Paul Klee, “Tree Nursery”

According to the Book of Genesis (New American Standard Bible), “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” All other translations known to me prefer the word “hovering” instead of “moving.” I like the boldness and dynamism of this particular translation because it conceives of the act of creation as a clash of opposing forces; an expression of the energetic, potent and fructifying spirit acting upon the inert, receptive earth and waters. I thought about this while visiting an exhibition at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland dedicated to the artist’s fascination and attempts at depicting movement in his paintings. The section of the exhibition entitled “Centrifugal forces of nature” has this as its motto:

“I place myself at a remote, originary place of creation, where I assume formulas for men, animals, plants, earth, fire, water, air and, at the same time, all the circling forces.”

Paul Klee, Diary IV

Paul Klee, “Landscape in the Beginning”

Paul Klee, “Rose Wind”

Klee believed the motion to be at the root of all growth. He described his works as Genesis. He was particularly fascinated by gravity and all kids of movements working to defy its inexorable force, namely the free centrifugal forces directed dynamically away from the centre (hence the frequent use of arrows and rolling wheels in his paintings); walking, jumping, running and dancing as other ways of overcoming gravity; finally, he juxtaposed the free movement of the spirit (mental motion) with the bodily movements hindered and limited by gravity. He called water an “in-between realm,” where “gravity, defined by the attraction of the earth, acts in the opposite direction, namely upwards.”

Paul Klee, “Eros”

Perhaps the word “hovering” used in all major Bible translations can be defended if we thought of it as implying “balancing movement.” Klee’s work was very much concerned with balance found through motion. He was interested in an equilibrium of colour, line and form as an expression of a spiritual balance of being. He saw the inner paradoxical nature of balance as a simultaneous action and (static) condition. If all of nature is a precarious interplay between the static and the dynamic forces, then a balance is a temporary, fragile and rare moment, as beautifully shown here by artists from Cirque Rigolo:

I. “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

Peter Brook

II. “All the world’s a stage.”

William Shakespeare

Adrian Lester as Hamlet in Peter Brook’s production

Perhaps theatre is the most primal of all arts. As far as we can tell, it developed alongside and through agricultural and religious ritual. The mask, its main symbol, is age old, with the first objects of this kind dating back to the Neolithic period (ca 7000 BC). In Ancient Greece, theatre was dedicated to and inextricable from the cult of Dionysus. Drama and dream are two words that come from a common root, which means that the theatre offers a way of looking behind the curtain straight into the eternal dimension. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche saw the beginning of the theatre in the ecstatic performance of hymns sung and danced in honor of Dionysus:

“In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities. Something never felt before forces itself into expression — the destruction of the veil of Maja, the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, of nature itself. Now the essence of nature must express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is necessary, the entire symbolism of the body, not just the symbolism of mouth, face, and words, but the full gestures of the dance — all the limbs moving to the rhythm. And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of music, rhythm, dynamics, and harmony — all with sudden spontaneity.”

In his classic work Dionysus: Myth and Cult, Walter Otto speaks of the “shattering” appearance of the god as the one who simultaneously brings “pandemonium and silence.” The central Dionysian symbol appears to be the mask. Otto saw the mask as “the strongest symbol of presence.” In his view, it depicts a god or spirit who appears, who is encountered, but who is also a being from beyond:

“It is the symbol and the manifestation of that which is simultaneously there and not there; that which is excruciatingly near, that which is completely absent – both in one reality. … The final secrets of existence and non-existence transfix mankind with monstrous eyes.”

A stone mask from the neolithic period, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask#/media/File:Musee_de_la_bible_et_Terre_Sainte_001.JPG

In this passage Otto captures the essence of the theatre: it is palpable and material, arresting and tangible, but at the same time the spectator feels that there is a division, a line that cannot be crossed because the reality presented on the stage is not of this world – it invokes the metaphysical dimension.

My first theatrical epiphany occurred while watching Peter Brook’s Mahabharata on TV when I was about twelve years old. It was a deeply transformative experience, arresting from the very first moment when I saw the orange flames that preceded the opening credits. In his captivating book about the theatre entitled The Empty Space, Brook speaks of the Holy Theatre as the one which makes the invisible visible:

“We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes. We observe that the behaviour of people, of crowds, of history, obeys such recurrent patterns. We hear that trumpets destroyed the walls of Jericho, we recognize that a magical thing called music can come from men in white ties and tails, blowing, waving, thumping and scraping away. Despite the absurd means that produce it, through the concrete in music we recognize the abstract, we understand that ordinary men and their clumsy instruments are transformed by an art of possession. We may make a personality cult of the conductor, but we are aware that he is not really making the music, it is making him—if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.”

Peter Brook

The theatre has the power of awakening our imagination, through which our inner eye opens to the images that populate the invisible. On the stage, objects, gestures and words transform into universal symbols. If what we have experienced was the Holy Theatre, we feel that a profound and invisible eternal truth has made itself present in our midst. The transient moment that can never be repeated in the same way (the theatre is all about portend though fleeting moments) has been endowed with a symbolic dimension. I remember being particularly struck by a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting of Godot, which I saw years ago on a school trip. One prop particularly caught my attention with an irresistible force: a suitcase full of sand carried by Lucky, a slave to the character Pozzo. I resonate deeply with the following passage from Brook, in which he gives homage to Beckett’s unique talent of symbolization:

“Beckett’s plays are symbols in an exact sense of the word. A false symbol is soft and vague: a true symbol is hard and clear. When we say ‘symbolic’ we often mean something drearily obscure: a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take. The two men waiting by a stunted tree, the man recording himself on tapes, the two men marooned in a tower, the woman buried to her waist in sand, the parents in the dustbins, the three heads in the urns: these are pure inventions, fresh images sharply defined—and they stand on the stage as objects. They are theatre machines. People smile at them, but they hold their ground: they are critic proof. We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us we can’t deny. If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great and wondering O.”

Waiting for Godot, via http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/04/26/theater/20090426_GODOT_SLIDESHOW_3.html

Symbols are eternally reborn in modern costumes. The great artists of the theatre have never had any doubts about the fluidity of all material representations of the underlying symbolic order. We have seen marvellous performances of female Hamlets, as we have seen Hamlets of all races. The Tragedy of Hamlet envisaged by Peter Brook achieved the seemingly impossible by bringing Hamlet back to life for the modern audience. As one critic wrote,

“It is a landmark production of the most hackneyed great play in history precisely because it compels us to see it with utterly fresh eyes. The fine Polish critic Jan Kott–an influence on Brook’s early work–wrote memorably about Hamlet that he’s become like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. ‘We know she is smiling even before we have seen the picture,’ Kott wrote. ‘Mona Lisa’s smile has been separated from the picture, as it were.’ … Peter Brook’s aim is to see behind the smile.”

via http://observer.com/2001/05/whos-there-peter-brooks-hamlet-leads-the-way/

The sublime way Adrian Lester delivers the famous monologue sounds unbelievably contemporary.

Giulio Camillo was a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher, most notable for his idea of the “Theatre of Memory.” The following passage comes from chapter 6 of The Art of Memory by Yates Francis (the embedded quotes are by Camillo himself):

“The Theatre rises in seven grades or steps, which are divided by seven gangways representing the seven planets. The student of it is to be as it were a spectator before whom are placed the seven measures of the world ‘in spettaculo’, or in a theatre. And since in ancient theatres the most distinguished persons sat in the lowest seats, so in this Theatre the greatest and most important things will be in the lowest place. That there would be no room for an audience to sit between these enormous and lavishly decorated gangway gates does not matter. For in Camillo’s Theatre the normal function of the theatre is reversed. There is no audience sitting in the seats watching a play on the stage. The solitary ‘spectator’ of the Theatre stands where the stage would be and looks towards the auditorium, gazing at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades.

Looking at our plan, we can see that the whole system of the Theatre rests basically upon seven pillars, the seven pillars of Solomon’s House of Wisdom. Solomon in the ninth chapter of Proverbs says that wisdom has built herself a house and has founded it on seven pillars. By these columns, signifying most stable eternity, we are to understand the seven Sephiroth of the supercelestial world, which are the seven measures of the fabric of the celestial and inferior worlds, in which are contained the Ideas of all things both in the celestial and in the inferior worlds. Camillo is speaking of the three worlds of the Cabalists, as Pico della Mirandola had expounded them; the supercelestial world of the Sephiroth or divine emanations; the middle celestial world of the stars; the subcelestial or elemental world. The same ‘measures’ run through all three worlds though their manifestations are different in each. As Sephiroth in the supercelestial world they are here equated with the Platonic ideas. Camillo is basing his memory system on first causes, on the Sephiroth, on the Ideas; these are to be the ‘eternal places’ of his memory.

…his memory building is to represent the order of eternal truth; in it the universe will be remembered through organic association of all its parts with their underlying eternal order.

…

Each of the six upper grades has a general symbolic meaning represented by the same image on each of its seven gates. We have shown this on the plan by giving the name of the general image for a grade at the top of all its gates, together with the characters of the planets, indicating to which planetary series each gate belongs.

…

…the second grade of the Theatre is really the first day of creation, imaged as the banquet given by Ocean to the gods, the emerging elements of creation, here in their simple unmixed form.

The third grade will have depicted on each of its gates a Cave, which we call the Homeric Cave to differentiate it from that which Plato describes in his Republic. In the cave of the Nymphs described in the ‘Odyssey,’ nymphs were weaving and bees were going in and out, which activities signify, says Camillo, the mixtures of the elements to form the elementata ‘and we wish that each of the seven caves may conserve the mixtures and elementata belonging to it in accordance with the nature of its planet.’ The Cave grade thus represents a further stage in creation, when the elements are mixed to form created things or elementata. …

 With the fourth grade we reach the creation of man, or rather the interior man, his mind and soul. … this grade (has) as the leading image to be depicted on all its gates the Gorgon Sisters, the three sisters described by Hesiod who had only one eye between them…

 On the fifth grade, the soul of man joins his body. This is signified under the image of Pasiphe and the Bull which is the leading image on the gates of this grade. ‘For she (Pasiphe) being enamoured of the Bull signifies the soul which, according to the Platonists, falls into a state of desiring the body.’ The soul in its downward journey from on high, passing through all the spheres, changes its pure igneous vehicle into an aerial vehicle through which it is enabled to become joined to the gross corporeal form. This junction is symbolised by the union of Pasiphe with the Bull.

…

‘The sixth grade of the Theatre has on each of the gates of the planets, the Sandals, and other ornaments, which Mercury puts on when he goes to execute the will of the gods, as the poets feign.

…

‘The seventh grade is assigned to all the arts, both noble and vile, and above each gate is Prometheus with a lighted torch.’ The image of Prometheus who stole the sacred fire and taught men knowledge of the gods and of all the arts and sciences thus becomes the topmost image, at the head of the gates on the highest grade of the Theatre. The Prometheus grade includes not only all the arts and sciences, but also religion, and law.

Thus Camillo’s Theatre represents the universe expanding from First Causes through the stages of creation. First is the appearance of the simple elements from the waters on the Banquet grade; then the mixture of the elements in the Cave; then the creation of man’s mens in the image of God on the grade of the Gorgon Sisters; then the union of man’s soul and body on the grade of Pasiphe and the Bull; then the whole world of man’s activities; his natural activities on the grade of the Sandals of Mercury; his arts and sciences, religion and laws on the Prometheus grade.

…

The Theatre is thus a vision of the world and of the nature of things seen from a height, from the stars themselves and even from the supercelestial founts of wisdom beyond them.

