MORE ART & SPIRITUALITY

   As work continues with the ongoing project ART & SPIRITUALITY, the research of Jewell Homad Johnson on Robert Motherwell [1915 – 1991) [ROBERT MOTHERWELL @ WIKIPEDIA]  is a welcome discovery. An article/paper and her main thesis are here:

Jewell Homad Johnson, The Modern Artist As Spiritual Adept [University of Sydney]  ONLINE HERE at her Academia page.

And her main ACADEMIA PAGE.

Jewell Homad Johnson, Robert Motherwell: the artist the spiritual the modern. A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Research) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences - University of Sydney May 24, 2015. [ONLINE HERE]

Then, directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak: Robert Motherwell, The modern painter’s world”, Revisiones, n.º 6 (2010), pp. 69-78.  [ONLINE HERE]

And a Documentary:   Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) STORMING THE CITADEL [ONLINE HERE ON YOU TUBE]

Dedalus Foundation was set up by Robert Motherwell in 1981 to educate the public by fostering public understanding of modern art and modernism through its support of research, education, publications, and exhibitions in this field. [WEBSITE HERE]

 

 

 

Cards from a Tarocchi (Tarot Pack): Love and charity

    

Cards from a Tarocchi (Tarot Pack): Love and charity

Milan, 1428-47

Tempera and gold leaf on paper, each 7Y2 x 3Y2 in. (19 x 9 cm)

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven (ITA 109)

   Although card games in general have a long history dating back to antiquity, these two fifteenth-century cards come from what may be the earliest known tarocchi, or tarot pack. Tarocchi have been associated primarily with divination since at least the eighteenth century. However, in the Renaissance they were used for trick-taking games. These were presumably played like the modern game of Crazy Eights, in which each player tries to discard his or her hand first by matching suits or numbers in turn. The typical tarocchi pack of seventy-eight cards is composed of fifty-six minor arcana: four suits (swords, batons, cups, coins), each with cards numbered one through ten as well as court cards representing a male page, a male knight, a queen, and a king. It also contains twenty-two major arcana, or trick or trump cards, represented by figures or allegories whose original meanings are lost. These trump cards allowed players to change the course of the game for their own benefit; for example, if the last discard was a baton, but the player had no batons, he or she could play a trump and call for a change of suit. But rules-and no complete set of rules survives for this period-seemed to vary widely and no full pack is known, so it is difficult to understand exactly why each trump had such an individual appearance and what each one could do in a game situation.

     The cards here, representing Love and Charity, are two of the eleven known trumps from the so-called Cary-Yale pack, which has been dated to anywhere between 1428 and 1447. Like many of the hand-painted packs from the Renaissance, it is associated with the court of Filippo Maria Visconti, who was duke of Milan from 1412 until his death in 1447· Each of the trumps in this pack has a gold diaper background patterned with Filippo Maria's sunburst device. On the baldacchino of the Love card, his coiled-viper arms alternate with the Savoy cross of his second wife, and his phrase, ''A bon droyt," or "By legitimate rule," is inscribed on the youth's hat. Other cards in the pack have additional devices related to the duke, such as

the impression from a Milanese florin struck during his reign used as the image of the coin in most of the cards in that suit. There thus seems little reason to question Filippo Maria's connection to the pack, particularly because, although best known as an able politician and soldier, he was also interested in the arts and especially in card games.

Between 1410 and 1425, according to his biographer Pier Candido Decembrio, Filippo Maria paid the painter Michelino da Besozzo the sizable sum of fifteen hundred gold ducats for an elaborate pack of cards, almost certainly a tarocchi, decorated with gods, court figures, animals, and birds.1 Although no further purchases were recorded, some 271 cards, representing perhaps as many as fifteen different packs, can be linked to the Visconti or their successors, the Sforza, in fifteenth-century Milan.2 In fact, the majority of Italian tarocchi, both the hand-painted packs and the earliest printed examples, as well as most of the documentary evidence for their production and use, come from the North Italian courts of Milan, Ferrara, and Bologna. The cost associated with these cards-with their fine silver and gold leaf, elaborate punchwork, and carefully composed and painted fronts-indicates that card playing was primarily a cultured courtly  pastime, particularly before printing made it much cheaper to produce packs in multiples for wider dissemination. The Cary-Yale pack was particularly extravagant; the condition of the delicate paint and gilding reveals that the cards were handled rarely and carefully, and the tiny holes in the top margins of each imply that they were strung together for safekeeping when not in use. This would have kept them in a particular order, which may have been a way to teach a new player the rules of the game.

