Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women
Forty-three centuries of sacred poetry by women, from Sumerian temple hymns through Mirabai and Rabia, in the anthology that made much of it visible in English.
Hirshfield gathers women’s sacred poetry from Sumerian temple hymns to the twentieth century, taking in Enheduanna, Mirabai, Rabia and the Gnostic “Thunder: Perfect Mind”, across forty-three centuries and most of the world’s traditions. The anthology that made much of this writing visible in English for the first time.
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Maria Popova
Sixteen centuries before Whitman, the Gnostics — those spiritual visionaries who saw the wholeness of being before modern Christianity partitioned the body and the soul — channeled that voice in “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” part of what is now known as the Nag Hammadi Library: a set of ancient texts discovered in a jar at the foot of a cliff by two illiterate Muslim brothers in 1945. The long poem of contrasts and conciliation “appears to derive from the female-centered Isis worship preceding Christianity,” writes poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield in introducing her translation of it in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (public library).
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