; Reserve: $20 per win/$10 per draw (and highest-scoring female in each section wins free entry into HCC XVII).  In addition, the top female finisher in each section wins free entry to the next Challege should she choose to participate.

Life Master Sheldon Gelbart will be on hand throughout the tournament to analyze games for tournament participants.

Thus far, 7 of the 23 pre-registered players are chess femmes, hooorrraaayyy!  Significantly, three of them are playing in the Open.

Register early!!!!  Something new (well, new to me, I didn't know about it until this evening) -- you can register by email and pay on the morning the tournament starts.  How easy is that!

I would love, love, love to see this tournament break the all-time record for participants.  Maybe GM Friedel will be a big draw - hope so!  So, if you are in or near the Milwaukee area, come on down and play!  It's a great and fun group of players, parents and the folks running the show from Southwest Chess Club.  I've been to enough of these now that I even sort of, kind of understand what Life Master Sheldon Gelbart is showing us on the board (sometimes) when we ask him to analyze our games in the skittles room!

Brooklyn IS 318 in USA Today

This Brooklyn middle school develops master chess players - a photo essay

Love this pic of Elizabeth Vicary Spiegel with "her" kids at IS 318. 

Visit USA Today at link (above) for more!

From CNN

Why bias holds women back

By Meg Urry, Special to CNN

updated 5:25 PM EDT, Mon October 1, 2012

 

Editor's note: Meg Urry is the Israel Munson professor of physics and astronomy and chairwoman of the department of physics at Yale University, where she is the director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

(CNN) -- In 2001, I became the first tenured female faculty member ever in Yale's physics department. Throughout my 30 years as a physicist, being the only woman in the room has been the norm. Women fill more than half of the jobs in the U.S. economy but constitute fewer than 12% of working physicists and engineers. For me and for others in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the dearth of women is not news.

What was big news last week was a study, from colleagues in other departments at Yale, explaining why this deficiency of women persists.

Evidence shows that established scientists at top research universities -- those choosing and training the next generation of STEM experts -- unconsciously rate budding female scientists lower than men with identical credentials. They judge women less capable, less worthy of hiring and less deserving of mentoring. And they propose starting salaries that are on average 14% higher for men than for women.

 

The new study is the first to be done on STEM faculty rather than, as is more typical, college undergraduates. Hundreds of earlier studies on undergraduates established that the name on a résumé affects our perceptions. And that women and men both act with unconscious bias to privilege those who already dominate a specific field of work, whether that means preferring a man's résumé for a job in physics or a woman's for a job in nursing.

When I was a young scientist, the dearth of female colleagues bothered me. So did the general lack of concern this raised in the scientific community. Occasionally, a colleague might ask why there weren't more women in physics, but their favorite hypothesis didn't hold water: that family priorities are to blame, because the years raising children often coincide with the crucial years as an assistant professor right before getting tenure.

But if family considerations slowed the advancement of women, why would women without children have similar career trajectories to those with children who remained full-time in the work force? It didn't add up.

I also struggled to understand why I didn't seem to belong in my field -- why I was overlooked for leadership roles, why I was underpaid, why my suggestions were ignored until a male colleague proposed the same idea and why female scientists in general garnered a disproportionately small share of honors and awards.

Then I stumbled on a description about bias in Virginia Valian's eye-opening book, "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women."

It was a classic Eureka moment. My observations of the underappreciation of women in science were suddenly explained by a simple idea: that each of us, having grown up in a society where men and women are not equal and do not populate the peaks of accomplishment equally, has an unconscious expectation that men are leaders.

Consider this riddle I heard as a kid: A man and his son are in a serious car accident. The man dies on the spot, and the son is rushed to the hospital. Upon entering the operating room, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy; he's my son."

I was utterly unable to figure out how the boy's father could both be dead and about to perform surgery. Of course, the answer is that the boy's mother was the surgeon. That possibility never crossed my young mind because, until I was in my 20s, I had never had a female doctor. So it's not surprising that I developed an unconscious expectation that doctors would be men.

 

The social science research made all kinds of sense to me. Our experiences of life are turned into unconscious expectations that affect how we see others. When scholars reviewed a psychology research paper, for example, they scored it higher if the author's name were male than if female. A male applicant for a job as police chief was rated higher than a woman, even though she had important qualifications for the job that he lacked. Similarly, a male applicant for a job as nursing supervisor was rated lower than the female applicant, even when he had the qualifications she lacked.

These experiments, which vary only the name at the top of the résumé, are repeatable. Time after time, the results are the same.

Perhaps the biggest worry is that people who swear they are objective are the most likely to make biased judgments. In several classic experiments, subjects were asked which criteria are most important for a particular job and then shown two résumés: one of the "wrong" gender who had all those qualifications and one of the "right" gender who lacked them. Yet the subjects rated the person with the "right" gender higher, i.e. they ignored the criteria they had earlier said were most important. And this tendency was greatest among those claiming objectivity.