   Tarocchi were not standardized during this early period.3 A total of sixty-seven cards survive from the Cary-Yale pack, but there is no agreement on the original number, which must have been at least eighty-six or perhaps eighty-nine. Instead of the more usual four court cards per suit, the Cary-Yale pack has six: along with the male page, male knight, queen, and king, it also has a female page and a female knight. Since no other pack has those additional characters, these cards may be an indication that this pack was intended for a female member of the court. The CaryYale trumps may have been more numerous

overall. Among its eleven known trumps are the Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, which no other pack has, as well  as the Cardinal Virtue of Fortitude, which implies that the remaining Virtues ofJustice, Temperance, and Prudence were also once present. Of course the trumps vary across all packs, and the vagaries of survival obscure what exactly is missing in every case. Despite these mysteries, the two cards shown here are excellent examples of the great richness and variety of the Cary-Yale pack as a whole. The image of the game as it was played-the courtiers dressed as magnificently as the characters on the cards, and the reflections of the punched silver and gold in the candlelit gaming room-offers a vivid picture of fifteenth-century court life.

   These players also needed a reasonably learned background to understand the complex representations on the trump cards. The Love card depicts a couple wearing rich contemporary dress clasping hands in a marital gesture under a baldacchino. A blindfolded Cupid, preparing to drop his arrows on each, flies above them, and a small dog, perhaps a miniature greyhound (a symbol of fidelity and a popular breed in Renaissance courts), scampers at their feet. As with so many objects in this exhibition, the heraldry and handclasp seem to signify a marriage, perhaps indicating that the pack originated as a marriage gift. The Charity card is a simpler composition, dominated, as many of the court and trump cards were, by a single largescale figure. The crowned Virtue is seated on a dais, her luxurious fur-lined mantle gilt and punched in a floral pattern. One of her hands holds a now-tarnished silver bell or censer, while the other supports the small naked boy she nurses. An older male figure in a rose-colored robe under the dais looks out at the player as if commiserating. Although he is not part of the traditional iconography of the Virtue, it has been suggested that he may be King Herod, symbolizing the Vice of Disdain, subdued and crushed by Charity above him.4

Scholars are divided on the interrelated issues of attribution and dating. Some date this pack early, as part of the celebrations surrounding Filippo Maria's own marriage to Maria of Savoy in 1428; if so, the cards may well be a product of the artists associated with the Zavattari, a prominent family of painters who enjoyed court favor in Milan.

   History reveals that Filippo Maria and his wife needed all the help they could get. Their arranged marriage was never consummated, and there is considerable evidence that the couple were deeply unhappy. In this way, the romantic iconography of the Love card might have been meant as a sort of talisman for a successful marriage. Alternately, the pack may have been made later, at some point prior to Filippo Maria's death in 1447.5

The most likely occasions were the marriage of his illegitimate daughter and only heir, Bianca Maria, to Francesco Sforza in 1441,6 or the marriage of Francesco's son Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Bona of Savoy in 1468? If indeed they do date to one of those later marriages, they may instead be associated with Bonifacio Bembo, to whom other, similar tarocchi have been attributed. Bembo's work for the Sforza court is well documented, and his training as a miniaturist would have been a great help in the planning and execution of the Cary-Yale pack. Regardless of authorship, the Visconti and Savoy references on the Love card put this pack in the Milanese courtly ambient, which was known throughout the fifteenth century to have a great interest in cards and card playing.

1. Pratesi 1989.

2. Visconti Tarocchi Deck 1984, pp. 4-6.

3· Dummett 1986, p. 15.

4· R. Decker and C. Decker 1975, p. 28.

5· Toesca 1912, pp. 523-25.

6. Kaplan 1978.

7· Algeri 1981, p. 72.

