Three video lecturettes on the shared myths of Abrahamic religions. I’ll include links to all three videos below the fold, followed by texts of the talks.

Some of the books referenced in this video series:
“Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers,” Kwame Anthony Apiah (W. W. Norton, 2006)
“J.B.: A Play in Verse,” Archibald MacLeish (Houghton Mifflin, 1958)
The children’s story books are:
“Bible Stories of Jewish Children: Joshua to Queen Esther,” Ruth Samuels (Ktav Publishing, 1973)
“The Pilgrim Book of Bible Stories,” Mark Water (Pilgrim Press, 2003) “Goodnight Stories from the Quran,” Saniyasnain Khan (Goodword Books, 2005)

Below are the reading texts for the three videos. I diverged from the scripts more than once, but this gives you the same basic argument.

FIRST VIDEO

Before getting in to the shared myths of the Abrahamic tradition, I need to cover a little background material.

First of all, let me answer the question: what are the Abrahamic religions? This is a fairly straightforward question to answer. These are the religions that trace their roots back to the figure of Abraham, whose story is told in the Torah and in other sacred texts. Generally speaking, these Abrahamic religions are monotheistic; that is, there is only one god whom the adherents of these religions are supposed to worship. Abrahamic religions include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha’i.

Secondly, what do I mean by “myth”? This is question that does not have a straightforward answer. In our current popular culture, the term “myth” tends to have negative connotations: a myth is something that is not true, it’s a fairy tale, or even an outright lie told to keep the schlemiels happy. When political progressives, for example, talk about the “myth of American freedom,” we know that by this they mean to imply that American freedom isn’t really available to everyone living in America.

Saying the myth is a form of lying is a simple way of distinguishing between two ways of knowing, what the ancient Greeks called “mythos” and “logos.” In today’s pop culture, we’ve reduced that distinction to the difference between truth and lies. Mythos — myths — consists of lies that humans make up to help explain the world. Logos — logical thought or reason — is a more advance form of thinking and knowing that allows us to strip away the falsehoods of myth to find the real truth. In one common formulation, mythos is religion, which is outmoded, and logos is science, which has replaced all other kinds of knowing the world.

But today’s pop culture definitions of myth are confused and often incoherent. So let’s see if we can come up with a less confused understanding of myth.

We might begin by turning to the insights of psychoanalysis. For example, psychoanalyst Carl Jung hypothesized something called the “collective unconscious” wherein symbols, archetypes, are shared across multiple individuals of a given culture. These symbols and archetypes are obviously related to myths and myth-making; they do not represent some kind of pre-scientific thinking that we’re now ready to dispense with; rather, they’re somehow integral to communal ways of knowing that help us make sense out of the world. While you may not accept Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious as being valid, nevertheless I would argue that there is validity in the notion that there are symbols and stories shared across a culture that deeply affect the way we make sense out of the world.

Another way of thinking about mythos and logos is that mythos relates more to music, painting and sculpture, dance, poetry, and so on — while logos relates more science, technology, engineering, math, and so on. Science can tell us a great deal about the evolutionary biology and ecology of Eschscholzia californica — I probably mispronounced that — but poetry takes over when our hearts fill with joy when we see a hillside covered in the vivid orange blossoms of the California poppy. Understand that this is not a completely binary distinction: doing science and math can certainly fill one’s heart with joy — but there’s a reason why Henry Thoreau wrote the book Walden, rather than a scientific treatise on the biology and ecology of a glacial kettle hole.

So as you can see, mythos and logos are different ways of making sense of the world; we might even say, they are different ways of knowing about the world.

By now, it should be clear that myth is not the same thing as theology. In fact, theology has more in common with science than it does with myth. The word “theology” derives from the ancient Greek word “theos” meaning a god or the divine, and the ancient Greek word “logos” meaning (in this context) logical or rational discourse. Thus “theology” is an intellectual discipline that involves rational discourse about deities or the divine.

If I may digress for a moment, as someone trained in the Western tradition of philosophy, I can tell you that in the West what we now call science was previously termed “natural philosophy,” and during the medieval period theology and philosophy were closely related; so from a philosopher’s point of view, science and theology are merely subordinate disciplines to philosophy.

Returning to our main subject, it may help you to understand myth when you realize that fundamentalists are not comfortable with myths. A fundamentalist feels certain their knowledge of their religion is clear, unchanging, comprehensive, and not subject to correction. In this respect, fundamentalists resemble some militant atheists — Jerry Falwell and Richard Dawkins appear to have similar habits of thought. When you live in the world of myths, however, you find that while myths may seem clear at the moment, they change and evolve; that rather than being comprehensive, there is always room for one more retelling of any given myth; that myths do not exist on a binary axis of correct versus incorrect.