…

Though the Ficinian influence is everywhere present in Camillo’s Theatre, it is in the great central series of the Sun that it is most apparent. Most of Ficino’s ideas on the sun are set out in his De sole, though they also appear in his other works. … On the Banquet grade of the Sun series, Camillo places the image of a pyramid, representing the Trinity. … Camillo’s arrangement is completely Ficinian in spirit, in its suggestion of a hierarchy descending from the Sun as God to other forms of light and heat in lower spheres, transmitting the spiritus in his rays.

…

The Theatre presents a remarkable transformation of the art of memory. The rules of the art are clearly discernible in it. Here is a building divided into memory places on which are memory images. … The religious intensity associated with mediaeval memory has turned in a new and bold direction. The mind and memory of man is now ‘divine’, having powers of grasping the highest reality through a magically activated imagination. The Hermetic art of memory has become the instrument in the formation of a Magus, the imaginative means through which the divine microcosm can reflect the divine macrocosm, can grasp its meaning from above, from that divine grade to which his ‘mens’ belongs. The art of memory has become an occult art, a Hermetic secret.”

From Astrological Mandalas by A.T. Mann: the sign Gemini imagined as Memory Theatre (more at http://www.atmann.net/12mantxt.htm)

I.“There is something special about their relationship, something not simply reducible to teacher and devotee, and all attempts to hedge and prevaricate about its nature merely render its energy more palpable. The unspoken bond between them reverberates through even the highly muted accounts in the canonical gospels, while the Nag Hammadi gospels make no bones about naming this energy for what it is. …

With her come the cadences of gentleness and forgiveness, the sounding of that core vibration of love.”

Cynthia Bourgeault, “The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity”

II.“Finally at the heart of the Christian mystery there are only two people; this is the mystery of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.”

Michael Haag, “The Quest for Mary Magdalene”

III. “I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to Him, Lord I saw you today in a vision. He answered and said to me, Blessed are you that you did not waver at the sight of Me. For where the heart is there is the treasure.”

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

Gustave Moreau, “Pieta”

In December 1945 a magnificent archaeological discovery was made, as it often happens entirely by accident: an Arab peasant dug out a jar containing papyrus books bound in leather. They were the Gnostic Gospels, buried in the desert by early church authorities, ready to see the light of day only in the twentieth century. Although they were written around the time or possibly a little earlier than the four canonical gospels, they were deemed so dangerous that somebody decided to make them disappear for centuries. They unveiled a hidden face of Christianity, namely its connections with Eastern mystical traditions, and a crucial role of women in early church; furthermore, they criticized the concept of virgin birth and bodily resurrection as stemming from a tendency to misconstrue what is symbolic and inner as literal and outer. But arguably the most sensational content of those apocryphal texts was related to the role of Mary Magdalene. The shocking lines of the Gospel of Philip (described as a Tantric gospel) read:

“. . . the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended] . . . They said to him, ‘Why do you love her more than all of us?’ The Savior answered and said to them, ‘Why do I not love you as (I love) her?’”

Some Biblical scholars have argued, however, that this is nothing new, as the extraordinarily special role of Mary Magdalene can be gleaned from the canonical gospels if read devoid of years of orthodox prejudice.  Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest and a mystic, lays a convincing claim that the four canonical gospels, if read inquisitively, make a strong case for Mary Magdalene’s special role. She was the first witness of the resurrection and the first one to announce it in public. Before Jesus died she anointed him with priceless perfume that she brought in an alabaster jar. By performing this ritual she recognized him as the Messiah (the Anointed One):

“Mary then took a pound of very costly perfume of pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

John 12:3

Eric Gill, “Mary Magdalene”

Moreover, all four gospels portray her in the role of “apostle to the apostles,” not only the first witness to the resurrection, but the first to announce it publicly. Bourgeault makes a firm claim that she was first among the apostles, as the one who fully got the message and was able to reach a spiritual realization unavailable to the other followers. She is consistently portrayed as the one who “knows”, as the one who has reached the true gnosis:

“It is not just a knowing from the head; it’s a knowing with the entire being. The Hebrew term which it translates is da’ath, which is also the word used for “lovemaking” (as in “David entered Bathsheba’s tent and ‘knew’ her”). Gnosis speaks of a complete, integral knowing uniting body, mind, and heart—and by its very largeness connecting the seen and the unseen.”

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, via Wikipedia

True Gnosis comes from the heart; it is as much of the body as of the mind. According to Bourgeault, the central message of Jesus, which was profoundly understood and embodied by Mary Magdalene, is a blending of “incarnational and Platonic elements,”  “a profoundly incarnational, warm-hearted, and hopeful path, where the realms support and interpenetrate each other and divine fullness is accessed simply by keeping the heart in natural alignment with its invisible prototype.” Bourgeault goes on to suggest that early Christianity was not in the least bit ascetic. Most of the Apostles were married, including St Peter, the first Pope, and it just stands to reason that so was Jesus. He was certainly at ease with women, contrary to the customs and taboos of his time. In a famous passage in the Gospel of John, he speaks with a woman from Samaria drawing water from a well. He converses with to her on equal terms though he is a male Jew, which for his contemporaries offered enough reasons to ignore her. But his message was about openness and inclusiveness. Further, all that Jesus taught seems to contradict the idea of celibacy, which, as Bourgeault points out, is connected with “conserving, collecting, concentrating,” its shadow side being avarice, storing up, withholding, not sharing of one’s essence. Bourgeault concludes:

“By contrast, the path that Jesus himself seems to teach and model in his life, and particularly in his death, is not a storing up but a complete pouring out. His pranic energy is quickly depleted; on the cross, as all four gospel accounts affirm, he does not hold out even until sunset, but quickly “gives up the ghost.” Shattered and totally spent, he simply disappears into his death. The core icon of the Christian faith, the watershed moment from which it all emerges, is not enstatic but ecstatic—love completely poured out, expended, squandered.”

Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ and the Woman of Samaria”

In his fascinating book The Quest For Mary Magdalene, the historian Michael Haag carefully analyzes all New Testament passages where she appears. He offers an illuminating analysis of her name, which means “the migdal, the tower, the beacon, the saving light in the darkness.” Jesus was fond of giving special names to his followers, and thus he called Simon Peter the rock upon which he will build his church (Greek petros – rock), and Mary Magdalene he named the tower that shines in darkness.

William Blake, “The Last Supper”

She was an independent, perhaps aristocratic woman of means, who chose to support Jesus and his movement. According to the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark, Mary Magdalene may have been a sister of Lazarus, at least this is the conclusion drawn by Haag in his book. Haag writes that together with her brother she may have been helping finance Jesus’s ministry and opened their home in Bethany to him and his followers. It is important to point out that nowhere in any of the gospels is she referred to as sinful or a prostitute. She was made into one by Pope Gregory I in a sermon he delivered in the 6^th century. This is clarified very carefully by Haag:

“MARY MAGDALENE FIRST APPEARS in the chronology of Jesus’ life in Galilee where she is travelling with Jesus as he proclaims the kingdom of God. ‘And the twelve were with him’, writes Luke in his gospel, ‘and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities’. Among these women three are mentioned by name, and the first is Mary Magdalene, ‘out of whom went seven devils.’

…

There is a popular misconception, which was first promoted by the Church in the early medieval period, that Mary Magdalene’s condition had something to do with sin. But this is plainly not true. Wherever Jesus is driving out devils the gospels are clear that he is healing people of their illnesses, mental and physical.”

Was there conspiracy intended to write Mary Magdalene out of early history of Christianity? Admittedly, the new hierarchy was becoming increasingly male, and soon women were banned from being ordained as priests. It seems that old prejudices against women were not ready to go away, despite what Jesus had taught and practiced. St Paul, the apostle who never met the historical Jesus, completely ignores Mary Magdalene in all of his fourteen books included in the New Testament. He does not mention Jesus’s mother, either. According to Haag, Paul chose to ignore the historical Jesus and focused entirely on spreading the new faith with its main message of Resurrection.

But Mary Magdalene’s name lived on in legends. In the Middle Ages she was called the light-bearer,and she was especially venerated in France, where she was believed to have travelled after Jesus’s death. Vézelay in Burgundy has a Romanesque cathedral dedicated to her, Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence a cave where she supposedly spent years repenting her sins and performing miracles. The French chapter was made famous thanks to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, which was based on the famous book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It claimed that Mary Magdalene’s children with Jesus intermarried with the noble French families, leading to the birth of the Merovingian dynasty.

Le Nain Brothers, “Mary Magdalene in Meditation”

She continued to fascinate the greatest minds of the Renaissance. Next to the famous Last Supper, which may feature her as a companion of Jesus, a portrait of Mary Magdalene has been identified as done by Leonardo da Vinci as well:

“This bare-breasted Mary Magdalene has recently been identified as a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, done in about 1515. The exposed breasts associate her with the goddess Venus and also suggest that she is preparing to consummate her marriage. She is entirely frank about her sensuality; her smile is a promise, and soon her fingers will let her robe fall away entirely. There is not an ounce of sin or repentance in this Mary Magdalene.”

Leonardo da Vinci (?), “Mary Magdalene”

For the Gnostics, Mary Magdalene, “Our Lady in Red,” played a very central role. They believed that she reached salvation through gnosis, which is, in the words of Tau Malachi, “the product of a direct spiritual or mystical experience of the Truth that illuminates and liberates the soul.” While Christ embodied the Logos, she was the Sophia. There exists a Gnostic legend in which Mary Magdalene is promised as a bride to a wealthy Babylonian merchant. On her way to Babylon she gets raped and sold to slavery and prostitution. She is trapped in Babylon. As Bourgeault summarizes:

“After a time she managed to regain her outer freedom, but inwardly she was still held hostage by hatred, rage, and darkness. At length a dream came to her telling her that she must return to the land of her birth and seek out the Anointed One, who would deliver her. She left immediately for the Holy Land, crossed the Jordan River, and found her way to the place where he was teaching.”

Hrana Janto, “Goddess Sophia”

According to Malachi, the Gnostics believe that one of the demons that possessed her soul at those dark times was Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who refused to be submissive to him. Malachi writes:

“When the Lord banished the seven demons from Magdalene, he did not banish Lilith. Rather, receiving the Holy Bride, he redeemed Lilith and Eve, and in Lady Mary, womanhood was restored to its rightful place, for in her was the Divine fullness of the Supernal Woman. … She is the consort of God and mistress of the dragon. In her holy breath is the power of creation and destruction.”

Her feast in the Catholic church is on 22 July, which is when the Sun enters the sign of its rulership – Leo. A woman of vision, inspired directly by Jesus, she bypassed all hierarchy and still continues to shatter all dogmas. She seems to combined wisdom with the gentleness and compassion of love and the fierceness of wild passion. As Sophia (Anima Mundi – the World Soul) she stands as an intermediary between the upper world and the lower world, fueling the flames of the inner vision of the heart.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Mary Magdalene and other women at the foot of the cross (detail). She came there to anoint his dead body, which only closest relatives were allowed to do.

Sources:

BBC Radio 4 In Our Time – Mary Magdalene  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0717j1r

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, Kindle edition

Michael Haag, The Quest for Mary Magdalene, Kindle edition

Tau Malachi, St Mary Magdalene: The Gnostic Tradition of the Holy Bride, Kindle edition

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

I.”The men where you live,” said the little prince, “raise five thousand roses in the same garden–and they do not find in it what they are looking for.” “They do not find it,” I replied. “And yet what they are looking for could be found in one single rose, or in a little water.”

