Files
kennethreitz ce93f429a2 Add Knowledge: the vault's reference shelf, crosslinked across the site
Publish the Obsidian vault's Knowledge folder as /knowledge (881 notes,
67 folders), with a Knowledge item in the nav and footer.

- scripts/import_knowledge.py regenerates data/knowledge from the vault:
  slugged paths, folder notes as index pages, wikilinks resolved to site
  links (or plain text), callouts, highlights, and Dataview tables
  rendered statically. Personal notes are withheld via an exclusion
  list plus a privacy guard.
- tuftecms/core/knowledge.py builds a concept index from note titles and
  aliases. First mentions on ordinary pages link to their Knowledge note
  (capped, never in headings, code, links, or sidenotes); Knowledge pages
  list related notes and where they're mentioned across the site; other
  pages get a Related Knowledge block.
- Knowledge URLs join sitemap.xml (so the sweep test covers them), never
  displace existing legacy slugs, list alphabetically, and mermaid
  diagrams render client-side only on pages that have them.
2026-10-18 20:08:46 -04:00

2.4 KiB

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obsidian-knowledge

Pomona

Domain: Fruit trees, orchards, cultivated abundance Symbol: Pruning-knife, orchard, ripe fruit Greek Equivalent: None (uniquely Roman)


Overview

Pomona is the Roman goddess of fruit trees, gardens, and orchards — the tended abundance of ripening fruit rather than the wild growth of the forest. Her name comes from pomum, orchard fruit, and her care is not for grain or the harvest at large but for the cultivated tree: the apple, the pear, the fig, the vine trained and coaxed to yield. She is uniquely Roman, with no Greek counterpart, a goddess born of the practical love of the orchard-keeper for the trees in his charge.

She carried her own priest, the flamen Pomonalis, low in rank among the flamens precisely because her domain was so specialized — yet the office existed, a mark of how seriously Rome took even the smallest sphere of cultivated life. Pomona does not wander the wilds; her attention is fixed and domestic, given wholly to pruning, grafting, and watering, to the slow art by which a tree is made to bear.

The Pruning-Knife

Her defining attribute is the pruning-knife (falx). She carries it not as a weapon but as a tool of tending: she cuts back the excess growth so the tree will fruit, grafts one stock onto another, and channels the water to the roots. The knife makes her a goddess of skilled cultivation rather than raw fertility — abundance produced by care and craft, the orchard shaped by a knowing hand.

Vertumnus and Pomona

Ovid tells the great story of her courtship in the Metamorphoses. Pomona wanted no suitor and shut herself inside her orchard, but Vertumnus, the god of the turning seasons and of ripening, loved her and could change his shape at will. He came to her disguised as a reaper, a vinedresser, a soldier, again and again, until at last he took the form of an old woman who praised the married vine embracing its elm and warned against a life alone. When persuasion failed, he dropped the disguise and stood revealed in his own youth — and Pomona, seeing him at last, returned his love. The tale reads as the seasons themselves wooing the fruit into ripeness.