Now we can circle around to the question of truth and lies. Are myths lies? Well, yes; myths are lies in exactly the same sense that Shakespeare’s play MacBeth is a lie. MacBeth is one big lie. There were no witches, the actors playing the parts of Lady MacBeth and MacBeth aren’t really them, the whole play is filled with lies from start to finish. On the other hand, if you would like to know some of the deepest truths about human nature, you could do no better than to attend a performance of MacBeth. Or, better yet, several performances, because different directors and different actors will bring out different aspects of this multivalent work of art.

So I would suggest that you think of logos as encompassing theology, science, fundamentalism, technology, and other types of logical discourse. Logos, logical discourse, aims at certainty through logical argument. In logical discourse, if the logic of a given argument fails (as I would argue happens in religious fundamentalism), then the whole argument fails. Mythos, by contrast, encompasses the plastic arts, the lively arts, literature, stories, folk tales, and maybe even dreams. While we might say that the arts do have an internal logic, that logic needn’t be a formal logic; it can be the coherent logic of dreams.

So when I speak of the shared myths of the Abrahamic religions, I’m not talking about theology. I’m not talking about fundamentalism. I’m not talking about science and technology. Instead, I’m talking about the shared stories — or maybe shared dreams, or maybe even some kind of collective unconscious — that appear in different forms in several different religions.

SECOND VIDEO

In the previous video, I defined what I meant by the phrase, “The shared myths of Abrahamic religions.” With that common understanding held firmly in mind, let’s look at what some of the shared myths might be — and what some of the differences are.

And to begin that process, I’d like to start with children’s books. I happen to have on hand several children’s books.

First, there’s “Bible Stories for Jewish Children” by Ruth Samuels, consisting of two volumes, “From Creation to Joshua” (1954) and “Joshua to Queen Esther” (1973). This story book contains retellings of familiar stories about characters from the Tanakh, including Abraham, Noah, and Jonah.

Second is “The Pilgrim Book of Bible Stories,” a liberal Christian story book with retellings of familiar stories about characters from the Old Testament, including Abraham, Noah, and Jonah, and characters from the New Testament, including Jesus.

Third, I have “Goodnight Stories from the Quran” (2007), published by an Islamic publishing house called Goodword Books. This story book contains retellings of familiar stories about characters from the Quran and the hadith, including Ibrahim, Nuh, and Yunus — also known as Abraham, Noah, and Jonah.

Let’s start by looking at one of the stories about Ibrahim in the Islamic story book, which begins like this: “One night, the Prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon him) dreamt that, to please his Lord, he was sacrificing his son, Ismail (peace be upon him). Ismail was still a child, but he was a brave boy and when his father told him about the dream he was quite ready to obey Allah’s command. Without hesitating, he said, ‘Do what you are commanded, father: God willing, you will find me one of the steadfast.'”

The liberal Christian version of this story begins quite differently: “Abraham was an old man, when he and his wife, Sarah, had a child. Now God told Abraham to take his son, Isaac, and sacrifice him! Abraham cut the wood to burn the sacrifice. He gave the wood to Isaac to carry. Abraham had the fire and a very sharp knife. Isaac asked his father the burning question: ‘I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?'”

This feels a little like the old movie Rashomon, where the same story is told from several different perspectives. Which is the true story, the real story? But that’ the wrong question to ask; that’s the question that is asked by scientists and by religious fundamentalists. An artist would ask a different question: What of the depths of human nature can be revealed by these different version of the same myth? The artist might ask: Do these retellings of this old myth do justice to the myth, and how might I retell this story?

(The artist might also ask, If I retell this story, will I put myself at risk of retribution by crazed fundamentalists who don’t want to let anyone else retell what they claim as their story? The artist might equally well ask, Will militant atheists misunderstand why I chose to retell this story and vilify me for spreading religion? In our society, it is safer to be a scientist than it is to be an artist.)

