Miss Forward
Oct 16th, 2008 by admin
Portrait by M. Maeder Sculpture by Jean Pond Miner Coburn
Jean Pond Miner created this bronze statue, which depicts a woman on the prow of a ship, for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Located at the West entrance to the Wisconsin State Capitol building, it was completed in 1893, about 3 years before Carl Grasshoff (later Max Heindel) emigrated to the United States. Miner sculpted this second statue after the fire in her studio went out one night and the freezing cold temperature completely destroyed the original clay statue she was preparing to cast into bronze.
Named Miss Forward for the state’s motto, she is a 7-foot tall allegorical representation of devotion and progress that, from Ms Miner’s experience, could also symbolize patience and persistence. Pointing west, she would seem to beckon Heindel and others to travel in that direction. Heindel talks about the natural law of east-to-west movement on Page 515 in The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception:
Everything in the world is subject to law, even our evolution is thus encompassed; spiritual and physical progression go hand in hand. The sun is the physical light bringer and, as we know, it apparently travels from east to west bringing light and life to one part of the earth after another. But the visible sun is only a part of the sun as the visible body is a small part of composite man. There is an invisible and spiritual sun whose rays promote soul growth upon one part of the earth after another as the physical sun promotes the growth of form, and this spiritual impulse also travels in the same direction as the physical sun; from east to west.