JMM

SELECTED REFERENCES: R. Steele 1900; Parravicino 1903; Toesca 1912, pp. 522-25; Moakley 1966, p. 77; R. Decker and C. Decker 1975; Jane Hayward in Secular Spirit 1975, p. 214, no. 225, pl. 10; Cahn and Marrow 1978, pp. 227-28; Kaplan 1978; Algeri 1981, pp. 64-85; Mulazzani 1981; Visconti Tarocchi Deck 1984; Dummett 1986, pp. 12-15; Pratesi 1989; Bandera 1999, PP· 52-63

From: Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, Edited by Andrea Bayer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008 [AVAILABLE ONLINE]

BEAUTY: THREE VIEWS

Hegel:

“Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts, and fine art is frequently the key — with many nations there is no other — to the understanding of their wisdom and their religion.” [1]

Abhinavagupta:

“For Abhinavagupta, in other words, art, the spirituality path and the divine reality were clearly one and the same. In the mind of Abhinavagupta, this cosmos is God’s artistic creation, a creation within which every smallest unit of that creation itself embodies and reflects the divine Artist which is its origin. For this reason, artistic expression — be it poetry, drama, music painting or any other artistic medium — is just as capable of bringing about spiritual realization as yogic practice. For Abhinavagupta, the artist is a yogin and the yogin is an artist. The ultimate artistic expression is life itself which presents the opportunity for the attainment of spiritual realization, an event which empowers the individual to recognize his or her own identity as non-distinct from the identity of that ultimate Artist who is the source and very body of creation itself.” [2]

Herbert V. Guenther:

“Insight into life and Being ultimately springs from creative, and by implication, artistic imagination. Therefore, the fine arts not only can give us knowledge, but also, through their influence on our lives, give form to our emotive experiences. The close relationship between Tantrism and the fine arts underlines the importance of learning to see reality as a symbol of life and feeling, not as a sign that points to something other than itself. The meaning of life is in living it.” [3]

[1]   Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet, ed. and intro. Michael Inwood (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1993), p. 9.

[2]   Dr. Jeffrey S. Lidke, A Thousand Years of Abhinavagupta, Sutra Journal, January, 2016. [ONLINE HERE]

[3]   Herbert V. Guenther, The Tantric View of Life, Shambhala Publications, Boulder & London, 1976, p. 147.

IMAGE: Cover of a Shakta Manuscript with Uma-Maheshvara

THE FOOL

All that remains to me is a great pity for humanity, forced to live out its allotted span upon this cruel earth.

-- Luigi Pirandello

Clowns are grotesque blasphemers against all our pieties. That's why we need them. They're our alter egos.

-- Dario Fo

William Willeford:

 “There have been many works of imagination with the theme of “Ubi sunt . . . “?   In which we follow the great ones of the earth as they yield to the common fate of death; we look at the point where they left us and try to find in the  dust and ashes a trace of their light.

            We do not ponder about fools in this way.”
 
William Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre. A Study in Clowns, and Jesters and Their Audience,   Northwestern University Press, 1986, p.4.

Some quotes from Cecil Collins on The Fool. (extracts from The Vision of the Fool and other writings. enlarged edition Ed. Brian Keeble, Golgonooza Press, Ipswich 2002)  [ONLINE HERE]

 I believe that there is in life, and in the human psyche, a certain quality, an inviolate eternal innocence, and this quality I call the Fool. It is a continuous wisdom and compassion that heals with fun and magic. It is the joy of the original Adam in men.

 The Fool is purity of consciousness. This purity is a cosmic folly that is utterly detached from what most of the world thinks worth doing; it is detached from the deadening edifice of clever ambitions, of power, and of the incredible vanity of knowledge, that has already dulled the capacity for poetry of life in contemporary society.

 The secret of life is to share the creative madness of God – if we have never experienced this madness we can be said never to have lived.

 Art is a form of transcendental magic which is created out of that awakened sense, and returns to it.

 The Fool is not interested in success or failure, or the vanity and burden of external knowledge. He is interested in life, in the mystery of consciousness and the transformation of consciousness which comes about through direct perception.