Let’s look at another pair of children’s stories. The book of stories for Jewish children begins one story like this: In the village of Galilee, there lived a man called Jonah. One night, Jonah heard the voice of God say: ‘Arise, and go to the city of Nineveh! Tell the people I will destroy their city unless they stop their evil ways.’ But Jonah was afraid to go to Nineveh, so he ran away….” Jonah gets on a boat, a storm comes up, he tells the sailors to throw him overboard, they do and he gets swallowed by a whale, who takes him to Nineveh, where he tells the people to repent. They do repent, so God forgives them. But Jonah sits outside the city waiting for God to destroy it, until he dreams he is inside a giant gourd, which protects him from the weather until a worm eats it up. Then God lectures Jonah on forgiveness.

The Islamic story begins this way: A very old and powerful community used to live around 800 B.C., in Nineveh, some 230 miles north of Baghdad. Allah sent the Prophet Yunus (peace be upon him) to this community to guide the on to the right path. Yunus (peace be upon him) preached to them for a long time, warning them to turn away from their wickedness, but they paid no heed to his words. Angry and despairing, he left these people, and headed towards a seaport….” And then Yunus gets on a ship, there’s a big storm, the sailors force him to jump overboard, he gets swallowed by a whale, he realizes that he had left Nineveh too soon, without completing his task. So he calls out to God, the whale spits him out at Nineveh, he finishes his task.

Now you begin to see how the same basic story is retold within different religions with minor differences in plot. Not only that, but the way the story of Yunus is retold in the “Goodnight Stories from the Quran” story book is different than the way it appears in the sacred texts of Islam. And you can find other retellings of that same story. Clergypersons retell these stories all the time, recasting them for their own congregations. There are comic book versions of these stories, and more than that, characters like Noah have become familiar figures in gags of comic strips. People who have no religious affiliation can retell these stories effectively: Archibald Macleish, who appears to have been non-religious, retold the Biblical story of Job in his play “J.B.”

This is what we do with myths: we make art out of them. We make low art, like the 2014 Tundra comic strip where the animals are lined up to get on Noah’s ark, and Noah has them going through a metal detector. We make high art out of them, as Archibald Macleish did with the play “J.B.” We retell these stories to our children, making our own personal interpretations out of them.

This is what cultures are supposed to do: we take the myths that many or most people in our culture know well, and we retell them. It’s easier to retell an old story than it is to make up a new plot, as Shakespeare knew full well — he stole most of his plots from somewhere else. It’s easier to do, and it can make for more effective art, because you can play off meanings and implications known to your audience. It’s like being a jazz musician, where you take an old standard and reinterpret it: when John Coltrane plays “My Favorite Things,” you can hear Julie Andrews singing it in the movie, which makes what he does with it even richer.

And it’s also wonderful to see how myths play out across different traditions. Knowing the Islamic version of the Jonah story gives you a new perspective on the more familiar Jewish and Christian versions. And this is one of the things that can keep you from sinking into the quicksand of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism requires rigid thinking, where myths have to be slotted into logical, rational, rigid little boxes.

I think we should be headed in the opposite direction. We used to talk about “world brotherhood,” a sexist term with colonialist implications; but there was a kernel of wholesome truth in that old, outmoded phrase. Instead, we can turn to Kwame Anthony Appiah, who talks about cosmopolitanism — which might be defined as the willingness to have “conversations across boundaries.”

This, I think, is why it’s so important to pay attention to the shared myths of the Abrahamic religions. We live in a country whose leaders often proclaim their Christianity and they portray Muslims as utterly alien; yet Christians and Muslims share these key myths. Similarly, we’ve seen a rise of Christian anti-Semitism in our country in the last few years, yet again Christians and Muslims share these key myths. While we are not going to be able to talk the bigots out of the bigotry, we can try on our own to have conversations across boundaries. And those of us who don’t identify as Christian, Jewish, or Muslim — or perhaps as post-Christian or post-Jewish — yet who are participants in Western culture; we are well-placed to initiate conversations across the boundaries of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; and these shared myths, common cultural inheritances of all of us, might provide enough common ground to open those conversations.

THRID VIDEO

I’m adding this third video to what was supposed to be a two-part series on the shared myths of Abrahamic religions, so I can look at some of the shared myths.

Well, so what are some of the the shared myths of some of the Abrahamic religions? One way to answer that is to look at figures who appear in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. (Unfortunately, I know less about Baha’i, and I don’t feel qualified to talk about their tradition at all.)

