Michael Blim

Americans gave away $300 billion dollars to charity in 2006. The amount is equivalent to twice the gross domestic product of Finland, three times that of the Philippines, and six times that of Morocco. Americans, in other words, give away a lot of money.

By virtually any ethical code I can think of, to give is godly, or at least goodly. A dollar passed to a homeless person, a dollar to kids selling candy for their band, or another to a Salvation Army soldier on a street corner at Christmas time – these little gifts signify our compassion. Sure, sometimes we think “there but for the grace of God,” or treat the gift as fulfilling an obligation to help our social inferiors. Compassion however tenuous is the basis for our actions.

But let’s take a closer look at the gift horse: Could it be a Trojan horse? In every other walk of life, we simply assume that money is power, and power is money. Consumers have purchasing power. Congress has the power of the purse. Bankers have the power to propel our economy, or as we are learning now, the power to ruin it. We hope that Ben Bernanke has the power to save it. Corporate bosses use their power to hire, fire, invest—and work to appoint boards of directors that will pay them ungodly sums for their efforts.

Charity, and especially at $300 billion dollars a year, is power. We give to whom we think deserves it, and we give it for things or services we believe are useful or necessary. We decide, and deciding is power.

The more money you give, the more power you have. The point of philanthropy, Andrew Carnegie believed, was to move society in the direction you want to see it go. He of the bloody Homestead Strike gave it all away. Carnegie gave monies that built local libraries, supported the development of standardized educational testing, dug up Mayan ruins, helped identify DNA, discovered radar and hybridized corn, among other things.

You may agree with the priorities of the present-day Carnegies, or not. But you can’t vote for or against them. In America, it’s their party, and they can do what they want.

In our new Gilded Age, the rich are richer than at any time in our history. This is also the golden age of philanthropy. Every day one can open the newspaper and find another instance of generosity. Museum wings and paintings, hospital buildings and science research centers, new buildings on America’s college campuses, new efforts to conquer diseases and learn the secrets of life – these are the types of things that a moment’s reflection brings to mind as instances of modern philanthropy.

The edifice complex of modern philanthropists irks some among their number. William Gross, a billionaire discussed by Stephanie Strom of the New York Times, (September 6, 2007) writes that “when millions of people are dying of AIDS and malaria in Africa, it is hard to justify the umpteenth society gala held for the benefit of a performing arts center or an art museum. … A $30 million gift to a concert hall is not philanthropy, it is a Napoleonic coronation.”

As Gross notes, philanthropy is an advertisement for virtue. It feeds a Pharaonic conceit of the rich that they are the anointed builders of society. The sentiment treads a well-worn path. “God gave me my money,” claimed John D. Rockefeller. And even if the money were tainted, it could be washed in the blood of the lamb. “People charge Mr. Rockefeller with stealing the money he gave to the church,” noted one Cleveland pastor. “But he has laid it on the altar and thus sanctified it.” (Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons, 1962 [1934])

For all of the misery Rockefeller brought to millions of Americans – he was perhaps the most hated man in the American heartland at the end of the 19th Century – his monies were put to work trying to wipe out hookworm and yellow fever, Donald McNeil Jr., wrote in the March 4, 2008 New York Times. His son devoted family resources to support birth control at home and abroad, among scores of other things including a gift of the land upon which the United Nations headquarters was built.

Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett are perhaps today’s greatest American philanthropists. They have pooled their fortunes into a $60 billion dollar foundation, and a large part of its funds support efforts to eliminate worldwide scourges such as HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria.

This last campaign against malaria has prompted some serious concern about the role of private philanthropy in setting a worldwide policy direction. Should philanthropists, however generous, decided world public health goals? Should their foundations using the power of the purse make scientific decisions about the values of one vaccine over another, one treatment over another?

Not everyone thinks so. The Times’ McNeil reports that many experts disagree with setting malaria eradication as the present goal. They believe that an eradication campaign mis-directs precious financial resources into a battle that presently cannot be won, while under-funding or overlooking more practical solutions that can drastically reduce infection. (You may recall that in my last column, I noted how the diffusion of $6 mosquito nets and $3 antibiotic treatments is achieving a dramatic reduction in malaria infection rates.)

The argument, as McNeil reports, is also about power. Who shall decide? It is perhaps not surprising that the Gates Foundation is the gorilla in room. If it says that eradication is the goal, how could it not be? Dr. Arata Kochi, the malaria chief of the World Health Organization, acknowledges the fact by his attack on the power of the Gates Foundation to dictate the shape and focus of the world campaign against malaria.