II.”It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Salvadore Dali, “Enigma of the Rose”

The rich minimalism of the Little Prince’s wisdom brings to mind the apparent simplicity of the Japanese karesansui (dry-mountain-water) gardens, known as Zen gardens in the West. The origins of those gardens are long lost in historical obscurity, but most probably they go back to Shinto – the Japanese native religion, which founded the sacred in elements of nature such as rocks, trees, mountains or rivers. The wavelike patterns of the raked gravel are believed to evoke currents of running water, while lone-standing rocks could be viewed as mountains rising out of the ocean, but one would be fooled to trust such limiting interpretations. The dry garden, always viewed from inside a room and composed like a painting, is first and foremost a place of contemplation; it is meant to startle the mind of the observer into a spiritual state by purifying it from pre-conceived ideologies.

Kyoto, Ryoan-ji

Kyoto, Ryoan-ji

The central symbol of the Zen garden is the stone. For Jung, it signified “something permanent that can never be lost or dissolved, something eternal that some have compared to the mystical experience of God within one’s own soul;” for Cirlot it is “the first solid form of the creative rhythm —the sculpture of essential movement, and the petrified music of creation.” Stones are pure and perfect in their simplicity, yet powerful, mysterious and inscrutable like the gods.

Abraham Bosse, “Geometric Garden”

In Shinto the purified places where spirits or gods gathered were called “niwa” – a word which means “garden.” Spiritual purification, a return to soulful simplicity, seems to be a unifying idea behind all Eastern gardens. At last that was the impression I got from an exhibition dedicated to the history of gardens, which I have seen recently (http://www.rietberg.ch/en-gb/exhibitions/vorschau-gaerten-der-welt.aspx). An inscription next to an installation dedicated to a well-known Korean ghttp://www.rietberg.ch/en-gb/exhibitions/vorschau-gaerten-der-arden reads:

“Yang Sanbo became disillusioned with politics at the imperial court and retreated to his father’s country estate, where he made himself a garden. Called a Hermit’s Garden, it is surrounded by a bamboo forest. Through the middle of it, a mountain stream crashes down over a rock. Its Korean name Saswaewon means ‘the garden in which the spirit is refreshingly cleansed just as bamboo leaves are cleansed by the rain of a thunderstorm.’”

The following video shows the garden’s beauty:

Ruth Ammann, a Jungian analyst, in her book dedicated to a psychological meaning of gardens, traces the roots of the word to the Indo-Germanic word “ghordo” – fence, enclosure, stockade, hence denoting a fenced-in or enclosed area. She marvels at a coincidence:

“Incidentally, ‘paradise’ has the same meaning, originating from the Old Iranian words ‘pairi’ (enclose, surround) and ‘daeza’ (wall). Thus, paradise is first of all a place or site surrounded by a wall. However, it encloses a particularly sacred place, namely the Garden of Eden, the garden of bliss.”

“The Garden of Earthly Delights (by Hieronymus Bosch) mimics the physical form of a sacred image and presents religious content, but its extraordinary central panel looks like nothing else in this world. When closed, the triptych presents a grisaille view of creation as it happens, formless void taking form beneath the crystal sphere of the firmament, moved by God, encased in his own tiny bubble in a space beyond the universe, as he holds open the book that contains the text of universal history. The plants and geological shapes brewing beneath the glassy dome of heaven are fat and swollen, bursting as Thomas Aquinas might have it, with their potential to come into being. When this double panel of amorphous forms is opened, a universe crowded with figures is revealed in a burst of color. The left-handed panel of the open triptych shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a Christlike God joining them in marriage. … Behind the First Couple, crazily fertile plants sprout gigantic shoots in improbable pastel colors, carrying out God’s injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The spotted cat carrying a mouse in its teeth in the left foreground, like the lion attacking a stag in the distance, is usually interpreted, like the serpent that coils discreetly around a tree in the middle ground of the panel, as an indication that evil is already present in Creation. But the book of Genesis never specifies that the animals God created in the Garden behaved otherwise than the animals we know; instead, we read that ‘God saw that it was good.’ The cat is being a good cat, doing what a cat is made to do, and so is the lion.” Quoted from “The Mystery of Hieronymus Bosch,” Ingrid D. Rowland, The New York review of Books, August 18, 2016 issue

At its root, a garden and a paradise are one and the same thing. Ammann points out that the garden is enclosed and bounded on the horizontal plane, but it is open on a vertical plane, that is, “unbounded toward the sky and the depths of the earth.” It connects heaven and earth, the mundane changeability with the eternal permanence. The existence of the fence makes a garden akin to a hermetically sealed alchemical vessel. It is a receptacle, where the raw “materia prima” of the chaotic nature is transformed and cultivated through the gardener’s dedication, hard work and respect for nature and its creative divinity. “Half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,” wrote Kipling in his poem “The Glory of the Garden.”

Both in the East and the West, our ancestors performed sacred land-taking rituals, which, as Ammann writes, placed “the garden or the enclosed plot of ground under the protection and mercy of a godhead that represented much greater power than that available to any individual.” The gardener is responsible for attending to and nurturing his or her garden, but its ultimate prospering may in fact lie beyond the gardener’s power. That brings to mind the concept of “borrowed scenery” used by East Asian Garden designers. It involved incorporating background landscape, such as mountains or a lake, into the composition of a garden. Perhaps it is worth remembering that the whole garden is “on loan” from the mighty nature, which may claim it back at any moment. How wild should the garden be is a matter of individual taste. I cannot decide whether I prefer the wilder English garden or the geometric grace of the French one.

Albrecht Dürer, he risen Christ shows himself to Mary Magdalene as a gardener

There is a beautiful line in The Song of Songs: “My sister, dear bride, you are a sequestered garden, a sealed fountain, an enclosed spring.” This line gave birth to the medieval concept of the Hortus Conclusus, a garden strictly shielded from the outside world, which was associated with the Virgin Mary. But perhaps the bride from the Song of Songs could also be interpreted as Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the resurrection, who mistook the risen Christ for a gardener. Or perhaps he chose to show himself as a gardener to her. In broader terms, the soul (anima) seems to have a lot of affinities with the symbolism of the garden. Saint Teresa of Avila compared a soul to a garden. Gardens are certainly places where the soul finds nourishment at the intersection of nature and culture. Whenever I stroll through a beautiful garden, I always have a feeling that it is a place conjured by my imagination, that it will disappear if I close my eyes. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo talks to Kublai Khan in Kublai’s garden. At one point he muses:

“Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids. … Perhaps the terraces of this garden overlook only the lake of our mind.”

Detail from an illustration for the French translation of La Teseida (1460) by Boccaccio, via http://lemiroirauxpreles.com/GardenHistory.htm

Sources:

Ruth Ammann, The Enchantment of Gardens: A Psychological Approach

Juan Eduardo Cirlot, The Dictionary of Symbols

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.”

C.G. Jung, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”

A book The Hidden Life of Trees; What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben was to me deeply comforting and rather alarming in equal measure. The alarming part had to do with a realization that trees are too often treated by humans as objects, forests – as lumber factories.  The comfort I found among the book’s pages was a certainty, a scientific fact proven rigorously by the author, that trees are receptacles of the deepest mysteries of life. Wohlleben may be a scientist but he approaches his subject with affection, even devotion. In another book I have been reading in parallel to The Hidden Life of Trees, Alexander von Humboldt is portrayed as a cold-hearted measurer of the world but when he encounters an ancient dragon tree on Tenerife, his cold heart cracks open, if only for a brief moment:

“It had been here before Christ and Buddha, Plato and Tamburlane. Humboldt held his watch up to his ear. It carried time within itself as it ticked away, while this tree warded off time: a crag against which its river broke. Humboldt touched the deeply corrugated trunk. High above, the branches opened out, and the twittering of hundreds of birds pierced the air. Tenderly, he stroked the bark. Everything died, every human being, every animal, every moment. Only one thing endured. He laid his cheek against the wood, then drew back and glanced around horrified in case anyone had seen him.”

Daniel Kehlman, “Measuring the World”

The wealth of information on trees contained in Wohlleben’s book is staggering. He starts by emphasizing the fact that most tree species are communal beings. Forests are “superorganisms” which can be likened to ant colonies. There, nutrients are ceaselessly exchanged, and no member of the community is abandoned in times of need. Why are trees so protective of each other? The author explains:

“Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer. Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover.”

Caspar David Friedrich, “Forest in the End of the Autumn”

The primary means of communication among trees is scent. On the Savannah, acacias warn other trees when giraffes start feasting on their leaves. This enables the trees next in line for the predator to emit toxic substances and thus keep the giraffes off. Signals between trees are transmitted by means of fungal connections. Wohlleben uses every opportunity to stress that artificially planted forests (unless they are organic plantations) do more harm than good because they seriously impair trees’ ability to communicate:

“Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb—and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests. That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.”

Communication of trees happens both below and above ground. The former is effectuated by means of roots, which for trees extend twice the spread of the crown. Apparently, roots send sound waves (220 hertz) to other roots to communicate about danger. Roots have been compared to brain-like structures; they are neural pathways that transmit both chemical and electrical impulses.  How strange that still many scientists refuse to call plants intelligent. Wohlleben reflects:

“The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself: the former photosynthesizes and the latter eats other living beings. Finally, the only other big difference is in the amount of time it takes to process information and translate it into action. Does that mean that beings that live life in the slow lane are automatically worth less than ones on the fast track?”

A walk through an old-growth forest reduces blood pressure and has a calming effect. Tree plantations do not have the same effect. What is more, forests that have experienced no intervention from foresters, grow more harmoniously:

“Because of the deep shade, wild flowers and shrubs don’t have a chance, so the color brown (from old leaves) predominates on the natural forest floor. The small trees grow extremely slowly and very straight, and their side branches are short and narrow. The old mother trees dominate, and their flawless trunks stretch to the sky like the columns in a cathedral. In contrast to this, there is much more light in managed forests, because trees are constantly being removed. Grass and bushes grow in the gaps, and tangles of brambles prevent detours off the beaten path. When trees are felled and their crowns are left lying on the ground, the debris creates further obstacles. The whole forest presents a troubled and downright messy picture. Old-growth forests, however, are basically very accessible.”

Photo by Ellie Davies, via https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/jul/26/ellie-davies-forest-photography-into-the-woods-in-pictures

Within the same species, trees do not follow the principle of survival of the fittest. Rather, they “synchronize their performance so that they are all equally successful.” They make it so that they all produce an equal amount of sugar per leaf regardless of their strength or age. Again, it is the roots which are responsible for this equalization of the rate of photosynthesis, as “whoever has an abundance of sugar hands some over; whoever is running short gets help.” In a natural forest trees grow close to one another. This “huddling together” is an advantage for the whole community since “a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.” However, a lot of foresters remove what in their opinion in an excess of trees. Again, such acts prevent trees from communicating with each other, leaving them at the mercy of predators.

In order for a tree to live a long life, it needs to grow slowly. To that effect, older trees purposefully deprive the young of light so that the rate of their growth becomes restricted. Modern forestry with their eyes on the profit margin does not promote steady and slow growth of trees. Trees are felled before they reach maturity in Europe, where we have lost almost all of true old-growth forests. One example is the primeval Bialowieza Forest on the border of Poland and Belarus, the exclusive refuge of the lowland bison. The Polish government has started logging parts of the forest in recent months, which was met with a public outcry over a destruction of the 10 000- year-old ecosystem.