The obvious figure that appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is Abraham. Christians and Jew both draw from the book of Genesis for their Abraham myths, while for Muslims, Abraham appears in the Quran. While the figure of Abraham remains the same across these three Abrahamic traditions, the myths vary. For Jews, the people of Israel are descendants of Abraham, and he is the exemplar of following the commandments of the Torah and of God. Christians tell slightly different myths about Abraham; he is a spiritual ancestor of every Christian, and he is the exemplar of having faith in his god. In the Quran, Muslims tell how Abraham found a spring at Mecca and thus the ritual of the hajj can be traced to him, and he is the exemplar of submission to God.

Remember that myths change and evolve over time, and different people within a single tradition may tell different myths about the same figure. So these broad generalizations about the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim myths of Abraham will have many variations across time and across cultures, and even from one individual to another.

Other figures and myths that are shared across these three religions include Adam and Eve in the garden; Noah and the flood; Moses and the exodus; King David and King Solomon; Job and his troubles, and Jonah and the whale. Again, while the figure and general outlines of the story are shared, the specifics of the ways the myths are told and retold will vary.

Another shared myth of these traditions is the myth of hell, that place where evildoers are sent after death. All three traditions talk about hell as a place of fire. For example, in surah 5:37, the Quran says that those who are condemned to hell “will long to leave the Fire, but never will they leave there from; and theirs will be a lasting torment.” But the details of hell get described in many different ways. For example, many Christians in the United States have been influenced by the description of hell in Dante’s Inferno, or by Jonathan Edwards’s sermons describing the torments of being burned up. There are a great many variations of these myths of hell, and there is no one single way that hell is described for any one of these traditions, let alone a single description of hell that applies over all three traditions.

Another shared myth is the way Adam and Eve did something that got them in trouble with God. Many Christians in the United States have been influenced — often without their knowing it — by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” so much so that children are told Milton’s version of the myth long before they’re old enough to read “Paradise Lost.” But Jewish children and Muslim children might not hear anything of Milton’s retelling of the myth, unless they happen to take a college English class where they’re forced to read Milton’s poem.

All these differences raise some tough questions: Are the differences between the Abrahamic religions so great that they’re going to get in the way of “conversations across boundaries”? Or, conversely, are the similarities so great that the differences loom even larger, thus preventing productive “conversations across boundaries”? An article by Ulrich Rosenhagen in “Christian Century” magazine back on November 24, 2015, addressed this question. The article, titled “One Abraham or three? The conversation between three faiths,” described some initiatives where adherents of these three Abrahamic religions tried to carry out “conversations across boundaries.” About one such initative, Rosenhagen wrote:

“At the Lubar Institute [for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Wisconsin], Jewish, Christian, and Muslim undergraduates have started to overcome religious intolerance through candid conversations about cartoon controversies, gender issues, and prayer practices. Shared trips to mosques, churches, and synagogues have enabled them to form relationships of trust and respect by learning about each other’s sacred spaces, texts, and rituals. Through debate and dialogue the students have been startled and comforted by the fact that they share sacred sources, stories of prophets, and a social obligation to care for the poor (Tzedakah, Zakat, social gospel). With each new revelation of their commonality, their bounds of moral imagination have expanded, and their ‘they’ has given way to a ‘we.’ All this gives good reason to believe that the Abrahamic paradigm is not just a noble idea but a promising new foundation for civic discourse and interfaith understanding.”

And back in 2016, I participated in one such initiative, an annual conference called “Sacred Texts, Human Contexts.” Started by a group that included Muslims, Christians, and Jews, by 2016 there were also a few Buddhists and adherents of other religions. For me, this conference proved to be a very good way to engage in conversations across boundaries, and I was disappointed when they rescheduled it to a time of year when I was unable to attend.

So this idea of shared Abrahamic myths can, in fact, be a good way to begin inter-religious dialogue. And as the Sacred Texts Human Contexts conference shows, the conversation can then be widened to include other religions.

The important point for me is the attempt to find some point of commonality where you can start to have conversations across boundaries.

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A Discussion with Andreas Karelas, Katharine Hayhoe, and Bill McKibben

From left to right: Andreas Karelas, Katharine Hayhoe, Bill McKibben

The existential threat of environmental collapse may loom high, but Andreas Karelas, founder and executive director of RE-volv, shows how we can move past our collective inaction on climate change and work together in our communities in his book Climate Courage. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe and environmentalist Bill McKibben joined him for his book launch on September 29 to talk about it. They also discussed how saving our planet, our economy, and our democracy are not mutually exclusive goals. Amy Caldwell, the book’s editor, moderated the discussion.

