Hi all,

Happy almost Halloween!

I spend this evening nerding out with other pottery nerds and the owner of Mudfire, my pottery studio. We had a class about ancient Vincan pottery from the Baltics and ancient Minoan pottery from Crete.

Parts that stood out to me:

• The first ceramic items found from 30,000 years ago are figurines of mother goddesses
• The first “pottery” or functional pots are from 10,000 years later than the figurines
• This means that pottery was about ritual far before it was about storage
• The Vincan people were peaceful for thousands of years, and they practiced worship of the mother goddess
• There is a field called Dermatoglyphics which is able to take fingerprints from pottery pieces and figure out who made the pots
• Among the Vinca people, the makers were mainly women between 20-40, but the practice was also taught to children

I’ll say it over and over again - I just love how ceramics connects us to thousands of years of human history from the past, and connects us to the future in the act of creating items that could be found thousands of years from now.
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I also developed a conspiracy theory today - because the main God of today, the God of Abraham and Isaac, creates using words: “Let there be light,” etc., we respect intangible arts like writing and music far more than we respect tangible arts like ceramics or weaving. In some origin stories, God is a sculptor (as we talked about last week) but in our story God is a speaker.

More thoughts to come on this –– as a side note I think the phrase conspiracy theory has been corrupted by all the bad theories out there. Yesterday someone told me they wanted to share their opinion but didn’t want to put on a tinfoil hat, so I said, “No, it’s okay, what tinfoil hats do you wear?” And we had a great conversation about the tinfoil hats we each put on.

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As an update, I’m preparing for holiday sales, teaching a lot, feeling love!

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All the best,

Liliana

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