Bialowieza National Park, photo from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/18/last-stand-for-europes-remaining-ancient-forest-as-loggers-prepare-to-move-in-bialowieza

Ancient trees are crucial for the ecosystem, explains Wohlleben:

“…Dr. Zoë Lindo of McGill University in Montreal researched Sitka spruce that were at least five hundred years old. First of all, she discovered large quantities of moss on the branches and in the branch forks of trees of this advanced age. Blue-green algae had colonized the trees’ mossy cushions. These algae capture nitrogen from the air and process it into a form the trees can use. Rain then washes this natural fertilizer down the trunks, making it available to the roots. Thus, old trees fertilize the forest and help their offspring get a better start in life. The youngsters don’t have their own moss because moss grows very slowly and takes decades to get established.”

Old trees are stronger than young ones; they also grow faster. Thus, they are our most powerful allies in the fight against the climate change. Even dead trees have an important role to play, as a fifth of all animal and plant species depend on them for survival. A felled tree trunk can even serve as a cradle for young trees, especially in the case of young spruces. This process is called “nurse-log reproduction.”

On other continents, the pivotal role of ancient trees is recognized and respected; in fact, it is only in Europe where ancient forests do not receive adequate protection:

“In the United States, forest preserves, such as the Adirondack and Catskill parks in New York State, keep economic interests out of the forests. According to the state constitution, the preserve ‘shall be forever kept as wild forest lands,’ and the timber shall not be ‘sold, removed or destroyed.’ In the wilderness areas of these preserves, most structures are not allowed, power vehicles are banned, and chainsaws require special permits. What started as a measure to ensure that excessive logging in the nineteenth century didn’t lead to soil erosion and silting up of the economically important Erie Canal has turned into a resource dedicated to the forest itself and visitors who ‘leave no trace’ as they pass through. Even more remote is the Great Bear Rainforest in northern British Columbia, which covers almost 25,000 square miles along the rugged coast. Half of this area is forested, including about 8,900 square miles of old-growth trees. This primeval forest is home to the rare spirit bear, which although it is white, is not a polar bear but a black bear with white fur. First Nations in the area have been fighting since the 1990s to protect their homelands. On February 1, 2016, an agreement was announced to keep 85 percent of the forest unlogged, though it does allow for 15 percent of the trees, mostly old growth at low elevations, to be removed. After a long hard struggle, some progress, at least, has been made in protecting this very special place. Chief Marilyn Slett, president of Coastal First Nations, is well aware of the forest’s importance: ‘Our leaders understand our well-being is connected to the well-being of our lands and waters… If we use our knowledge and our wisdom to look after [them], they will look after us into the future.’ The Kichwa of Sarayaku, Ecuador, see their forest as ‘the most exalted expression of life itself.’”

It is no wonder that trees are happiest in the balmy forest. An especially eye-opening chapter of the book was dedicated to “street kids,” that is the trees which live in cities. They suffer very harshly because of the temperature being too high for them, due to the dryness of the air and its pollution. Their bark gets burned and their roots rot because of dogs’ urine. They get damaged heavily by winter salt. Some species of trees suffer more than others when they are torn away from the protective forest. Others, such as poplar, quaking aspen, silver birch and pussy willow are born pioneers and actually enjoy striking out on their own and colonizing new territories. Their seeds can fly longer distances. They often grow alone in wide-open spaces. Therefore, their bark is often lighter in colour to protect them from sun scald. Birches and other lonely wolves among trees typically live more intensively and shorter than oaks, beeches or redwoods which prefer the familial atmosphere of the forest.

I found Wohlleben’s book awe-inspiring. It made me think how it seems that we humans cannot help applying our short-term thinking to beings, which are radically different from us. Trees are slow, still, majestic and, at least compared to us, eternal. They were here before us and will outlive us. Their symbolic meaning is vitally connected with the totality of life processes in the universe: “its consistence, growth, proliferation, generative and regenerative processes,” as Cirlot wrote in his Dictionary of Symbols. The tree represents “absolute reality” positioned at the centre of the world. It is a world-axis connecting the above with the below. There were two trees in Paradise: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Living and knowing, notices Cirlot, are two distinct and parallel processes. The tree of Life is usually depicted in full bloom, the tree of Knowledge, which brought people death and awareness, is shown as dry or on fire. It is a marvellous coincidence that in scientific taxonomy the endings of the names of trees are masculine whereas their gender is feminine. The tree is a central symbol of totality that connects microcosm and microcosm, the feminine and the masculine, life and death, change and permanence, and other opposites.

William Morris, Tree of Life tapestry

Hermann Hesse offered the following beautiful reflections on trees:

“A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”

Hermann Hesse, “Bäume” (Trees)

http://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/baeume-hermann_hesse_19393.html

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/09/21/hermann-hesse-trees/

Arnold Böcklin, “The Sacred Grove”

Francis Picabia, “Crashing Waves”

I. ”Water nourishes and soothes us. But this same stuff also carved the Grand Canyon out of solid rock over the course of millennia, and every day thunders down with unimaginable fury at Niagara and Victoria Falls.”

II. ”One of the roots for the word ‘water’ comes from the Sanskrit ‘apah,’ meaning ‘animate,’ something that gives life.”

James Whistler, “Nocturne, the Solent”

III. “There is nothing softer and weaker than water. And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.”     Lao Tzu

Leonardo da Vinci’s water powered gyroscopic compass

IV.”For Leonardo [da Vinci] water was the ‘vehicle of nature’ (‘vetturale di natura’), the driving force behind all natural things. He was obsessed with it.

…

Water, he reasoned, was the fluid that transported nutrients around the Earth, feeding plants and fields, just as blood … nourished the organs of the human body.”

V. “Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savour, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes.” Leonardo da Vinci

VI.”If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.”

Philip Larkin, “Water”

Tinguely Fountain in Basel, Switzerland

All quotes have been taken from The Water Book by Alok Jha.

Lakshmi, the most widely worshiped Indian goddess, emerged on a lotus out of the primeval ocean of milk. In the pantheon of goddesses she is a soothing and gentle presence. In her book Awakening Shakti, Sally Kempton includes compelling words of Thomas Merton, which perfectly invoke Lakshmi’s divine essence as balancing the fiery essence of warrior goddesses such as Kali or Dhurga: “There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.” The ocean of milk not only gave the world Lakshmi but also soma – the life-giving moon nectar. Ayurvedic medicine speaks of soma as a vital essence which can be found in the bone marrow. It is supposed to govern sexuality and rejuvenation, cool down the fiery Kundalini power and, as Kempton puts it, it is “the water of life and the subtle nectar that moistens the heart.” In iconography, Lakshmi is usually portrayed flanked by two elephants showering her with water while she pours golden coins out of her hands in a gesture of abundance.

In many ways, Lakshmi is the primordial mother goddess. Before she was even named, she already existed in the minds of her worshipers as a lotus goddess on the one hand and as “sri,” explained by Rhodes as “splendor, glory, majesty, brilliance, and the divine power of auspiciousness,” on the other. Ancient Indian art rejoiced in depictions of lotuses resembling feminine figures curling gracefully upwards. Feminine figures holding lotuses symbolized life-force and fertility. Besides the well-known symbolic meaning of the lotus as rising from mud through the water and into the air, always gloriously untouched by any kind of impurity, it carries an additional significance pointedly explained by Rhodes:

“…lotus,” also literally denotes a foothold: ‘pad’ refers to foot and ‘ma’ refers to a measured expansion across a spatial dimension. The lotus seat serves as the foundation upon which the gods rest in their embodied forms when they become manifest upon the earth…”

Osho Zen Tarot – Flowering (Queen of Pentacles)

As said before, in the earliest Vedic texts an abstract quality called “sri” was not associated with any particular goddess, though it already denoted a radiant divine feminine force, which bestowed abundance and dispelled misfortune. In the later Vedic period those qualities started to be called Sri Lakshmi. The name Lakshmi is related to a Sanskrit word meaning “sign, imprint, symbol, an embodied expression.” The goddess Lakshmi began to embody the abstract qualities of sri; she became the living symbol that manifested itself as a divine revelation of a deeper mystery.  Rhodes calls her “the quintessential devi” Devi, the Sanskrit word for “goddess,”  is derived from “div,” which means to shine, to play, to sparkle, to rejoice, and also to gamble, as Rhodes further explains:

“The term, then, also conveys the excitement of uncertainty, the expectancy of luck, and the vibrant sensation that anything can happen – all of these as opposed to the frozen stagnancy of absolute certainty. Laksmi is the epitome of luminous energy in action… When that luminosity expresses itself as bounteous beauty, delight, harmony, abundant wealth, and spiritual liberation-in short, prosperity of every kind – then it is recognized and called upon as Laksmi, goddess of abundance.”

By her devotees she is called “bhukti-mukti pradayini” – “bestower of material enjoyment and spiritual liberation.” She infuses the world with four qualities: kama, artha, dharma and moksa. The former three deal with worldly enjoyment, the latter denotes freedom from worldly attachment. They are the four goals of life. Kama is pleasure, sensuality, sexuality and passion. It gives the spark to procreate being the beauty of all life, and all the flavours of material reality. Artha is wealth and its fluid circulation in society. Unsurprisingly, the goddess’s most ardent devotees are merchants, who enthusiastically erect shrines to the goddess. Diwali, the most important festival devoted to Lakshmi, also marks the beginning of a new financial year. It is during Diwali that gambling is encouraged as well.

The coins that are being poured forth from the goddess’s open hands or from a golden urn symbolize all forms of abundant energy, not only money. Lakshmi is also the goddess of self-worth, believed to make the inner beauty of a person shine through. Her sacred animal is the owl symbolizing the ability to see in darkness and to be able to move towards the light of wisdom. Rhodes adds that the golden coins can also be looked upon as “bija mantras” or “seed syllables that are produced from the body of the goddess as vibratory patterns of sacred sound.” They are the fruit of her womb holding “the potentialities of all of creation.” Through those sound-forms, i.e. the fifty-two letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, the goddess is “unfurling herself into the universe as the matrka Sakti (matrix of cosmic energy). Together with her consort Visnu, Lakshmi preserves and upholds harmony in all the realms. This is her role as an upholder of dharma (the Sanskrit root word “dhr” meaning foundation and support). Rhodes writes:

“In general, we may consider dharma to be the energy governing harmonious relationships – with oneself, with one’s spouse, children, and family, with one’s community, with one’s natural environment, and with the gods.  On a cosmic level, dharma is the harmony of interconnectedness that upholds society and supports the creation…”

Many different translations of the word dharma have been offered, including  “virtue,” “virtuous conduct,” “harmonious relationship,” “”etiquette,” “communal obligation,” “social consciousness,” “balanced way of life,” “living in right relationship,” “doing the right thing.”

From Lakshmi’s perspective, doing the right thing often involves mundane tasks such as cleaning and maintaining self-discipline. Her festival begins with a thorough housecleaning because it is believed that she will not grace a dirty house. The final component is moksa – release from attachment, spiritual liberation. Mahalakshmi is the Great Illusion and a means to liberation from it. Kempton observes:

“The release from cyclical existence in samsara, then, comes from the same goddess who sanctions the world and embellishes it, even mesmerizing one to enjoy attachment to it for lifetime after lifetime.”

The goddess of luck has a sister called Alaksmi, who brings bad luck whenever an imbalance occurs. Lakshmi does not approve of “an overly zealous attention to any one of the four aims of life to the exclusion of the others.” The truth of beingness calls for a dynamic equipoise between the four elements. This task involves “weaving together” (the word Tantra means “weaving”) the seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Vedic Hymn to Sri conveys this paradox beautifully:

“Draw unto me, O sacred fire, the goddess Lakshmi,

The resplendent, the golden,

Doe-like, moon – lustrous,

Garlanded in silver, and in gold.