Climate change was a key topic in what turned out to be two rather than three presidential debates. On one hand, President Trump defended the fossil fuel industry while not displaying much understanding of how humans are responsible for changing the climate. On the other, Vice President Biden spoke about his climate plan’s goal of job creation. According to Karelas, we already have the tools needed to solve the climate crisis. Here’s what he, Karelas, McKibben, and Hayhoe had to say during the book launch about the power of community steering our course to solving our crisis with those very tools.

Amy Caldwell: We know that the fires that have been decimating California and the Pacific Northwest are related to climate change. There are also huge fires in South America and Australia. So this is a global issue. Every year, we hear bad news about the polar ice caps; there’s more bad news this year. What are some bright spots? What are some bright spots and solutions that focus on inclusivity within the climate movement?

Andreas Karelas: Bill, I was recently flipping through your book Falter, and one of the things you write that speaks to a big portion of Climate Courage is that we have two technologies that, if employed, could be decisive to the era: the solar panel and the nonviolent movement. RE-volv, the nonprofit that I founded, finances solar-energy projects for nonprofits that otherwise couldn’t go solar. Those nonprofits can then reduce their electricity costs, benefit the people they serve even more so, and demonstrate to the community the benefits of solar energy.

One of the things we have on our side in the fight against climate change is the fact that solar energy is contagious. When someone goes solar, their neighbor is more likely to go solar. And their neighbor is even more likely to go solar. We’ve seen this play out in communities across the country. It happens over and over and over again. You can see it on a map in clusters of people going solar.

To tie this to the equity piece, there was a great study that came out of Tufts and UC Berkeley about a year ago. It talked about the racial and ethnic disparity of solar installations in those communities. What they found, not surprisingly, is that communities of color, particularly African American communities, have much less solar, even after you account for wealth disparity. But what the study also found was the solution they call seed projects. These seed projects build off the idea that solar is contagious. In fact, if you put solar in a community of color, the adoption rates are even faster. The solar contagious effect is even higher, dramatically so, than it is compared to other communities. That is super powerful. It means that we as communities look to our neighbors to see how we can solve this thing, and if we see other people taking action, we want to take those same actions, and those can spread.

The climate movement, in my opinion, has often painted one of two areas of engagement. One is, as Bill mentioned, changing your lightbulbs, or taking individual actions. Like you said, we have a detector that says, “That’s not going to cut it.” I can bring a reusable tote bag, but that’s not going to stop companies from spewing carbon into the atmosphere. The other side looks at what our leaders can do. What can our federal government do? As somebody who’s been in this fight for a long time, we all know that none of us are holding our breath, waiting for the federal government to solve this, right? We send petitions, we sign letters to our congress folks and representatives, but we don’t necessarily think that’s the only way it’s going to happen, as important as that is. Between those, what I see is the way to engage people so that they can feel agency is at the community level. What can we do with our neighbors? What can we do in our cities and our counties that can actually have an impact, that can demonstrate the benefits of sustainability, and thus, like a seed project, have this contagious effect from one community to another?

Some examples, the Sierra Club has their Ready for 100 campaign. They’ve basically trained volunteers to say, “Go to your community. Go to your local city and county and convince them to commit to 100 percent renewable energy.” This campaign, in just a few short years, has been so successful that now we have one out of every three Americans lives in a city or county or state that is committed to 100 percent renewable energy. That’s the power of community.

Bill McKibben: I do think there are things that should give us plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Or if not optimistic, at least not a reason to give up. We’ve watched over the last year or so a real sea change in the way Wall Street thinks about carbon and climate. It’s happened because lots of people have gotten together and pushed. And it’s also happened because solar power and wind power are now the cheapest way to generate electricity, and that causes your spreadsheet to start blinking amber in alert. Between that, the way money gets allocated has begun to shift. And Andreas is right to caution us that Washington is not the only place that counts. There are lots of possibilities. The part about coming together is really important. There’s been some good coming together even over the course of this horrible year.

The most important thing anyone has said in 2020 was what George Floyd said as he was being murdered: “I can’t breathe.” There are lots of reasons why people can’t breathe. They can’t breathe because there’s a cop kneeling on their neck. Or because police brutality stifles their community. Often, in the very same communities, people can’t breathe because there’s a coal fire powerplant down the street. We know enough about the effects of COVID to understand that it follows lines of race and class vulnerability, too. People can’t breathe because the wildfire smoke gets so thick that the authorities tell people to tape shut their windows and stay inside. People can’t breathe because it gets too damn hot. We saw the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on our planet this summer. 130 degrees in California. 120 degrees in San Luis Obispo, which is pretty much on the Pacific Ocean. That really shouldn’t be possible, but it is now. We have the possibility for a commonality that we have not felt before, or at least not for a while, in this overly divided nation and in this overly divided world. It’s a commonality of vulnerability as well as of possibility. We’re at this moment when the technologies that engineers gifted to us could be transformative if applied quickly and at scale. Our job is to make sure we create the conditions for that to happen.