Those who admitted at the outset that they were not objective were the least likely to shift criteria because of gender. It seems like people who are aware of the unconscious biases we all carry are less likely to make judgments influenced by that bias.

You can even check out your own objectivity on a website: implicit.harvard.edu. It's a sobering experience. Mine is probably typical: I so deeply wanted to be unbiased, but while taking the online tests, I felt the impact of gender and race on my reactions. Mahzarin Banaji, the Harvard professor who started the website, says she too showed signs of bias when she took her own test. If she can admit that, perhaps the rest of us can be open to the possibility.

Mayan Warrior Queen's Tomb

From Reuters:

Warrior queen's tomb in Guatemala gives up Mayan secrets

By Mike McDonald

GUATEMALA CITY | Wed Oct 3, 2012 9:00pm EDT

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Archaeologists in Guatemala have discovered the tomb of an ancient Mayan warrior queen packed with jade jewels and other artifacts that shed light on the long-vanished civilization, experts said on Wednesday.
Researchers from Guatemala and the United States uncovered the remains of Queen Kalomt'e K'abel, who reigned in the seventh century, at the Peru-Waka dig site in the sweltering Peten jungle region in northern Guatemala.

Inside the tomb, the team found a hoard of glistening jade jewels and a small alabaster vase decorated with the image of an older woman's face and inscribed with the queen's name, providing identification of the long-dead ruler.

"To discover something of this importance is very unusual," lead archaeologist David Freidel told Reuters. "She was the supreme warlord of her kingdom."

The remains were discovered in June but it has taken until now for experts to verify the identity of the queen.

The Central American nation is studded with pyramids and ruins from the ancient Mayan civilization, which thrived between AD 250 and 900 and extended from modern day Honduras to central Mexico.

Queen K'abel's portrait has appeared on Mayan plaques that associate her with the year 692 during the Mayan classic period, when her husband, king Wak K'inich Bahlam II, ruled.

Historians believe that K'abel reigned over Calakmul, a Mayan community which often battled the powerful king 'El Zotz' and his kingdom Tikal - just south of the border with present-day Mexico - where well-preserved ruins are a popular draw for tourists.

Deciphering the identities of ancient Mayan leaders from dig sites often proves a challenge. While rulers' tombs are often covered with ancient hieroglyphics and pictures, determining precise names is difficult, researchers said.

"We had made a lot of discoveries of objects making reference to this queen and now to complete it with her remains is very important," said Guatemalan archaeologist Griselda Perez.

(Editing Tim Gaynor and Mohammad Zargham)

Roman Die Made of Elephant Ivory

From BBC News:

24 September 2012 Last updated at 11:58 ET
Roman die at Gloucester museum 'made of elephant ivory'

A scientific study on an ivory Roman gaming die found in Gloucestershire has ended a 40-year mystery.

The die was found in Frocester near Stroud about 40 years ago

The small cube was found in Frocester near Stroud in the late 1960s but until now the type of ivory was unknown.

Dr Sonia O'Connor from the University of Bradford has carried out tests at Gloucester City Museum which she says prove the ivory came from an elephant.

The museum's curator David Rice said he was "disappointed" the object was not made of rarer whale ivory.

"We've been puzzling about it for 30 years [since it has been in the museum]," he said.

"I am disappointed, but it's good to know what it is.

"It shows Gloucestershire was connected to the world even 2,000 years ago, with things coming from Africa to the county."

Trade routes

Dr O'Connor first studied the die in the early 1980s, but revisited it after the award of new funding.

It has allowed her to study objects made of hard animal tissue such as ivory, antler, bone, horn and tortoiseshell.

"Although it had been identified as ivory nobody could work out what the species was, and at the time I couldn't get any further either," she said.

Dr O'Connor came to the elephant ivory conclusion after studying the texture of the surface.

"I would love for it to have been one of the unusual ivories for the Roman period but it is actually elephant ivory.

"The species helps us understand trade routes and the importance of the piece.

"The rarer the material perhaps the more valuable it was to the people who owned it."

Mr Rice said he now planned to put the die on permanent display in Gloucester Museum.

Of Prostitutes and Prophets

An interesting article at Haaretz Online.  You need to sign up to view the full article - but it's free, and registration entitles you to view 10 articles a month.

Of prostitutes and prophets

Stories that link prostitutes and repentance are common in both Judaism and Christianity. But the very different roles played by the prostitute in Jewish and Christian literature attest to different views of both women and penitence.

By Tali Artman-Partock Sep.25, 2012 | 8:44 AM

 

I excerpted this part - the part I found most interesting, actually:

 

In its first few centuries, and especially the fourth century, Christianity created a new literary genre: stories about repentant prostitutes who become nuns. The plots are usually similar: The heroine of the story is a famous woman living a life of sin, who meets a saintly man. In the wake of this encounter, she finds God, changes her ways and becomes a sexual recluse, a holy woman.