…

I invoke the goddess Sri,

Who manifests as golden light.

She blazes with the effulgence of fire

Yet glistens like soothing, cool waters.

Seated on a lotus,

The lotus-hued one

Smiles benevolently.

Contended, she bestows contentment.”

Sources:

Sally Kempton, Awakening Shakti, Kindle edition

Constantina Rhodes, Invoking Lakshmi the Goddess of Wealth in Song and Ceremony, Kindle edition

Remedios Varo, “Space-Time Fabric”

The distinction between past, present and future is the most persistent illusion of all, said Einstein. From the perspective of quantum physics, the past, present and future exist simultaneously in time-space. Time is static, it is us who are flowing through time. This revelation is well explained by James Gleick in his review of the movie Arrival:

“Even without help from mathematical models, we have all learned to visualize history as a timeline, with the past stretching to the left, say, and the future to the right (if we have been conditioned Sapir-Whorf-style by a left-to-right written language). Our own lifespans occupy a short space in the middle. Now—the infinitesimal present—is just the point where our puny consciousnesses happen to be.

But Einstein felt that this was fundamentally a psychological matter; that the question of now need not, or could not, be addressed within physics. The specialness of the present moment doesn’t show up in the equations; mathematically, all the moments look alike. Now seems to arise in our minds. It’s a product of consciousness, inextricably bound up with sensation and memory. And it’s fleeting, tumbling continually into the past.”

“Arrival”

We may ponder the big question asked by Krishnamurti:

“Time is the past, time is now; and the now is controlled by the past, shaped by the past. And the future is a modification of the present. I’m putting it dreadfully simply. So the future is now. Therefore the question is: If all time is contained in the now, all time – past, present and future – then what do we mean by change?”

Zen Buddhism, as explained by Alan Watts in his book The Way of Zen, compared time to a moving wave, which does not actually move water forward but creates the illusion that it does.

Ogata Korin, “Rough Waves”

Yet, from an individual perspective, time is experienced viscerally and intimately. In Borges’s words, time is “the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” We are mentally conditioned to view time as sequential, progressing from the past into the present and towards the future. The human perception of time is rendered perfectly in Macbeth’s famous monologue, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, /Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time.” The word “syllable” is a remarkable choice here since our written communication also unfolds sequentially through time– from left to right or from the past into the present, at least for western speakers.

But not all languages are written in this way. In his “Temporary poem of my time” Yehuda Amichai wrote:

“Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west,
Latin writing, from west to east.
Languages are like cats:
You must not stroke their hair the wrong way.”

Remedios Varo, “Clockmaker”

The idea that the language shapes our thinking is known as linguistic relativity.  The creators of Arrival played with that idea remarkably well. Louise, a master translator played by Amy Adams, is drafted by the US army to establish communication with a race of aliens who have just landed on the earth. The mysterious visitors are seven-limbed creatures, dubbed heptapods. Seven being the number of spiritual perfection, as Gleick describes in his review of the movie, “They turn out to be virtuosos of calligraphy: their feet/hands are also nozzles that squirt inkblots, which swirl and spin and coalesce into mottled circles with intricate adornments. Louise says these are logograms.”

Each logogram is a miniature work of art, a rich symbol evocative of the Zen ensō.

Enso “Visually, an enso appears simplistic, but its true nature is much more complex and highly involved. In Zen, enso symbolizes a moment when the mind is free to simply let the body and spirit create with the brushed ink of the circle being performed in one movement – one stroke, one chance. Often the circle is drawn complete representing perfection, or incomplete with an opening signifying that it is part of something much greater and that imperfection is vital to existence. Unlike other forms of art work, there is no possibility of modification. The perfect enso is achieved by having “no-mind”. The brush stroke should be guided by the spirit, not the wrist. It should be performed without effort.” Via https://diversejapan.com/2012/05/15/shodo-japanese-calligraphy-master-shoho-teramoto-the-enso-of-zen/

A logogram (“Arrival”)

Logograms house the meaning of entire sentences or passages. What is more, they seem to be produced instantaneously rather than sequentially, unlike our earthy writing. They emerge suddenly like wondrous emanations. This is because heptapods do not see time as sequential. Having a simultaneous overview of each individual moment on the time-space continuum, they see wholeness instead of events unfolding one after another. Their written script goes simultaneously from right to left and from left to write – to meet in the centre, pulsating with meaning. As Louise masters the heptapod language, she develops headaches which are a sign of a tremendous consciousness shift. It dawns on her that she can see the future, including a tragic twist in her own life. Her mind becomes able to move forwards and backwards; she gets glimpses of events which the viewer thinks are flashbacks, but turn out to be flash-forwards.  Yet, in the holistic frame of temporal reference the direction of the time arrow does not seem to matter any more.

We do not feel ourselves as timeless in our day-to-day lives, quite the contrary. Nevertheless, almost all of us have moments when we experience a momentary rupture in the fabric of time. The poet Szymborska would call it the moments when we remember that we have a soul, which is timeless.

Giorgio de Chirico, “Piazza d’Italia”

From the web:

http://laughingsquid.com/how-the-film-arrival-connects-the-concepts-of-language-and-time-to-tell-a-non-linear-story/

I “The anthropologist Paul Radin points out that … ‘it must be explicitly recognized that in temperament and in capacity for logical and symbolical thought, there is no difference between civilized and primitive man,’ and as to ‘progress,’ that none in ethnology will ever be achieved ‘until scholars rid themselves, once and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary history; until they realize that certain ideas and certain concepts are as ultimate for man’ as his physical constitution. ‘The distinction of peoples in a state of nature from civilized peoples can no longer be maintained.’”

“The Bugbear of Literacy”

II “We have no other language whatsoever except the symbolic in which to speak of ultimate reality: the only alternative is silence.”

“The Christian and Oriental, or True, Philosophy of Art”

III “’Revelation’ itself implies a veiling rather than a disclosure: a symbol is a ‘mystery.’ ‘Half reveal and half conceal’ fitly describes the parabolic style of the scriptures and of all conceptual images of being in itself, which cannot disclose itself to our physical senses.”

“The Christian and Oriental, or True, Philosophy of Art”

IV “The references of the symbolic forms are as precise as those of mathematics. The adequacy of the symbols being intrinsic, and not a matter of convention, the symbols correctly employed transmit from generation to generation a knowledge of cosmic analogies: as above, so below.”

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?”

V “The symbol must be naturally adequate, and cannot be chosen at random; one locates or infers … the unseen in the seen, the unheard in the heard; but these forms are only means by which to approach the formless and must be discarded before we can become it.”

“The Hindu Tradition

Theology and Autology”

All quotes found in The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.

Kay Sage, “Margin of Silence”

By Susan Seddon Boulet

I. “Let your beauty manifest itself
without talking and calculation.
You are silent. It says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
comes at long last over everyone.”

Reiner Maria Rilke, “Initial,” translated by Edward Snow, in: The Book of Images, Kindle edition

II. “The crown chakra is the thousand-petaled lotus. Most people think of the petals as reaching up into the heavens; actually, the lotus petals turn downward like a sunflower, dripping nectar into the crown and down through the chakras. In this way, the two ends of the spectrum are profoundly connected. … The crown chakra is a two-way gate to the beyond. It opens outward, beyond ourselves to the infinite, and it opens inward and downward to the world of visions, creation, and eventual manifestation.”

Anodea Judith, “Eastern Body, Western Mind”

Chakra dance, via http://www.chakradance.com/the-chakradance-practice

“Pile of Stone-henge! so proud to hint yet keep Thy secrets, thou that lov’st to stand and hear

The Plain resounding to the whirlwind’s sweep,

Inmate of lonesome Nature’s endless year.”

William Wordsworth’s , “Guilt and sorrow; or incidents upon Salisbury Plain”

By John Constable

Never mind the busy motorway nearby, never mind the throngs of tourists, Stonehenge was a consciousness-shattering experience. The horizontal lintels placed on massive vertical posts looked like portals, which, though ruinous now, are still capable of transporting the mind beyond itself. The Romantics so rightly spoke of the “sublime terror” of the monument; while contemporary authors, such as John North, marvel at its embodiment of spiritual forces. This undeniable sense of awe and wonder is not shrunk by the awareness that we may never know why it was built, and what purpose it served. The scholarly consensus is that it was a place of burial, that the stones were aligned in astronomically significant ways, and that it always attracted great numbers of people, even from most distant places. In an article in the Smithsonian Magazine, Ed Caesar talks to archeologist Vince Gaffney, who compares the experience of Stonehenge to Jerusalem Syndrome, “the feeling of intense emotion experienced by pilgrims on their first sighting of the Holy City.” The eerie, “cathedralesque” monument has always sparked utmost awe and devotion.

The Heel Stone

It is perhaps universally known that the so-called Heel Stone aligns with the rising sun on the summer solstice as seen from the stone circle. It is perhaps less known that on the same day the sun rises along the Avenue, a pathway which in present time is cut off from the henge by a road. However, some authors, notably Paul D. Burley, have suggested that there exists a deeper correspondence between the Stonehenge Landscape and the heavens above. His findings have not been scholarly acknowledged; nevertheless, they are worth considering. He sees Stonehenge and an extensive area surrounding it as a ritual landscape, place of healing and domain of ancestors. A similar assumption has also been made by renowned professors and experts on Stonehenge, Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright. According to them, people came to Stonehenge to be cured. The so-called blue stones, which are smaller and located in the centre of the monument, were believed to have healing properties. They came from an unbelievable distance of 200 miles and were brought from a mountain in Wales. To this day, it has not been established what methods were used to transport them to the Salisbury Plain.

Hamish Fenton, Looking along the Avenue to Stonehenge, via http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146413920

Burley, however, goes even further and deeper in his claims about the symbolism of Stonehenge, which was built around the same time as the Egyptian pyramids. While I do not share his absolute confidence that lo and behold we have solved the ancient mystery, I found his book worthwhile. Personally, I have no doubt that Stonehenge, equally to the pyramids, holds the key to astounding secrets and truths about the dawn of our civilization. Burley puts forward an intriguing hypothesis of a translocation of the Winter Hexagon, the Milky Way and Orion onto the Stonehenge Landscape. The Winter Hexagon, an egg-shaped asterism, was, as Burley writes, perceived by ancient and indigenous cultures as the source of life – “where life began and where life returns.” Further, Burley sees the Greater Cursus (a long trench-like structure) as representing the Milky Way, or “the pathway for the spirit’s return to its home in the cosmos.” The Avenue, in turn, is supposed to be “the product of translocating the right arm of Orion onto the Stonehenge Landscape.” The arm of Orion receives the body of the dead, welcoming it to the Netherworld. I find the following passages from Burley’s book particularly significant:

The Winter Hexagon

“There is notable difference in shape between the Greater Cursus and the Avenue built centuries later. The cursus appears to be very much inorganic in form, constructed of straight lines and sharp corners, like broken ice, sherds of pottery, flakes from toolmaking, triangles formed by the astral nodes and links of constellations. It is the spirit’s gateway between Earth and sky. Conversely, the Avenue has no sharp corners. It is organic in shape, curved, flowing, getaway to the end of life made manifest.

…

The Greater Cursus is immense. Its size, shape and outline in white … was meant to be seen from above, the cosmos and Creator looking at earth and seeing a reflection of themselves.