 In other words the Fool is interested in love and its manifestation in that harmony and wholeness which we call beauty. He is therefore in a state of creative vulnerability and is easily destroyed by the world.

 Society must be based on our sense of wonder, the one experience which justifies our being alive.

---

The artist Cecil Collins wrote in 1989 of his belief of the artist's role in relationship to the spiritual:

 
"Beneath our technological civilization, there still flows the living river of human consciousness within which is concentrated in continuity the life of the kingdoms of animals, plants, stars, the earth and the sea, and the life of our ancestors, the flowing generations of men and women: the sensitive and the solitary ones, the secret inarticulate longing before the mystery of life. The artist is a vehicle of the continuity of that life and his instrument is the myth and the archetypal image."

    We have to contact the center of our being because there we have contact with the center of the universe. Because we are cut off from our center and from the center of the universe we feel, and are, exiles imprisoned in the world of multiplicity and mere existence, longing to awake and journey back to the center which is our heart and our Home. ...the truth is that the secret desire of our heart is for (this) lost paradise. (The Vision of the Fool and Other Writings, page 90)

 The future of civilization depends upon the freedom of the individual to develop his personal consciousness: to find and to fulfill that essential self, which is unique to each of us. It can be done by gradually stripping away the impurities, the false ideas and conceptions we have of ourselves. These are a kind of dirt on the inner glass of our outlook. (The Vision of the Fool and Other Writings, page 55)

Cecil Collins, The Resurrection of the Dead

This is the age of Holy Spirit, this is the age of the universal principle -- the open, flexible field of consciousness, the understanding of the unity of life in the multiplicity of human experience, so that we find in our culture again that hidden unity which transcends the fate of multiplicity and nemesis. As I see it this creative spirit which has entered our world is causing such disturbance that it will have to be answered by the spirit of the earth which we have denied as much as we have denied the spirits of the higher worlds. We have denied the spirit of the earth, and that spirit of the earth has to appear in woman. The meeting of the spirit of the earth and the spirit of the other world is one of the great moments that, I believe, will come in the future history of culture.

Cecil Collins, from The Vision of the Fool and other writings.

CATHARSIS -  Transformation through the art

CecIl Collins @ WIKIPEDIA

Cecil Collins 1908 –1989 The Great Happiness - A Centenary Exhibition:   Paintings, drawings and prints drawn from major private collections

 

 

 

 

Cell: 07 999 77 339

 

SUPPRESSIO VERI . . . SUGGESTIO FALSI . . .

George W. Bush: 

 “See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” [1] 

Adolf Hitler:

“Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of a crowd.”  [2] 

C. C. Zain: 

 “Their chief method of getting victims is through having ideas widely accepted that are untrue and which place people in their power. To get these ideas thus widely accepted, they have recourse to thought-dissemination, to the suggestive power of repetition, to insinuations, to platitudes, and to inversions.

Inversion is a method of presenting some idea in a manner that the lie is deeply and inconspicuously concealed amid much truth, the more real the facts, and the more widely they are recognized as facts, the better they afford cover for some cunning lie.” 

"One keeps coming around - and around - this phenomenon of the vast means of communication and its - repetitive nature. Again, one man, Soren Kierkegaard, saw the perverse possibilities in this. In his extraordinary treatise On Repetition, he was the first to suggest that we are moving into a time when falsehood, repeated over and over, would acquire a dynamic genius of its own, [3]that the mere mechanics of repetition would create intellectual and emotional structures." [4]

[1]  Quoted in Eliot Weinberger, What I heard about Iraq, London Review of Books, Vol. 28, Number 1,  5^th January 2006, p. 9. 

[2]  Adolf Hitler, Mein Campf, p. 163. In Alan Bullock, Hitler. A Study in Tyranny.

[3] C.C. Zain, The Sacred Tarot, The Church of Light, Los Angeles, various editions.