Had Andreas’s book come out ten years ago, it would’ve been whistling past the graveyard, because we wouldn’t have had in place the possibility for solutions at scale. But now that we do, it makes enormous sense to be precisely having this conversation.

Katharine Hayhoe: People often ask, “How do we talk about this when there are so many other issues right up in our face?” There’s injustice, poverty, inequity, the inability to supply the physical needs of our families and put food on the table. Right here at home, as well as everywhere around the world, everybody is struggling right now. The reason we care about climate change is not because it increases the average temperature of the planet by one or two or three or five degrees; it’s because climate change is the great threat multiplier. It takes everything we already care about today and it makes it worse. It increases the risk of health impacts, the area burned by wildfires, the risks of extreme heat, which, of course, hit the poorest first. It makes our hurricanes stronger and much more devastating.

If you look at every basic goal to reduce poverty, eliminate hunger, insure people have clean water to drink, make sure that we have stable systems where people can go to school and go to the doctor—all of those basic things are threatened by climate change. So what I say to people is, “Who you already are is the perfect person to care. In fact, you already do.” It isn’t a case of moving climate change up your priority list and displacing something else. The only reason we care about climate change is because items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—all the way down are being affected by climate change.

***

If you weren’t able to attend the book launch, you can watch it here in full.

About the Panelists 

Andreas Karelas is the founder and executive director of RE-volv, a nonprofit organization that empowers people around the country to help nonprofits in their communities go solar and raise awareness about the benefits of clean energy. He is a dedicated clean-energy advocate with over 15 years of environmental and renewable energy experience. He is an Audubon TogetherGreen Conservation Leadership Fellow and an OpenIDEO Climate Innovator Fellow. He lives and works in San Francisco. Connect with him at re-volv.org and on Twitter at @AndreasKarelas.

Katharine Hayhoe, who wrote the foreword for Climate Courage, is an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on understanding what climate change means for people and the places where we live.

Bill McKibben is a founder of the environmental organization 350.org and was among the first to have warned of the dangers of global warming. He is the author of several bestselling books.

Jan Gartner

Continue reading "Compensation Process Guidance"

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Jan Gartner

Continue reading "Insurance Plans and Taxes"

Jan Gartner

Continue reading "Insurance Plans and Taxes"

 On Sunday, my novel goes live (at least the Kindle version). And NaNoWriMo starts! So I am having a book launching party on Facebook and writing my first 2000 words in the same day.

The Facebook party will need a bit of planning, which of course I have not done yet. I wanted a real-life party, but ironically, I have more people attending this one than I would have a real-life party. 

Fittingly, I'm writing the sequel to The Kringle Conspiracy, called Kringle in the Night, for NaNo. So I have a Christmas romance for next year.

Here's to a favorable result in the election, and here's to a month of creativity!

Quick quiz.  What woman won more Academy Awards than any other?  Meryl Streep your say?  Wrong.  Katherine Hepburn.  Nope.  Sally Field.  Don’t be ridiculous.  The woman with eight, count ‘em eight Oscars was not an actress at all but a diminutive woman turned out for decades in enormous round glasses, black Moe Howard bangs, tasteful two piece suites, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.

Who else but costume designer to the stars,Edith Head.

Edith Claire Posener was born on October 28, 1897—although she would later claim 1902, a date which still shows up in articles based on her Hollywood press clippings—in San Bernardino, California.  It was not a place she called home.  Indeed she never had a real hometown.  Her father, Max Posener, was a Russian Jewish emigrant and her mother, Anna E. Levy, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of German/Austrian Jews.  In the pecking order of Jewish society in America, they were mismatched.  It is likely Anna’s parents disapproved of the match and the couple eloped, or simply ran away since there is no evidence they ever married.

Max disappeared when Edith was small after a haberdashery he managed to open in San Bernardino failed.  A year later, in 1905 Anna married Frank Spare, a young Catholic engineer.  They were soon passing Edith off as their mutual daughter and she was raised a Catholic.   Her stepfather’s profession made the family virtual nomads has he found work in mining camps around the West.  The family stayed longer in Searchlight, Nevada than most towns.