…

The Winter Hexagon is where spirits come from, and where spirits return. Upon death the body was interred to Earth, while the spirit took to the spirit path – the Milky Way beginning at Sirius – on its return journey from Earth to the centre of the Winter Hexagon. That is where Orion as the psychopomp Sky King or Queen (perhaps both) waited to welcome the spirit in his right hand.

…

Sunrise occurred in the constellation Cancer during summer solstice morning in 2500 BCE. … if we could see below the horizon at sunrise on summer solstice Orion would appear with right arm raised, pointing directly toward the sun, as if bringing forth the sun into the sky… In this capacity we see why Orion … is called the ‘Bringer of Light.’”

In Greek myth, Orion assaulted Merope and was blinded in revenge by her father. He recovered his eyesight thanks to the rays of the sun god Helius after being guided in the direction of the rising sun. There he fell in love with Eos, goddess of the dawn. For Ancient Egyptians, Orion was a manifestation of Osiris, while Sirius was associated with Isis. Together they brought to life Horus, the New King. Burley sees an analogy between a Late Neolithic festival and the ancient Egyptian myth of death and rebirth. The germinating seed, the zygote, so intimately associated with Osiris and Isis in Ancient Egypt, seems to be a universal symbol, connected across times and cultures to the area of the sky known as the Orion constellation. Says Burley:

“There are cultural traditions which may explain a sacred ritual-based transfer of Orion from sky to Stonehenge. The connection may be associated with a Late Neolithic festival and ritual similar to the Iron Age Celtic Lughnasadh. In ancient Irish mythology Lugh is a hero and a High King. The bright One with the strong hand , related to Latin lux light.

…the beginning of a prototypal two week Lughnasadh celebration ca. 2500 BC coincided with the first appearance (heliacal rising) of Orion, ending with the joining of Orion with Earth at Stonehenge during mid-August. For the people of Salisbury Plain… this intercourse ensuring new life in the following year was between Lugh … and the Earth Goddess.

With appearance of the symbolic king (Lugh as Orion) the people may have begun anticipating consummation of life by the new king and Earth inside the goddess’s enclosure – the womb – the centre of Stonehenge.”

It never ceases to amaze me how consistent religious symbolism is across cultures. Can there be any other explanation than the Jungian collective unconscious churning out symbols from within individual psyches across time and space? And yet, I would like Stonehenge to be free of any reductive explanations. It may be that forcing all kinds of symbolic robes on the bare and primal Stones is an exercise in futility. What if the Stones, like constellations, precede all such attempts? They come from the times before gods were named, when sacred symbols were only emerging. They have that numinous quality so beautifully described by Rudolf Otto:

“…we are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, mysterium tremendum. . . . The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane,” non-religious mood of everyday experience. . . . It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

Via https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudolf-Otto#ref226756

 Perhaps all we can do is bow in front of them in silence.

By William Blake

 Sources and links:

Paul D. Burley, Stonehenge – As above, so below: Unveiling the Spirit Path on Salisbury Plain, New Generation Publishing 2014

Ed Caesar, “What Lies Benath Stonehenge?”, via http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-lies-beneath-Stonehenge-180952437/

Jesse Harasta, History’s Greatest Mysteries: Stonehenge, Charles Rivera editors, Kindle edition

Jonathan Morris, Stonehenge: Solving the Neolithic Universe, Kindle edition

John North, Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos, Kindle edition

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/sep/23/archaeology.heritage

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/25/stonehenge-tunnel-desecration-prehistoric-traffic-jams

“The cairns of piled stones that mark the high passes are spiked with poles where prayer flags fly. Who hung them in these lonely defiles we cannot tell. As the wind funnels through the passes, their inscriptions stream in faded tatters. With every flutter, it is believed, the wind disperses their prayer into the world, to ease the suffering of all sentient beings. And they will propitiate whatever capricious mountain gods control the pass. I touch them gingerly: the Tibetan script that I do not understand. I have seen them before in China and in regions of Tibetan exile, and every time they stir a poignant wonder. They glare in five primary colours, embodying earth, air, fire, water and sky. Like the prayer wheels that circle holy sites or turn in the hands of pilgrims, they redeem the world by the mystique of words. Some, near monasteries, are even turned by flowing water. Many are stamped with the wind horse, who flies their mantras on his jewelled back; others with the saint Padmasambhava, who restored Buddhism to Tibet. Iswor circles them reverently, clockwise. I follow him, glad, for some reason, of his faith. Sometimes the flags are so thinned that their prayers are as diaphanous as cobwebs. But this, Iswor says, does not matter. The air is already printed with their words.”

Colin Thubron, “To a Mountain in Tibet”

I. THE WALL

 “In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori

baskets of olives and lemons,

cobbles spattered with wine

and the wreckage of flowers.

Vendors cover the trestles

with rose-pink fish;

armfuls of dark grapes

heaped on peach-down.

 

On this same square

they burned Giordano Bruno.

Henchmen kindled the pyre

close-pressed by the mob.

Before the flames had died

the taverns were full again,

baskets of olives and lemons

again on the vendors’ shoulders.

 

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori

in Warsaw by the sky-carousel

one clear spring evening

to the strains of a carnival tune.

The bright melody drowned

the salvos from the ghetto wall,

and couples were flying

high in the cloudless sky.

 

At times wind from the burning

would drift dark kites along

and riders on the carousel

caught petals in midair.

That same hot wind

blew open the skirts of the girls

and the crowds were laughing

on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.”

Czeslaw Milosz, “Campo dei Fiori”

In this touching poem, the brutality of the Nazis liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto is happening behind the wall, sheltering the potential onlookers from the atrocities. In Polin, the Warsaw Museum of the History of the Polish Jews (see below for the meaning of “Polin”), these words written by Chaim A. Kaplan struck a poignant chord with me:

“We are imprisoned within double walls: a wall of brick for our bodies, and a wall of silence for our spirit.”

The Jewish story is no longer surrounded by the wall of silence. The central thought of The Story of the Jews, beautifully imagined in the opening credits to that magnificent documentary by Simon Schama, is that the people who were left with nothing started living in the house of words. Their story and their holy book, the Torah, was sustaining them. The thought is strengthened in his book The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words. Those who have found their words, have found themselves.

II. THE PALM TREE

The 15-metre tall artificial Palm Tree at a busy roundabout in the centre of the city may seem an unlikely symbol of Jewishness. It stands at the intersection of the two most representative streets – Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue) and Nowy Swiat (New World Street). The palm tree, reminiscent of the palms of Jerusalem, marks the absence of the Jews in the city, which was previously their settlement. Wikipedia explains why the Jews chose Poland as their home:

“Some Jewish historians say the Hebrew word for ‘Poland’ is pronounced as Polania or Polin in Hebrew. As transliterated into Hebrew, these names for Poland were interpreted as “good omens” because Polania can be broken down into three Hebrew words: po (“here”), lan (“dwells”), ya (“God”), and Polin into two words of: po (“here”) lin (“[you should] dwell”). The “message” was that Poland was meant to be a good place for the Jews.”

The palm is an ancient symbol of life, victory and fertility, and the Christian symbol of resurrection. It has both masculine and feminine connotations, making it a symbol of totality. In the Dictionary of Literary Symbols, Michael Ferber wrote, “The word “palm” (Latin “palma”) is the same as that for the palm of the hand: to the ancients the tree resembled the hand, the branches or fronds looking like fingers.” In the web of symbolic meaning, another association was solar, the branches of the palm resembling the rays of the sun. Apollo was born under the palm tree. On the feminine side, both in the Odyssey and in the Song of Songs, the beauty of women is compared to the beauty of palm trees. Ferber adds, “The Hebrew word for palm, tamar, was and remains a common girl’s name.” “Phoinikos”, the Greek word for the palm, brings to mind its association with rebirth.

There is something very triumphant, exultant and joyful in this ancient symbol positioned in the middle of a busy roundabout in the part of Europe where palms do not belong. As the symbolic palm unites the opposites, so does this one bringing two worlds together.

“And just as the cosmos is not a dissolving mass of particles, but rests in the unity of God’s embrace, man must not dissolve into a whirl of warring possibilities and tendencies imposed on him by the unconscious, but must become the unity that embraces them all.”

C. G. Jung, “Psychology of Transference”

“To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.”

Fernando Pessoa

There is a desire in every soul to open up and merge, rather than stand alone. The Sufis called this the longing of every soul for the beloved, while the Orphics placed Eros at the top of the Pantheon. Jung, after Silberer, referred to the coniunctio as the central idea of alchemy. In Rosarium Philosophorum, a sixteenth-century alchemical treatise, we read:

“There is the conjunction of two bodies made, and it is necessary in our magistery, and if but one of our two bodies only should be in our Stone, it would never give tincture by any means.”

As Jung explains in The Psychology of Transference, “the coniunctio oppositorum in the guise of Sol and Luna, .., occupies such an important place in alchemy that sometimes the entire process takes the form of the hierosgamos [holy marriage] and its mystic consequences.” In the same book he guides the reader through a sequence of selected woodcuts from Rosarium Philosophorum. Adam McClean of The Alchemy Website, inspired by Jung, presents his own reflections on the full sequence of twenty images (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/roscom.html).  This and the subsequent posts will summarize Jung and McClean’s offerings concerning the images of the Rosarium. My goal is to elucidate the nature of the coniunctio as presented in the Rosarium images while simultaneously referring to the Jung’s final work Mysterium Coniunctionis.

IMAGE 1 (view all the images here: http://www.alchemywebsite.com/virtual_museum/rosarium_philosophorum_room.html)

This image showcases the Mercurial Fountain, which symbolizes the activation of the unconscious. The fountain as a symbol is “an image of the soul as the source of inner life and spiritual energy”, as was aptly summarized by Cirlot in his Dictionary of Symbols. About Illustration 1 McClean writes:

“In illustration 1, we have a picture of man’s inner soul world. In the lower part of the soul we see a triple fountain which pours forth the threefold soul-substance – the Virgin’s Milk ( the feminine receptive lunar forces in the soul), the Spring of Vinegar (the masculine sharp, penetrating solar forces in the soul) and the Aqua Vitae, the water of life (the inner source of soul energies). These three streams pour forth from the head of the fountain, at the central point of the soul, and stream down merging together in the basin at the lowest part of the soul. This vessel contains the primal substance of the soul forces, the Inner Mercury, the Mercury of the Philosophers, that is one and yet is composed of these three streams.

Thus we have here a picture of the unintegrated soul realm of man. The three streams pour down from the heart centre into the lower soul world, but are cut off from a balanced direct connection with the upper soul, the realm of the soul that can touch upon the spiritual. The only connection with this upper soul initially is through the unintegrated polarity of the lunar and solar streams within the soul.”

For alchemists, Mercury was the fluid substance symbolizing the oscillating nature of the unconscious. In Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung called Mercurius the ligament of the soul because it united the body with the spirit. To amplify McClean’s description, in image 1, there are four stars which symbolize the four elements while the fifth star stands for  the quintessence, the unity achieved at the end of the opus. Further, if we see the Mercurial Fountain as located in the centre of the universe, then the four stars may be an allusion to the Four Rivers of Paradise. The three mercurial streams point to the inherent ambivalence of Mercurius – he is both nourishing and poisonous, as indeed is the unconscious. The vinegar is the dissolving substance, which penetrates and breaks down the forms which need to be destroyed before the new structures can be built. The forces erupting from the depths of the unconscious may have a destructive aspect. The water of life cleans and purifies, healing and reviving after the shock and suffering caused by the acidic spring erupting from the unconscious. Finally, the milk nourishes and allows the soul to grow. There is also nourishment coming from the stars, which are being licked by the two mercurial dragons.