BUDDHISM AND SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM

 

“Cultivating the Wisdom Gaze: A Contemplation on the Outer and Inner Causes of Globalization”

Judith Simmer-Brown, Ph.D. Religious Studies, Naropa University Boulder, Colorado

 

   When Tibetan Buddhist lamas fled the Communist Chinese tyranny in 1959, many came to the west to study, teach, and practice the dharma. The culture they encountered, however, presented special challenges to a genuinely spiritual life. In contemporary America, the dominant obstacle they observed was the predominance of materialism, a lifestyle of acquisition that promotes self-grasping. Tibetan teachers have remarked about how difficult it is for American students to practice meditation in a materialistic environment. Observing the difference with their Tibetan home, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche remarked, Because Tibet is an untouched and uncivilized country, people are quite happy with the simplicity of life. They do not long for the comforts and luxury of life. As long as there is food to eat and a roof for shelter, they are very happy. With that state of mind, when they go to retreat, their mind is simple and the decision is quite complete. They think, “Even if I die of an illness during this retreat, I will let myself die. Even if I die of starvation during this retreat, I will let myself die. Even if I die from the difficulties and hardship of the vigorous practice, I will be happy to die.”

 

  Tibetan teachers continue to ask how consumer mentality has affected the meditation practice of their American students, shaping intentions and expectations for spiritual development. Buddhist scholar Jose Cabezon has suggested that traditional and contemporary Tibetans are primarily concerned about how material wealth “deflect[s] one from pursuing the true, inner wealth of spiritual perfection.”

 

  Wealth is viewed as ephemeral and therefore rather than accumulating it, it is more important to spend and enjoy it while it is available, or to give it away. He refers to the 13th century Tibetan master Sakya Pandita, who reflected that those who have wealth which they neither use nor give away must be either sick or a deprived spirit. “Accumulating wealth without using it is like accumulating the wood for one’s own cremation. Those who do so are like bees, who put so much effort into manufacturing their honey only to have it taken away from them.”

 

  Accumulating wealth accrues many obstacles, for then the wealth must be protected and one’s greedy tendencies are exacerbated. When accumulation of wealth is an end in itself, it has the power of diverting one from the spiritual path and creating negative circumstances for future awakening.

 

  Over thirty years ago, my teacher Ven. Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, wrote one of first popular dharma books in America, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. This view of the challenges of western spirituality came to him while in retreat in a Padmasambhava cave in Bhutan. Trungpa Rinpoche at that time composed a ritual text called the Sadhana of Mahamudra that addressed the way in which contemporary societies are dominated by material concerns. This text was received in a visionary state as a terma, a hidden-treasure text, attributed to Padmasambhava as a contemporary contribution to the “dark age” dominated by the forces of materialism. In the book, Rinpoche identified what he considered primary obstacles to spiritual development in the west. The relevance of this analysis only increases each year.

 

Trungpa Rinpoche described the acquisitive pursuit that binds humans to suffering as the hallmark of construction of personal identity, or “ego.” To promote this core activity, three allegorical “lords of materialism” pursue three levels of acquisitiveness: the lord of form refers to physical acquisition, the lord of speech to conceptual acquisition, and the lord of mind to acquisition in the spiritual realm. According to these descriptions, materialism must be challenged or it will co-opt our physical lives, our communities, and our spiritual cores. “Physical materialism” refers to the compulsive pursuit of pleasure, comfort, and security as a balm for all of our problems and concerns. Culturally, it is expressed in the form of consumerism. On the conceptual level, “psychological materialism” seeks to control the world through theory, ideology, and intellect. We mentally create theoretical constructs that keep us from having to be threatened, to be wrong, or to be confused, thus putting ourselves in control. In American life, psychological materialism is expressed in science and technology, medicine and psychology. On the most subtle level, “spiritual materialism” carries acquisitiveness into the realm of our own minds, into our own contemplative practice or prayer, sometimes expressed as religious exclusivism or extremism.

 

Book Chapter FROM:, Hooked!: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and The Urge to Consume edited by Stephanie Kaza, Shambhala Publications, 2004

 

[FULL ARTICLE ONLINE HERE @ ACADEMIA.EDU]

THE BEARDED ONE

THE PUER-SENEX STRUGGLE

A Note.

Samten de Wet

 

Albrecht Durer, Portrait of a boy with a long beard

 

PAEDOGERON

To understand the archetypal struggles embedded in the myths and their astrological equivalents, we have to place these fables in context. For example, the conflict between senex and puer - between the power of age and the power of youth, is well represented in our society.