Frank did earn a nice living an indulged his daughter in a first rate education.  Edith graduated with a B.A. and honors in French from the University of California at Berkley in 1919 and earned her Master’s in Romance Languages from Stanford a year later.

Then she was on her own in the world.  She started as a French teacher, first in a parochial school in La Jolla and then at the Hollywood School for Girls, a prestigious finishing school catering to the daughters of the booming movie business. In order to qualify for higher pay, she volunteered to teach art as well as French despite having no lessons in the subject since high school. 

Edith’s drawing skills were extremely limited so she enrolled for night classes at the Chouinard Art College.  While there she met Charles Head, the brother of a classmate.  They were married in the summer of 1923.  It was not a particularly happy marriage and the couple separatedafter a few years.  They did not divorce, however until 1934, presumably because of Edith’s Catholicism.  They had no children, but she gained the name she used throughout her professional life.

In 1924, bored with the life of a housewife in search of a good income, Edith naturally turned to the main local industry for work.  Despite absolutely no experiencein fashion or design and still limited in drafting skills, she applied to Paramount Pictures for work as a costume sketch artist under the direction of studio designers.  To get the job she submitted a portfolio borrowed from another student.  Not the last time she would finesse her career by cutting corners here and there.

                         A rare shot of a young Edith Head sans glasses from her early days at Paramount.

Head, however, was a quick study.  Her drawing improved, and she began making suggestions.  Within a year she was designing for her first picture, The Wanderer, a Raoul Walsh film starring German actress Greta Nissen and Wallace Berry.  She soon became a Walsh favorite, the first of several directors who championed her career.

At first she toiled in the shadows of Paramount’s head designers, first Howard Greer, then Travis Banton both of who, as was the custom, would often claim her work as their own for screen credits.  It was a “tradition” Head continued after she got the top job long after it was both out of fashion and professionally frowned on, for which she would get a lot of criticism from fellow designers.

But within the studio, Heads work was championed not only by directors, but by leading ladies who appreciated her habit of consulting with them on her design to accommodate  when possible their taste and to accentuate their best features.  Most designers took a take-it-or-leave it attitude with actresses except for the handful of stars with real clout within the studio system.

Although she had enjoyed some studio publicity over the years, Head did not attract wide spread public attentionuntil she put Dorothy Lamour in that famous sarong in 1937’s John Ford epic The Hurricane.  The dress made Lamour a star—Head kept her in versions of it in the subsequent Bring Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures—and Edith a celebrity. 

Dorothy Lamour's sarong was a break-out look.

And she would keep an iron grip on the job for 29 more years.

Paramount was toward the rear of the pack of Hollywood Major Studios, much smaller than the relentless factory at MGM which produced as many as 200 pictures a year at its peak, or Warner Bros.  home of gritty urban dramas, women’s movies, and prestige bio-flicks.  In either of those she would have had to compete with rafts of designers to get the top assignments.  Paramount, on the other hand, made 20 or 30 features a year with a relatively thin stable of stars.  Head got her hand on any project she desired, and had time to frequently go on loan to other studios at the bequest of stars or directors she had cultivated.  By the 1940’s “Costumes by Edith Head” seemed a ubiquitous credit.

In that decade she left her impression on many stars and memorable films including Paulette Goddard in Cat and the Canary; Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels and I Married a Witch; Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and Double Indemnity; Ginger Rodgers in Lady in the Dark; Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, Loretta Young in The Farmer’s Daughter; and Bette Davis in June Bride.

Head’s star was rising, but she was not about to let studio publicity departments burry her contributions while hyping stars.  She made herself available for interviewsto key entertainment reporters and kept gossip columnists in her debt by occasionally feeding them juicy—but never career damaging—studio gossip and usually flattering bitson the stars she cultivated.  She contributed fashion articles to magazinesand staged costume shows for newsreels.  She even got Paramount to film a short documentary on her and her department.

Not that she was without critics, particularly among her fellow designers and those who toiled in studio wardrobe departments.  She had been an outspoken opponent of unionization by costume designers.  Always obsequious to authority, especially studio bosses, producers, and name directors, she could be a tyrant and taskmistress over the employees under her, quick to shift blame for failures and to claim credit for their work.  She defended the later by saying that their designs were always only executed at her guidance, direction, and inspiration. 

