telerib | Convention Report I

We left for BWI at 4am; I was at my hotel by 1pm local time, or 4pm EDT. For a 12-hour trip, it wasn't bad - I had just enough time at my layover to walk briskly to the gate and use the restroom before boarding. No rush, and no wait.

Main bummer of the day: realizing while on line at BWI security that I left my cell phone in the car. This was a pain because the car repair people were supposed to be calling me on that phone on Monday. I figured I could make do with pay phones, since this is what people did BC (before cells).

I called my college bud Kevin from the hotel; he popped on over and we spent an hour or so catching up. We had planned to go to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, but Kevin had heard that upwards of 50,000 people attend it on that first day. Not really wanting to deal with the traffic, we decided to give the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Planetarium a go.

The museum really is a straight-up collection of Egyptian artifacts. The museum, its grounds, and the Rosicrucian facilties are all done in an Egyptain style - modeled on the temple at Karnak, I think, but I don't quite remember. It was really very beautful. The exhibits were interesting - I best liked a replica statue of Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of desert winds, plague and healing. They set it at the back of a longish, slightly dark gallery, and illuminated it with a single recessed overhead light. The effect on the black stone was striking, and did a much better job of illustrating how these statues might have been perceived in situ than the typical bland museum presentation.

The planetarium, on the other hand... the current show was on Mithraism and a possible astronomical explaination thereof. I've read about this before, and the show was frankly not convincing. It did explain some of the symbolism, but rather blatantly ignored other large chunks of it, and some of the logic seemed circular to me.

The gift store was a little short on unique swag - mostly Egyptian-themed trinkets that could be picked up via any number of mail-order catalogues. The books, though... I regretfully couldn't pick up all the interesting woo-woo books that were there (including one, of which I have previously heard, which postulates that the lost remnants of Lemurian culture can be found on Mount Shasta in California). I did pick up two more scholarly texts on Elizabethan occultism and the Rosicrucian enlightenment, as well as a book highlighting the "Women of Egypt" sections of the museum's collection. (Incidentally, I thought they did a fabulous job of integrating the "women's studies" aspect of their work into the general collections - there wasn't a special "girl power" room, but rather an effort in all of the exhibits to show how both sexes contributed to the culture, government and religion).

Last bit that really stood out - several references in the exhibits that the daily application of makeup and the styling of the hair were a rite of worship for Hathor, the goddess of beauty. I found it very interesting that those personal grooming habits which in a northern European context would be labeled "vanity" were once sacred duties.

Kevin showed me his new apartment and we had dinner; he dropped me off at the hotel and I promptly went to bed. I wanted to go over the presentation that I was giving the next day, but it had been a 20-hour day and I figured (what with the time difference) I could get up early Sunday and practice it that morning.