The first image already heralds the future coniunctio, while presenting all the elements of transformation. “With its quiet song and strange power” (to quote Denise Levertov) the Mercurial Fountain is rushing, moving and flowing within our innermost being.

To be continued with further images…

Einsiedeln Abbey, exhibition poster https://www.nationalmuseum.ch/e/microsites/2017/Zuerich/Einsiedeln.php

A striking poster advertises an exhibition dedicated to the history of 1000 years of pilgrimage to Einsiedeln Abbey, the seat of the Black Madonna. We see her red robe and the crown but the statue is not there. A veil is all there is. The energetic, blood red colour of the cape arrests and fills with awe. It dresses up the unconscious, adorns the shadow, crowning darkness and emptiness. “I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my veil,” – the words inscribed on the statue of Isis of Sais come to mind. All the symbolic representations of the divine are just what comes from our attempts at peering through the veil; this is why we communicate the mystery or perhaps how the mystery communicates with us. In our daily world biased towards clarity, obviousness, growth, achievement and tangible benefits, the Black Madonna is an omen of wholeness that we have lost on the way. She heals by making whole, soothes and warms the cold hearts, projecting boundless forgiveness and compassion. She is not always meek, but can be quite defiant and disruptive in relation to the stale status quo. Like the unconscious, she is the great balancing force. The weak, the sick, the disenfranchised, the disempowered, women, strangers, outsiders and foreigners, have all sought refuge under her mantle. It was believed in the earlier centuries that only the Black Madonna can show the right way to murderers and other criminals. Until the eighteenth centuries convicted criminals of Switzerland were able to atone for their guilt and go free if they made a pilgrimage to the holy statue.

The capes of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln

There are many covert ways in which the church still try to downplay her vibrant and growing cult. Her blackness, for example, is usually explained by the prolonged exposure of the statue to candle smoke. This is quite hard to believe, since the numerous Black Madonna statues have sprung up in numerous places in the world immediately in their black glory. According to legends, the statues were often found by children, shepherds or animals close to caves or streams, often buried in the earth. The mystery surrounding their sudden emergence is symbolically very fitting. She shows herself to the humble and the weak, her source of origin being veiled in mystery. She does not seek a central or prominent role, and yet she is the centre of the mandala, the creative matrix from which all life came and to which it will return. Although her face is featured on the poster advertising the exhibition, she is just but one of the themes of it. Still, it was easily noticeable how crowds gravitated towards and concentrated in the sections dedicated to her. Disappointingly, the role of Forest Sisters, one of whom offered the statue of the Black Madonna to St Meinrad, the founder of the monastery, was not acknowledged. Nothing is said of the appalling treatment of the Sisters by the male establishment of the Monastery. Namely, they were driven out of the Dark Forest, where they lived in a peaceful community gathering herbs and healing the sick, banned from visiting the Black Madonna statue, ordered to wear black and had to lead a convent life in the nearby town (see my previous post on the subject https://symbolreader.net/2016/02/28/the-black-madonna-of-einsiedeln/).  As a consolation, the sisters received a copy of the original Black Madonna statue. What is more, the lay public were also restricted by the Benedictine monks from adoring the statue right until the beginning of the twentieth century. Older female inhabitants of Einsiedeln still remember the times when they had to sneak in to the church to pray in front of the Black Madonna.

The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln

I am Black and Lovely: the Mystery of the Black Madonna by Margrit Rosa Schmid is a booklet rich in detail that accompanies the exhibition. It contains a wealth of stories about the Black Madonnas of the whole world. I was not aware of the sheer number of statues and shrines of her in Switzerland alone. At the beginning of the twentieth century in the Italian canton of Tessin, where her cult is very strong, a local pastor felt uncomfortable with what he perceived as a pagan cult of the statue of La Madonna Nera. He replaced it with a white Madonna, which sparked outrage with the locals. Eventually, the church had no choice but to give in, the Black Madonna was restored, while the white one ended up in pastor’s attic. This particular Black Madonna is a copy of the magnificent Black Madonna of Loreto in Italy. Schmid beautifully describes the symbolism of the appearance of the original Italian statue. Especially striking are the five black moon sickles adorning her gown complete with a reversed red triangle – a symbol of feminine fertility (the chalice and the womb). During the French Revolutionary Wars, Napoleon moved the Black Madonna statue from Loreto to Paris, where she was displayed in Louvre as an Egyptian goddess. He must have understood subconsciously that the Black Madonna indeed comes from a long lineage of ancient dark mother goddesses, especially but not only Isis. The Loreto Chapel of Madonna showcases statues of nine Sibyls, further strengthening the connection with the ancient cult of the goddess as well as pointing at the gift of prophecy, seeing in the dark, common to all dark female deities. Mary, not only in her role as the Black Madonna, has always fulfilled a symbolic role of a pontifex – a bridge builder between humans and divinity.

La Madonna Nera of Sonogno, Switzerlad

The Black Madonna of Loreto

A particularly moving legend is connected with the Polish Black Madonna of Czestochowa, who bears two long scars on her face. In the 15th century, the monastery was raided by the Hussites, who stole the icon. However, their horses refused to move the wagon in which they were travelling. In frustration, one of the robbers inflicted two strikes on Madonna’s face with his sword. When he tried to draw his sword upon the image for the third time, he fell to the ground and died a painful death. It is perhaps her fragility and a memento of suffering visible on her face that makes her divine form so human.

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland

“I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are—

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.”

W.B. Yeats, “Ideas of Good and Evil”

I am looking forward to seeing a new documentary by Thomas Riedelsheimer about the work of Andy Goldsworthy, a Scottish land artist. As he works, “getting under the skin of the earth,” engaging deeply with the elements, he taps into the memory of nature, evoking it by means of symbols. The Hebrew/Greek word ‘archetype’ understood as the original pattern is also linguistically related to “mark of a seal,” while the adjective “archetypos” can be translated as “stamped first.” In a way, Goldsworthy “stamps” the earth with his archetypal creations, and by so doing he makes us see the symbolism that nature hides in plain sight. In one of his works, he even imprints the earth with his own body.

In 2001 Thomas Riedelsheimer made the first documentary about Goldsworthy entitled “Rivers and Tides.” You can see it here:

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/andy-goldsworthys-rivers-tides/

Goldsworthy is not a man of many words. He would much rather dialogue with us through his art. But what he says is quite powerful. Far from being just decorative, his art invites us to look deeper at nature, which he does not see as just pastoral or pretty. As he is making his ephemeral stone creations on the beach, which within minutes will be flooded by the tide, he states, “My art is trying to understand the stone.” He goes on to say that he offers his work to the sea as a gift. The sea will transform it beyond what he can imagine. He has a deep awareness of roots, what is hidden, the life processes working in darkness. He enjoys taking his work to the very edge of collapse. What accompanies him is a constant amazement that he is actually alive. The black holes he adds to the landscape are particularly striking; they are reminiscent of absence, void, death, but also of the space where life germinates.

I. “Whenever, in the course of the daily hunt, the red hunter comes upon a scene that is strikingly beautiful or sublime–a black thundercloud with the rainbow’s glowing arch above the mountain; a white waterfall in the heart of a green gorge; a vast prairie tinged with the blood-red of sunset–he pauses for an instant in the attitude of worship.”

Charles Eastman, “The Soul of the Indian”

II. “In the world where I was raised, life has only a brief moment of flowering — the time of physical strength for men, the season of youthful beauty and childbearing for women. All else is a time of becoming or a time of decline. Rather than looking at our lives like the seasons, where each has a richness that belongs to no other, we look at them like a flower that moves from bud to bloom to gradual decay and death. Only the time of bloom is seen as the fullness of life. Native people like Joe do not see life this way. They see it as a passage through spiritual seasons where we gain knowledge and richness as we pass from one season to the next. Only a person in winter has seen them all, so only a person in winter is granted the respect that comes with full spiritual knowledge. Far from being vestigial or in eclipse, the elders, who have lived through all of life’s seasons, are the honored ones, the crown jewels of the Native family.”

Kent Nerburn, “Voices in the Stones: Life Lessons from the Native Way”

III. “There were ideals and practices in the life of my ancestors that have not been improved upon by the present-day civilization.”

Luther Standing Bear

Luther Standing Bear

Mount Rushmore is a landmark with complicated history. The portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were carved onto the Black Hills rock, which is sacred to Native Americans, who were granted this territory in a treaty of 1868. The treaty read, “As long as the rivers run and the grasses grow and trees bear leaves, Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, will forever and ever be the sacred land of the Indians.” Like many promises bestowed on Native Americans, this one was also broken. After gold was found there, the Hills were immediately seized by the whites. The land is still under dispute.

Black Hills National Forest, via Wikipedia

Some thirty kilometres from Mount Rushmore another leader’s portrait is being carved onto rock – the statue of Crazy Horse, a Lakota warrior. The memorial was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, to be sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski, an American sculptor of Polish descent. Ziolkowski worked on the monument for thirty-six years, until his death. Throughout that time, he refused to take any salary. He carved his own epitaph, which can be viewed on the site:

“KORCZAK Storyteller in Stone
May His Remains Be Left Unknown.”

Crazy Horse Memorial

Rather paradoxically, throughout his short life Crazy Horse consistently refused to be photographed. He did not want anyone to know his face and yet his carved head is 27 metres high. Perhaps there is no other way of raising public awareness about the First Nations but to erect a giant memorial as a counterpoint to the existing White American one. But the Native soul is in actuality humble and alien to ostentation. This was beautifully expressed in a landmark book by Charles Eastman, who was a physician and an activist of Santee Dakota, English and French ancestry. In The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation, he wrote:

“There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky!”

Charles Eastman

Quite different, much less conspicuous but not less powerful stone carvings are mentioned in another worthy book devoted to the spirituality of Native Americans, namely Voices in the Stones: Life Lessons from the Native Way by Kent Nerburn. He recalls a time when two of his Native American friends accompanied him to see ancient carvings on stones known as petroglyphs, located east of the South Dakota border. The two Indians, father and son, did not try to rationalize the Great Mystery; they did not strive to understand the meaning of the ancient carvings, but instead performed an ancient ritual that involved burning sage over the rocks.

Nerburn explains that In Native American tradition, everything has a voice, the whole nature calls out to us with the voice of the Great Mystery. The stones and the soil call to us with the voices of our ancestors who died or who were buried there. In some places, such as The Wounded Knee or in Auschwitz, the stones and the earth speak louder, so the more sensitive of us have to cover their ears.

Petroglyphs, photo by John Novotny via https://www.behance.net/gallery/9053885/Native-American-Petroglyphs-at-Writing-on-Stone

In a striking passage from Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he remembers an encounter with an older of the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, who said to him:

“How cruel the whites are: their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by holes. Their eyes have a staring expression. They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something, they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want, we do not understand them, we think that they are mad.” I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad. “They say they think with their heads,” he replied.

“Why, of course. What do you think with?” I asked him in surprise.

“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.”

When such two radically different visions and ways of living clash, disaster ensues. If stones were taken to represent atrocities committed on Native Americans, the Wounded Knee massacre would be the last stone thrown on top of a high mountain. A particularly distressing to me was the story of the Osage murders, of which I had been unaware. This nation was repeatedly stripped of their land until, finally, they managed to acquire some barren, unfriendly rocks in Oklahoma, which no one else wanted. The situation changed drastically when oil was discovered in the area and the Indians got extremely wealthy. As a result, they immediately became target of “theft, graft and mercenary marriage.” They were kidnapped, shot and poisoned often by those that posed as their friends or who were their spouses in the eyes of the law. In four years dubbed as the Reign of Terror sixty Osage Indians were murdered. Most of the murders were never prosecuted.