Kochi, McNeil reports in another posting for the Times (February 23, 2008), accused the Gates Foundations of creating a research cartel that kept funding among themselves at the expense of other, perhaps just as rewarding initiatives. In an internal WHO memorandum, Kochi speculated that the Gates-sponsored malaria campaign could have “implicitly dangerous consequences on the policymaking process in world health.” He has been one of many who have argued for pressing malaria control rather than what they see as the unrealistic and more costly goal now of complete eradication advocated by the Gates Foundation.

Described as a highly effective bureaucratic reformer of the world health effort against malaria, Dr. Kochi lost his job, according to McNeil’s February 23 report, because he had offended the Rockefeller Foundation, another major public health player.

McNeil writes: “Some scientists have said privately that the foundation is ‘creating its own WHO.’”

Herein lies the point, not coincidentally useful to be made 8 days before Income Tax Day, when charity giving deducts $40 billion dollars from the federal tax take.

Money is power. Private money can create public power. In a sense, the rich buy public power the way other people buy groceries. They also buy “rights” to use public power in any way they see fit. Some decisions may be good or bad; some outcomes may be good or bad.

Nobody votes on their choices. Only the occasional weight of shame deters these masters of the universe from doing what Carnegie set out to do: to remake the world in a way he thought was better.

Gilded Age, Golden Age of philanthropy, tarnished and impoverished democracy. This is part of the design of our times.

Sughra Raza. Leaving Chicago. 1999.

Acrylic on canvas.

Posted with permission from the private collection of Anjuli Kolb.

Elatia Harris

This is the second in an open-ended series of articles on four millennia of saffron history and use. Saffron Mother, Part I looks at the culture that produced the famed saffron-harvesting frescoes on the island of Thera, painted 3600 years ago, in the time leading up to the Thera Eruption, the largest geological event in the ancient Mediterranean.

“To possess wings,” writes the classics professor Deborah Tarn Steiner, “is to be deeply implicated in the workings of desire.”  Prof. Steiner was not making specific reference to Eos, the saffron-winged goddess of the dawn in ancient Greece, but among female Olympians driven too far by desire, Eos is peerless.

Above left, we see Eos on an Attic Red Figure-style krater from 440 B.C.E., in the Johns Hopkins Museum of Art. Arms raised for snatching – a typical representation – she chases down Kephalos, a youth with whom she’s besotted.  Beyond the borders of the photo, the slight, wingless mortal boy looks over his shoulder and runs. A hunter, he is unused to being the hunted. But Eos cannot wane, for she is the dawn, and can only increase in light and strength, overtaking whatever she sees. Eos will nab Kephalos, and get from him a son.  Her husband, Tithonos, is so old as to be useless in that way – now. But Tithonos was once a dewy boy, for whom Eos negotiated eternal life, alas forgetting to hold out for eternal youth. So in the rose-filled halls of the dawn at Okeanos, the stream at the edge of the world where she sleeps in a golden bed, Tithonos is withered to a grasshopper, and once more Eos must go forth to hunt for a fresh youth. Orion, Tithonos, Kephalos, Kleitos – oh, there were many such.

Greek goddesses saved seduction for other Olympians; when they desired mortal boys, they simply took them, albeit sometimes rather sweetly. In this company of unapologetic females, Eos is as big a kidnapper as Zeus. (Or a bigger, to judge only from pottery. The seminal catalogue of Attic vases compiled in 1969 by S. Kaempf-Dimitriadou, Die Liebe der Gotter in der attischen Kunst des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr., shows 147 scenes of Eos with a consort, Zeus coming in a poor second with only 116.)  Eos labored under a curse from Aphrodite — payback for a bit of amatory poaching –- for her adventures brought her only intense sadness.  Though not remorse.

Holding onto a boy would seem a big part of the problem. In the painting by Poussin below, Cephalus and Aurora (as Eos would later be called by the Romans), the goddess, needy and greedy, her gold and red saffron-dyed garments falling away from her, grasps her young lover around the hips. But he’s clearly had enough of her, not only twisting away but shielding from his sight her seeking and — Hesiod tells us — all-seeing gaze.  She’ll get back at him later by causing the death of his young wife, but here is an iconic image of the fear-tinged sexual distaste that it was Eos’s sad portion to inspire in a boy by the end of every affair. In the mid-1600’s, when Poussin was active, the representation of Eos/Aurora seldom included wings, but these have been transposed to the dawn-facing white steed, one of either two or four that Eos commanded for her daily climb into the sky — Homer’s “rapid horses that bring men light.” Wings, in any case, would detract from the pathos of the scene Poussin envisioned; as a raptor, the goddess would have come across as well able to outmaneuver her prey. While there can be no contest between a boy and a goddess, ever, there can be entire — and cruel — failure of desire on the boy’s part, putting him temporarily in the ascendant.

