Day: June 19, 2025

South Arabian goddess

The Walters Museum in Baltimore has a small selection of South Arabian art. I’m completely unfamiliar with South Arabian art, and before I went to the Walters Museum yesterday I knew nothing about its long history. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art:

“For over a thousand years, from around 800 B.C.E. to 600 C.E., the kingdoms of Qataban, Saba (biblical Sheba), and Himyar grew fabulously wealthy from their control over the caravan routes of the southern Arabian peninsula and, in particular, from the international trade in frankincense and myrrh. Excavations at the capitals of these ancient kingdoms have yielded spectacular examples of architecture, distinctive stone funerary sculpture, elaborate inscriptions on stone, bronze, and wood, and sophisticated metalwork.”

One of my favorite pieces of South Arabian art on the view at the Walters Museum is an unnamed goddess, who appears in a fragment of a pediment. She sits next to a child deity. Due to the lighting, I found it difficult to take a photograph due to the reflections on the glass case which houses this goddess; I had to do a fair amount of digital manipulation to make her look more or less the way she looks in the museum.

Sculpture carved in stone.

Here’s what the museum label says about this sculpture:

Fragment of a Pediment with a Goddess
South Arabia (Marib), 2nd century A.D.
The upper left side of this composition depicts an imaginary creature composed of an Asiatic lion’s head, a serpent-like body, a fishtail, and wings. A nude child deity grasps one of the creature’s wings with his left hand and holds a short sword in his right hand to control it. A smaller fragment containing the head of a similar composite beast in the British Museum might be the complement to this vignette. The lower right section depicts a nude fertility goddess emerging from vine leaves and grapes. With the increasing influence of Greco-Roman culture curing the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D., new artistic styles and motifs, such as this female deity, became a part of South Arabian culture.
Calcite-alabaster
21.74, gift of Girard and Carolyn Fester, 2014

I wonder if she was really a fertility goddess, or a goddess of wine. I don’t think we’ll ever know.

Multiplatform GA

Wednesday evening, Carol, Ms. M., Roger, and I joined the watch party for the opening worship service for General Assembly. The video worship service was well done — the script was good, the performances of the individual elements were well done, and the editing as good. But online worship always makes me feel like a passive consumer, whereas live worship (if it’s done right) makes me feel like an active participant.

Not that many people showed up for the watch party. A few hours earlier, the room looked nearly full, with a few hundred ministers and family members. But for this watch party, the room felt empty.

A hotel ballroom, with a few people clustered near a large video screen.

I also noticed how the audio system boosted the lowest audible frequencies. If you record your audio with a mediocre microphone, your audio track can be filled with low frequency rumble. When you listen to that audio on your laptop, you’re not going to hear that rumble (unless you have really good headphones). But when you pump that audio through speakers big enough to fill a hotel ballroom, that rumble is going to be noticeable. This is something I’m going to remember to be aware of if I ever produce video/audio content that will be heard in a large room.

On Thursday morning, I started walking to the convention center from our hotel. I got almost all the way there when I realized that I had forgotten my face mask. So I walked back to the hotel, and then back again to the convention center, by which time the “Meet the Moment” programming had already started. I tried to figure out which programs were in which room, but I found the Whova event app so user-unfriendly that I gave up and downloaded the PDF program from the UUA website. Then I saw that we are supposed to commit to a single “Meet the Moment” program track for all three days. Frustration set in. Just then, Jen, an old friend, walked up. Jen said she was going to several different “Meet the Moment” tracks, because she was the only person from her congregation and she wanted to be able to go to as many tracks as possible. Yay! I had permission to ignore the rules!

At lunch, I walked through the Baltimore heat to a ramen place about ten minutes away. I was joined by Jen and Abby, who belongs to a UU congregation near my congregation. Abby and I talked about ways our congregations could cooperate. (It’s a little weird that I had to travel all the way to Baltimore to meet someone from a nearby congregation.) Then Jen reminded us both that Spirit Play would be a great kids program for small congregations like ours. So far, this lunchtime conversation is the most valuable thing I’ve gone to at this General Assembly.

Now I’m sitting in the meeting room listening to this year’s Congregational Study/Action Issues (CSAI). Somewhat to my surprise, there’s a CSAI that is fully aligned with one of the big priorities of our congregation — “Housing: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” And one of the speakers in support of this CSAI actually mentioned classism (she’s affiliated with UU Class Conversations). The other two CSAIs are also worthy projects, but as the only delegate from our congregation, I’m going to vote for the issue that I think will be of the greatest interest to us.