The words of Martin Luther King who said that he American nation was born in genocide express a shameful truth that cannot be hidden any longer. Historian Howard Zinn agrees:

“And so, Indian Removal, as it has been politely called, cleared the land for white occupancy between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, cleared it for cotton in the South and grain in the North, for expansion, immigration, canals, railroads, new cities, and the building of a huge continental empire clear across to the Pacific Ocean. The cost in human life cannot be accurately measured, in suffering not even roughly measured. Most of the history books given to children pass quickly over it.”

And yet, the Native Way is neither buried nor forgotten. Quietly, the wheel of history is turning again. As Nerburn puts it in the epilogue to his book, “We could destroy the First Peoples physically, but we could not erase their presence from our hearts. And so we hid them, buried them deep in our cultural psyche, just as we had buried so many of them in the earth they once had called their own. They became the shadow of our cultural guilt.“

At the Wounded Knee site

American Indians are so much more than the shadows. Their teaching us about the Great Spirit that unifies all opposites, bringing about the necessary reconciliation, appeals to ever increasing number of people. The indigenous values of respect for nature and inclusion are making a relentless resurgence. We are slowly realizing that domination has to be replaced by understanding, as Nerburn writes, “…your task in life is not to dominate, but to understand; to learn the rules of the universe and come into right relationship with them.”

Links:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2000/09/09/us/an-apology-and-a-milestone-at-indian-bureau.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/books/review/killers-of-the-flower-moon-david-grann.html?mtrref=undefined&gwh=DB7126F99355F35C0BB21DC87CADB903&gwt=pay

https://www.economist.com/node/11848993

https://crazyhorsememorial.org/crazy-horse-the-man.html

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Children’s Games”

The vision of the world as an unfolding game is a very alluring idea. Once you start viewing all reality through that lens, it is quite hard to step back into ordinary perception. In Hinduism, the concept of Lila, divine play, is used to describe the creative, joyful and spontaneous activity of Brahman, the supreme existence and the Divine Ground of All. “It is a spirit leaping forward to be pursued and enjoyed and, ultimately, understood,” as it was expressed by an anonymous theosophy master here . From that perspective, the world arose as play and it unfolds as such. At the deepest level, to paraphrase Krishnamurti, the purpose of life is nothing but living itself.

Betty Heimann, a German professor of Sanskrit and a renowned expert on Indian studies, who died in 1961, wrote the following on the relation of the concept of Lila to time:

“As regards the concept of Time, lila represents continuity. It is well worth noting that the Greeks from the time of the pre-Socratics establish the necessity of a ‘kairos,’ of the adequate moment when to start with adequate means to achieve one single purpose and intent. India, on the other hand … never felt the need of the effortful moment and directed purpose for one single end. Instead of limiting herself to a ‘kairos,’ a straight line towards a certain end, she thinks in series of continuing receding preceding waves: polar existence is ever present, simultaneously and successively. Heraclitus, then, the Western thinker who more than all others approaches the Indian world of thought, significantly grasps the concept of the ‘aion,’ the creative continuity of time and life force, under the simile of an ever youthful child at play. In his Fragment 52 he asserts that the ‘aion’ is a child playing with dice. The supreme government of the world lies in the hands of a child.”

From University of Ceylon Review vol. III, No.2,1945,pp 29-34, link http://dlib.pdn.ac.lk/bitstream/123456789/899/1/Betty%20heimann.pdf

Shiva and Parvati at the game of dice

The Puranas (ancient Hindu texts) contain a story of Shiva playing the game of dice with Parvati. This game can be viewed as a metaphor of how the world came into manifestation, a tale of the birth of consciousness, as writes Richard Smoley in The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. Shiva personifies pure consciousness, the self itself (Purusha) while Parvati stands for the contents of consciousness, i.e. the world or experience (Prakriti). Before the universe is manifested, consciousness and its contents are united in primordial sleep. The dice game introduced to the divine pair by a demon of discord symbolizes “the beginning of manifestation,” as self and the other (Shiva and Parvati) begin to consciously relate. Having been defeated in the game, Shiva, unperturbed, simply retreats to the forest. As Smoley explains, consciousness can detach from experience:

“You are not your thoughts; you are not your feelings; you are not even your actions. This realization in expressed in the myth of the dice game: Shiva, having ‘lost’ all his attributes to Parvati, goes off, unruffled, to the forest to live the life of an ascetic. Purusha has no attributes; they all belong to prakriti; that is why purusha always loses the game. But since these attributes are not part of it to begin with, it loses nothing in actuality.”

The dice itself embraces consciousness and experience in its symbolic construction. A marvellous explanation of the symbolic meaning of the dice can be found on the Theosophy Trust website here . As a cube, the dice symbolizes the earthly manifestation (prakriti). However, it is a well-known fact that the top and bottom faces of the dice always add up to seven, which is a holy number with rich symbolic significance. First of all, it reconciles the square of matter with the heavenly triangle (three being a number symbolically linked with god and goddess). Like the rainbow bridge, the number seven links the unmanifested divine reality with the manifested earthly realm. According to Cirlot, the author of the Dictionary of Symbols, the seventh day of rest after six days of creation corresponds to the centre and the return to the Divine Source. For more on number seven, see here .

Play as an activity, not only the one involving the dice, has a way of transporting the participants from ordinary life to the realm of enchantment. In a classic book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, written in the 1990s by a Dutch scholar J. Hiuzinga, humans are imagined as always engaging in ludere – Latin for to play. Play transcends the immediate needs of life; it denotes “a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” Play creates beauty and order that it brings temporarily to the mundane sphere of chaos and confusion. It draws a magic circle around the play activity and, similarly to a ritual, “transports the participants to another world.” Huizinga asserts firmly that all the “great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start.” For him, play is older than culture and society. What is more, culture and society arise from play:

“As a rule the play element gradually recedes into the background, being absorbed for the most part in the sacred sphere. The remainder crystallizes as knowledge: folklore, poetry, philosophy, or in the various forms of judicial and social life.”

The crystallized seriousness of our institutions, of all civilization, of all our truths and duties, rests on a magic cloud of enchanted play.

The Theosophy Trust website also contains an entry devoted to symbolism of games (https://www.theosophytrust.org/626-games). Through games, “the potential perfection inherent in the macrocosmic plan may be gradually realized in the microcosmic nature of man.” In games universal truths are embodied, for they offer “means of transcending the ephemeral flux of external appearances.” The ball is seen as an object with magical powers:

“To release these powers has been part of the fascination of the game, and when the powers represent a victory over various obstacles or even darkness itself, the result is truly cathartic for both players and spectators. Pitting oneself against objects, forces, others or even against oneself releases and cleanses the emotions, whilst onlookers purge themselves of anger, malice and frustration.”

But, how to explain the violence, addictions and other distortions that haunt human as the playing animal? From a theosophical perspective, this shows the humankind’s inability to come to terms with the deeper level of the psyche, where the universal game between good and evil is being eternally waged. Gamblers, in turn, are merely revealing their contempt for authority and the restrictions of living in the society:

“They are thereby displaying a perverse unwillingness to accept their own legitimate karma as well as the collective karma in which they find themselves enmeshed.”

Via https://www.theosophytrust.org/702-the-dice

Eric Berne, the Canadian psychiatrist famous for creating the theory of transactional analysis and applying game theory to psychiatry, believed that children are born princes and princesses until their parents turn them into frogs. A healthy ego, according to transactional theory, should be able to switch between the roles of a child, parent or adult according to needs and circumstances. However, I agree with Rilke about one thing: “…we are always closest to the center of our lives at the point where according to our own means we most closely resemble the child!” (found in “Letters on Life”)

Jan Steen, “Card Players Quarrelling”

“I wasn’t hurt enough when I should have been, Kino admitted to himself. When I should have felt real pain, I stifled it. I didn’t want to take it on, so I avoided facing up to it. Which is why my heart is so empty now. The snakes have grabbed that spot and are trying to hide their coldly beating hearts there.”

Haruki Murakami, “Kino”, a short story included in the collection “Men Without Women”

This is so typical of Murakami’s writing. Although the passage seems ascetic, it opens a vast psychological space. The snakes offer a startling image, which immediately brings to mind the myth of Medusa. I have already approached her here but Murakami made me think of her again. Coincidentally, I have recently seen a BBC documentary “Civilizations”, where in episode 5, “The Triumph of Art”, Simon Schama devoted some time to Benvenuto Cellini’s masterpiece “Perseus with the Head of Medusa.” Several years ago I was lucky to see the sculpture at the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Schama marveled at the beauty of Medusa and at the emotional power of the whole piece. He said:

“All the ancients Perseuses and Medusas were contrasts between beauty as hero and grotesque Gorgon. Not here. Cellini has the genius crazy idea of making them interchangeably androgynously beautiful. Boy girl, girl boy both looking down, even the hairdos aren’t actually that different – tousled curls of writhing snakes. Cellini is a sorcerer, an alchemist. He has made hard metal sweat with the exertion of killing. He has turned that hot alloy back into liquid, the blood coursing through the hero’s body, the blood pouring from Medusa’s sliced away neck. And remember, even dead, her looks can kill you.”

Benvenuto Cellini, “Perseus with the Head of Medusa”

The myth of Medusa can be interpreted on so many different levels. For Valerie Estelle Frankel, author of From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey Through Myth and Legend, the myth pertains to the haling of the wounded shadow. When Medusa is raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, the goddess is so outraged that she turns Medusa into a monster. This frozen monster form serves as defense against a deep trauma:

“Medusa is safe forever in her monster form, safer even than Athena in her armor. This form has defenses: the venom of the snakes, the banishment to the impenetrable underworld, and the famous petrifying gaze. Medusa’s stare is the ultimate power—one that says “No, don’t come any closer!

…

Medusa dwells in the underworld, crouched in the safety of this still half-life, where nothing changes, where no one dies or is born or is harmed.”

On the one hand, the head of Medusa represents “a source of feminine power raped by male authority.” However, she may also stand for the wounded heart, the bottled up fury of all of us, regardless of gender. Comes Perseus as the wounded masculine hero:

“Medusa senses someone is there and turns her gaze on him. But he is a victim as she is, cast into the seas by his grandfather, ignored by his father, with mother and self endangered by the patriarchy in the form of King Polydectes. Perseus holds the mirror that to inner self, but more, he is Medusa’s inner self, the frightened child behind the rage-filled gaze that Medusa cannot outstare.

Confronted with this wounded hero so like herself, Medusa succumbs and allows her barriers to be broken, allows her return to the world above. This, like all growth, requires great pain; Perseus’ sword slices Medusa’s head from her body. But there is also glorious birth as children, once sired by Poseidon, spring forth: Pegasus, beloved of the Muses, and the golden hero Chrysaor. Walling herself off has resulted in stagnation, isolation, as Medusa rages and nurses her wounds. But until now, she has failed to grow beyond them. With a sword-strike, with a mirror, Perseus opens her to her painful past, forcing her to confront it, accept it, and move forward. Medusa is no longer frozen, unable to give birth to her desires and needs. She can finally return to life.”

Master Cellini managed to show just that in his sculpture – Perseus and Medusa united in their human suffering.