In Baroque Rome, the Aurora theme was unabashedly a triumphant one, the disinhibited deity dear to Sappho, Homer, Hesiod and countless vase painters almost never represented in terms of the doomed abductions found in the classics. Rosy Aurora was the bringer of day, and she ushered in Apollo — if there is a more resplendent role for a goddess who has outgrown the need to possess boys unable to love her, I am sure I do not know of it. Two masterpieces of ceiling painting, commissioned in the 1620’s for exquisite Roman pleasure domes about a half an hour’s walk from one another, provide an opportunity to assess this new phase of the goddess’s development.

Guido Reni’s Pallavicini Aurora, top below, is of the proud maiden ilk. Winglessly, she flies ahead of Apollo’s quadriga, her saffron peplos and white veil made voluminous by an updraft. She chases not boys but the last sooty clouds of night, powerless before her. Guercino’s Aurora, bottom below, in the Casino Ludovisi is a matron seated in her own conveyance, holding the reins of her fabled roan horses. Rearing to gallop across the sky, the horses’ hindmost hooves improbably find a purchase on cloud cover. The weary cast of the goddess’s expression suggests, at the very least, an appreciation of the day of work ahead, and she is dressed for work in garments of the saffron spectrum, from rich yellow to dark orange red. Girded for her mission to dissolve the night and break the day, she is the star of her own show, for on this ceiling Apollo is nowhere in sight.

Looking closely, one can see that each Aurora handles flowers — roses, to be exact. They are scattered about the head and raised right arm of Guercino’s goddess, and Guido’s Aurora grasps garlands in her hands. This could be, but is not, merely pictorially ornamental. Homer in the Iliad was the first to call Eos “rosy-fingered” (rhododaktylos), and he did this numerous times. In a later day of imperfectly accurate translations, that description was taken quite literally.  Never more so than by the 18th century French painter Fragonard, in his Aurora, below.

Actually, the variously translated references to crimson, rose-red, saffron, gold and yellow associated by poets from Homer to the Byzantine era — over 1000 years — with dawn and Eos tend to lead back to just a few Greek and Greek/Latin words, epithets for Eos all. She is called golden-armed (khrysopakhos), golden-throned (khrysothronon) and golden-sandaled (khrysopedillos), elsewhere rosy-armed (krokopakhos) and saffron-robed (krokopeplos.) To write, as Ovid did, of the saffron wheels of her chariot and of her saffron cheeks, he used adjectives derived from the Greek-based Latin word, crocus. It is Ovid who calls her a “saffron mother [who] arrives to view the widening earth on rosy horses.” Nowhere does the Eos of the ancients hold roses in her hands — how ingratiating and unlike her, when she wants those hands free! The ruddy color of her arms and fingertips is the red of the first light of dawn, the long red dawn of the Mediterranean which can take more than an hour to whiten into day.

The use of krokos to mean saffron should not disappoint anyone looking for word roots, the word “saffron” deriving from an Arabic source and entering the Romance languages via Spain. The Greeks used the same word, krokos, for the plant and for the colors its stigma produced, a radiant palette opulent enough for a goddess and instinctively preferred in matters of dress by mortal women of high standing. The use of saffron as a dye, a medicine, a ritual substance, and in the making of fragrance predated its use as a lavish flavoring for food. At the time of Homer, Hesiod and Sappho, to make a figure of speech involving saffron was to speak of the most precious substance after gold, one known since dynastic Egypt to treat severe medical complaints and create extravagant color — a red as sudden and shocking as the dawn, for instance, or as bright and slippery as blood.

The enormous symbolism of the gold-red saffron palette, which reaches across Eurasia and back into the deep history of its people from India to Ireland, is a subject for a future post. The image furthest to the right under the title is the saffron-robed Ushas, the Vedic dawn goddess, her name the Sanskrit cognomen of Eos. For the moment, however, we’re looking at saffron as a signifier of female sexuality in the ancient world, and as intimately identified with Eos.  Her robes, her throne and her occasionally lonely wedding bed at the world’s end were all made red-gold by it, her fingers and arms stained with it as they streaked the Eastern sky at dawn.

In Eos’s day, saffron was well understood to be an aphrodisiac, to treat female complaints, and to treat what are now called mood disorders. Ingesting too much saffron was known to bring on mania, so then as now, one must be careful of it. And careful Eos was not. The relentless, onrushing goddess who knew only how to increase and engulf and not how to back off is an icon of immoderation; if she were a saint of it too, her attribute would be saffron. For being unrestrained and frightening, she is punished more severely than other transgressive Olympian female deities, and is allied with the much earlier and scarier man-hungry goddesses of Minoan times. The tears springing from her numerous sorrows — the withering of her truest love, the death of her son — are found every morning on the grass and on tender plants. They are the dew.  In the central image under the title, Eos is imagined by Evelyn de Morgan, an English painter who at the threshold of the 20th century pictured the goddess as wan and somber, pouring her teary dew from a black ewer, her red wings at the dark end of the saffron spectrum.