Others were critical of her style, particularly in modern dress pictures calling her the Shirtwaist Queen for her frequent use of that basic style.  But shirtwaists are flattering on most women’s bodies.  Moreover studio bosses were explicit that designs be a timeless as possible, shunning passing fashion trends, so that pictures could easily be re-released, a big money maker.  The result was a classic clean but elegantEdith Head style.

Head's design for Bette Davis's coctail party gown in All About Eve was among her most celebrated work.

In 1949 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added the costume design to its annual Oscar Awards.  Beginning that year with The Emperor Waltz, a Bing Crosby musical co-starring Joan Fontaine, Head would be nominated for the next 19 consecutive years—sometimes  for multiple pictures in a year—and five more times after that with a total of 35 nominations.  Her eight trips home with the trophy were for The Heiress with Julie Harris, 1950; Samson and Delilah with Heddy Lamarr (color), 1951; All About Eve with Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (black and white), 1951; A Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Shelly Winters, 1952; Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn, 1954; Sabrina, again with Hepburn, 1954; The Facts of Life with Lucile Ball, 1960; and The Sting in 1974.

Of those films, the award for Sabrina was the most controversial.  For the key sequences when Hepburn as the chauffeur’s daughter blossoms into a Paris model, the star personally picked sketches by designer Hubert de Givenchy.  The outfits were constructed in Head’s wardrobe department and she did design most of the American clothes.  She refused to give de Givenchy screen credit with her for design.   Although the award was obviously mostly for his contributions, Head accepted it anyway.

Head was now a major celebrity in her own right.  There were not yet famous American fashion houses, and outside of New York society hardly anyone knew the name of a haute couture American designer.  Only the great Paris fashion houses were known to the public.  For many ordinary American women, the highly visible Head was high fashion, not just costume design.  Knock-offmanufacturers kept Main Street dress shops across the country stocked with dresses and suits inspired by Head movies.

Even I, a pre-teen yahoo in Cheyenne, Wyoming knew who Edith Head was.  In those days we had a full hour for lunchat school and those who could, walked home to eat.  I did.  And everyday Mom had Art Linkletter’s House Party, a kind of stone age talk/variety program, on the TV.  Head made frequent, sometimes weekly, appearances on the show, on the show, often dishing out fashion advice to members of the audience.  At home, Mom paid strict attention.

She had now added Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock to her list of director champions and a galaxy of stars including Hepburn, Taylor, Baxter, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood as her devoted fans. 

Among her other screen triumphs in the ‘50’s and ‘60s were Sunset Boulevard with Gloria Swanson; Rear Window and It Takes a Thief with Kelly; White Christmas with Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen, Crosby, and Danny Kaye; The Man Who Knew too Much with Doris Day; the DeMille epic Ten Commandments; Witness for the Prosecution with Marlene Dietrich; Separate Tables with Rita Hayworth; Vertigo with Kim Novak; and That Kind of Woman with Sophia Loren.

Starting in 1963 with Love With a Proper Stranger through The Last Married Couple in America in 1980 Head made seven films with Natalie Wood.

Her last film for Paramount was the gaudy melodrama The Oscar, for which she naturally received another nomination for the statuette in 1967.  Then Head left her longtime home at Paramount and jumped to Universal, a studio on the rise since its days as the home of classic monster movies.  She followed Alfred Hitchcock there, the director with whom she worked most often. 

Head surrounded by sketches reflecting her long career in 1967.

Age and increasingly fragile health slowed her up some, but she could still pull out some claims to glory.  There were five more Oscar nominations including nods for the musical Sweet Charity,  the costume epic The Man Who Would Be King, and the disaster movies Airport and Airport ’77.  After years of gaining glory for designing for beautiful Hollywood clothes horses, her final years were marked by films centering on men, including her final Oscar win, The Sting.

She designed for Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn.  She also did work that evoked earlier years of Hollywood glory and her own screen work—Gable and Lombard with James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh, W.C. Fields and Me with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine, and Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.  The latter, released in 1981, captured the look of ‘40’s film noir.  Released after her death, Martin dedicated the film to her.

Head’s husband since 1940, set designer Wiard Ihnen died in 1979 of prostate cancer.  The couple had no children.  Although Head continued to work until the end, her health was bad.  She suffered from myelofibrosis, an incurable bone marrow disease.  She died on October 24, 1981 four days shy of her 84th birthday.  She was buried unostentatiously under a simple bronze plaque in a Catholic section of Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens removed from the flashy graves and mausoleums of the stars she had decorated. 

“No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn’t stop for your grief.”
― Faraaz Kazi

How do you make space for grief?

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