These stories were first told and documented in monasteries in the Roman provinces of Palestine and Syria. Their attractiveness to this particular audience was, of course, twofold. They reinforced a Christian axiom - the spiritual principle holding that there is no one who cannot find God and repent. But they also supplied erotic amusement devoid of guilt feelings in a place that had completely repressed eros and continually cultivated guilt. These stories also stoked the monks' egos, because all the women who repented did so after having met a holy man, so the retelling of the woman's history was always framed in the story of the holy man's life. Thus the repentance of the prostitute always represented a spiritual victory of the monk.

These stories - about Mary of Egypt, Pelagia, Thais and others - spread like wildfire through the Greek- and Syriac-speaking Middle East. They were beautiful, fascinating and brazen, the box-office sensations of the ancient world. They were also playing at a theater near your home: in the Babylonian Talmud, but dubbed into Hebrew, a drama about proper Jewish repentance.

 

From prostitute to monk

One of the stories that most faithfully represents the Christian genre is the tale of Pelagia - or in the monastic version, the story of the monk who redeemed her, Nonnus. For a special gathering of clergymen and monks at Antioch, the bishop Nonnus is asked to leave his monastery and address the gathered audience. As they are standing outside the church, an entourage passes. At its center is a stunning woman riding on a donkey, her head bare, her body clad in jewels and nothing else. It is the well-known actress Pelagia. All the bishops turn their heads away with disdain, but Nonnus stares, transfixed. Thereafter, he thinks about her, talks about her, dreams about her.

Nor is she apathetic. She hears him in church, and arrives at the understanding that she has taken the wrong path in life. She struggles with the devil, and stubbornly insists on meeting Nonnus. He is afraid to meet her alone. But she has already decided that he is the man who will redeem her. Nonnus baptizes Pelagia; she gives him all her money to distribute to the poor. On the third day, she removes her clothing, dons Nonnus' hair shirt, and heads into the desert.

Years later, one of Nonnus' students comes across her in Jerusalem, living in an isolated monk's cell on the Mount of Olives. He is the only one who knows that she is a woman. In the Land of Israel, she has become the saintly monk Pelagius. Her gender is revealed only when she dies, and even then the other monks try to conceal the fact. But the large crowd that has gathered for her funeral does not let them keep the secret.

This story is one of the more refined tales in terms of sexuality, but it is quite bold in terms of spirituality and emotion. It asserts that sin and holiness have a surprising common denominator: temptation. The bishop's greatness lies in his ability to perceive this. While his friends are deterred by everything she represents, and essentially give up on her, Nonnus is spellbound. In her art of seduction and her devoted adherence to it, he discerns spiritual virtue from which he and his friends can learn.

But his fear of meeting her also reveals the sexual attraction he feels for her. And the delicate work done by temptation is converted along with her. When she decides to abandon the devil, she redirects all the skills she has acquired toward a new objective, a new addressee: Jesus. Her impressive intensity is preserved; it merely changes form. Yet here, too, the implicit erotic link between the two is preserved: She insists on Nonnus alone as her teacher and baptizer, and wears his hair shirt on her body. And Pelagia's next transformation is no less revolutionary than the previous one: In her new life, she chooses to live as a man, and as a monk.

I have put man before monk here, because this choice is first of all one of gender. If every woman, as the second-century church father Tertullian said, is the gateway to the devil, this is because woman is the representation of sexual temptation. In effect, she is sex itself. Man is the pure but weak subject, while sexuality is attributed entirely to women. If this is how every woman is represented, the prostitute - defined by her sexual occupation - is the purest representation of womanhood. In order to be rid of this burden, Pelagia chooses to become not only a nun but a monk, a holy man. She has to completely rid herself of her sexuality, and therefore also her gender.

In a more humane interpretation of the story, one can imagine another motivation for her decision - primarily, considerations of self-protection for someone living alone in the desert, along with an inner desire to create as great a distance as possible between her current and her former life.

The monks' attempt to conceal her true gender following her death reveals the cognitive dissonance and shock in which they find themselves, as well as their own political considerations. The surprise inherent in discovering that a person who lived for years among them, and was considered holy by them, was in fact a woman shatters all the conventions about men and women, and about their attitudes toward holiness. If this were revealed to the masses, how would they interpret the fact that the saint was not only a woman, but a former prostitute?

The same short-sightedness that characterized the conclave of bishops in Antioch, who refused to look at her when she was an actress, is also found among the monks with whom she lived. But the masses, like Nonnus, are prepared to revere a person who changed her life and broke the conventions of both worlds - the world of sin and the world of holiness.

 

**************************************

 

I would very much like to check my Walker The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets but it's packed away somewhere since March (eek) when I ill-advisedly decided I was going to redo my family room.  It could be in any one of a dozen boxes holding books and I'm not about to go digging for it.  Sigh.  I guess I will finally have to start working to get the family redo going, just so I can get my books out of the stacked boxes in the garage!