Hyborian Bridge 112

Titian, Noli me Tangere

In an Eastertime review, the DT's Alastair Sooke admired Titian's depiction of Christ ("Touch me not") meeting Mary Magdalene in the Garden of Gethsemane. He admires,

that beautiful, verdant landscape, softly illuminated by the light of dawn – and suffused, for believers at least, with sacred magic. Easter Sunday commemorates Christ’s resurrection. But all of us – Christians and non-Christians alike – find solace in rebirth. It’s, in part, what makes us human – which Titian, surely, understood. Happy Easter.

It's a slightly curious phrase, "find solace in rebirth.. what makes us human." Does he mean the natural world, like the tree which, in the picture connecting the gaze of Magdalene to that of Christ?

That got me thinking about how rustic religions are in general. The Buddha and his fig tree are well known. The lotus that grows in muddy water as an emblem of blossoming from the murk. The Hindu Kamadhenu or cow-goddess, which is "the source of all prosperity". A non-erotic fertility symbol that contains all the gods in her body.

You'd think this might not apply to Islam, and yet Kamadhenu iconography was influenced by Buraq, the female-faced horse that carried the Prophet. The Quran contains the story of a female camel who was born from a rock as a miraculous proof to disbelievers of the Prophet Salih.

The disbelievers then maltreat the camel, and are enjoined to, "Let her feed from Allah's Earth" (11:64). There are six Surahs specifically on animals. Surah 2 (cow); surah 6 (cattle); surah 16 (bees); surah 27 (ants); surah 29 (spiders); surah 107 (elephants). In general their integrity and work-ethic are lauded as well as the social aspect of the communal ones. The horse (surah 100) is cited as an example of fire and fury to follow for the faithful.

So, these creatures that feed or graze from Mother earth and are noble are praised. The implication is that the Earth is praised - as distinct from cosmopolitan cities. The deserts and their intrepid camels.

Religions that find animals praiseworthy and useful are also temperamentally rustic. Whether the image is of a garden or an oasis, the same idea of growth, death, rebirth is apparent.

So, therefore in order to have rebirth one must also have death, whether it is Christ or of the vegetable order. So the very notion of rebirth means disorder, a falling-off and disintegrating.

That could easily be likened to the feminine dynamic of dancing on the new-arisen earth that grows from the eternal cycle of destruction - Kali or the red-brown ochre of Rudra-Shiva; or the effeminate eastern god Dionysus.

Dance and destruction and destiny are tied-together as surely as the fiery sun hurtling across the sky is tied to Earthspin. A dance has destiny whereas a straight-line does not. Reason being that the destructive ingredient of the dance invites in new creation.

The material world (of light or straight-lines) is an Airtight Garage that actually approaches the immaterial (algorithm). This is the world we enter when we open the door to the universe of straight lines.

Tales of Faith 12

I think I mentioned before that where I live there is a Creative Quarter where artists are established from as far afield as Russia? One casualty of the enterprise was a large lobster mural that was eccentric and boasted history here on the coastal east. Of course, it was replaced by a lot of straight lines with a locked door - clearly from The Airtight Garage.

One of the old gods of the maritime workers

I've nothing against artists and, actually, met my own illustrator Elena in this area. However art, historically, isn't a development, it's a spontaneous outgrowth of the society, as with Venice.

The spontaneity has a type of naive charm. The Renaissance masters like Titian have a naive grandeur that has never been equaled. Naivety being just a tactile contact with Mother earth and the red loam of home.

This contact is a contact with the dance of destruction and creation, the fiery sun traveling across the sky. Earth and sky have a naive simplicty. The simplciity is the simplicity of a dance that has power and meaning in the cosmos.

A straight line, for all its complex parallel reality, does not have that and that is the universe we're in. The meaning of powerful, monumental simplicity often has a religious tone, as was picked-up by Robert Yaple in his essay on Stygia (Savage Sword #23).

Places like Khemi had a decadence, almost a decline,

"a grim massiveness.. that was overpowering and oppressive."

The torpor of such ancient kingdoms reeks of decadence, and also a strange writhing power. As Yaple notes, only Stygia survived the catastrophe that engulfed Hyboria, eventually to become the kingdom of the Nile.

Yaple asserts that the Stygians were "obsessed with stability", but it is also characterized by a wild, rhythmic swaying of its serpentine heritage (see Milius's Conan, the scene at Thulsa Doom's palace).

The serpent, a bit like the Chinese dragon (Tao) belongs to the Earth and manifests destruction and creation. It's not dormant, but it can appear like the same cycle is repeating endlessly.

By contrast, the straight-line world appears to advance, but is it advancing towards self-destruction? Destruction of the psyche through physical boredom manifested by acolytes of sorcerers of number.

As Yaple says in the same essay, sorcerers like Thoth Amon weren't government employees, they were out for self-gain, even enemies of the state. Our position in modernity is exactly the opposite. Our psyches are increasingly under peril from number and sex, since the two become one in the expressive algorithm (prev.)

The society of physical boredom is also the society of psychic weakness, and that trend could be self-destructive.