Eos was not the only Olympian to be associated with saffron, for wherever there were exalted individuals — including gods — there was likely to be saffron, and wherever there was saffron, there was likely to be a sexual allusion. Every five years, high-born Athenian girls between the ages of about 7 and 12 were required to participate in a festival at Brauron, the Arkteia, referenced by Aristophanes in Lysistrata. For this, they were dressed in the krokotis, a saffron gown intended to make them look like ruddy little bears.  The point of playing the bear for Artemis was symbolically to come of age, to go from being a wild little girl to suitably tamed wife/mother material. There were games at the Arkteia, and stripping from the saffron-bear clothes, but at the end the girls were gathered in, transformed – at least, that was the thinking. In Athens, marriage came very early for a girl, with almost every bride a child-bride, often a mother by 14. The Athenians of the 5th century were not unaware that girls pushing 20 were likelier to survive pregnancy, but this knowledge did not alter custom.  Artemis was the great protector of women in childbirth; in her shrine at Brauron, within a stroll of the Aegean Sea, bolts of cloth have been found, offerings to the goddess for a safe childbirth.  Also votive sculpture – effigies of little girls cuddling bunnies, like the one pictured here, bidding for the goddess to protect them when in a few short years they would become mothers or die trying. 

The saffron crocus figures superbly in Book 14 of the Iliad, when Hera beguiles and beds Zeus.  Despite the keen disappointments of their centuries-long courtship, the sky god having pursued with perfect impunity his many dalliances — here a nymph, there a boy, again and again and again – despite Hera’s turning occasionally into a scold, the two gods at the summit of Olympus, brother and sister as well as husband and wife, were capable of convincing and even comic reconciliations.  One day on Trojan War-related business, the story goes, Hera made for Mt. Ida, where she knew Zeus to be hiding out, en route tricking Aphrodite out of a golden sash filled with charms. (“It has sex in it,” Aphrodite tells her.) Ensorcelled, Zeus finds her lovelier than all the competition, and insists that she lie with him in the open air – just like that. Modestly, she would prefer to be indoors, but as James Barry’s painting of the late 18th century, Zeus and Hera on Mt. Ida, suggests, she summoned the mood.  And in a rite going back almost a thousand years before Homer to Hera’s beginnings in Mycenae, the sky father and the nature mother lay down by a river, so furious their coupling that a bed of saffron crocuses sprang from the earth beneath them, the violet petals opening to release a spicy golden dew. Hera needn’t have worried, for of all this, passers by saw nothing but a shimmering red-gold cloud.

COMING: Saffron Mother, Part III — Your Own Saffron, and What to Do with It

Selected Offline Resources

Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought, Deborah Tarn Steiner

Die Liebe der Gotter in der attischen Kunst des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr., S. Kaempf-Dimitriadou

Studies in Girls’ Transitions: Aspects of the Arkteia and Age Representation in Attic
Iconography, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood

“ ‘Predatory’ Goddesses,” Mary R. Lefkowitz, Hesperia, Vol. 71, No. 4

Selected Online Resources

http://www.theoi.com/
The Theoi Project, created by Aaron J. Atsma of Auckland, NZ, with helpers in the US, the UK, Greece and Australia, is a compendious and well-illustrated site about Greek mythology, literature and art.

http://www.paleothea.com/
Women and Greek myths – a site maintained by a highly lettered amateur of the subject who is also a blogger.

http://www.stoa.org/diotima/
Materials for the study of women and gender in the ancient world, including a forum, Anahita-L.

http://www.paghat.com/
“Paghat” is the nom de plume of a gardener who has put up entertaining essays on the history of plants she cultivates, which include the saffron crocus.  No research materials are referenced, however, except glancingly, and one would enjoy knowing how she arrived at her readings.

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The Four Horse’s Asses of the Necropolis
Jim Culleny

Why would the Four Horse’s Asses
of the Necropolis
still strew fetid flowers
upon the path
of the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse,
as an ill-wind
blew the scent of aftermath
into the faces of a people
barely mewing?

Would even horse’s asses
herd us down the trail
of our undoing?

Oh, yeah. They’ll happily
have done their will
leaving us nil
while they are safely
toodle-ooing…

RE: An American “Nakbah”

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