We have, for example, the cultural or academic mafias, who hold onto power and do not allow any young energy to penetrate their vast ivory towers. We have seen Professors hanging onto their respective Chairs for decades and making it difficult to move on.

Gerontocratic governments with their flocks of politicians, as well as religious structures, have clung to power over hundreds of years. They still are entrenched, as we see with the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the rigidity of the literal interpretation of the text, e.g. stoning a woman to death for giving birth outside of wedlock. These are doctrinal calcifications, typical of Saturn.

Likewise, there exists an inversion, which capitalism has recognized as a value in its marketing strategies, where youth dominates, and does not answer to anything outside of its immediate concerns. This leads to a sort of mass infantilism -  the tantrums of spoilt children.

So, we have the power of the youth market, which denies or is denied, the wisdom and experience of age; and we have the aged, clinging to power for all it is worth. And it is worth very little, in the sense of Treasures in Heaven.  A case in point is the present Trump Regime in America. Guns and Motorcars, the toys of little boys, the dominator culture of testosterone. As we are to believe that the present astrological dispensation is The Age of Aquarius, we should consider the symbolic implications of this sign of the Zodiac.

Aquarius is extremely polarized by the energies of stasis and revolution. The Silver Key and Golden Key images, give us our thematic senex - puer polarity, in the Hermetic, Wise, Old Man of the Tarot, and the Water Bearer, or Pourer, sometimes associated with Ganymede, of the astrological symbol.  So somehow, in the Age of Aquarius, the Senex and the Puer, have to, and will cohabit in their action patterns, for the benefit of the larger society, and from there to humanity.

How could this paradigm be put into action?  Well, simply put, the lead must be tempered with a bit of quicksilver, mercurial energy, and the mercurial must be balanced with a touch of lead.  Gravity and levity have their place.

In other words, there must be a balance between Saturn and Mercury. At the moment we have the Saturn materialism of Militarization, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, while on the other side we have the Mercurial-Hermetic World Wide Web, the Global Brain, the Gaia - Ecology-Green Movements, and various empowered communities along the lines of gender, ethnicity, resurgent spiritualities and so forth, all very based in communication.

It is not the Youth of the Planet who planned the bombing of Vietnam, Baghdad &c. But they are the ones who died. Think of the millions who died in the 1^st World War.

Unfortunately, the Mass Media, with the emphasis on mass - as in massive, titanic, totalitarian,  seems to control the show. But likewise, the Mercurial Web, is also wiring over 60 million people to the Internet - and if open resistance is not evident, internal sharing of information is moving ahead at an ever-accelerating speed.  Saturn can only maintain power by withholding, distorting or inverting information. Mercury cannot be controlled because of its propensity to fragment into Mercurial spheres and reform at the slightest nudge into a unitive, holistic sphere.  The Senex-Saturnine is selfish - the Puer-Mercurial shares. But, as mentioned before, we also have the sharing Wisdom of the Senex, versus the selfishness of Youth!

“… the Roman god Janus with his two faces – the young beardless man looking forward and the old bearded man looking back.”

 

In this sense, we could speculate that the Past is the Senex & the Future is the Puer.

 

Edgar Wind in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958) amplifies the Durer image:

 

PAEDOGERON

 

8. For the combination of puer and senex in one hieroglyph, uniting Infancy and Old Age, Calcagnini used the expression paedogeron (^[1]). He first employed the term, with the explanation id est puer senex; in his translation of Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride (^[2]), which Panofsky mistakenly describes as 'never published and apparently lost' (^[3]).”

 

“As the term was believed to be Plutarch's, it is more than likely that H. Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat were right in suggesting (^[4]) that Durer's Bearded Child in the Louvre is a paedogeron, or puer senex conceived as a hieroglyphic image. Like the triple-headed monsters in which Youth and Old Age counterbalance each other, this hoary infant would again signify Good Counsel or Prudence, that is, practical wisdom.”

 

Paedagogus ? paedo- (United States pedo-) combining form of a child; relating to children: ORIGIN  from Greek pais, paid- 'child, boy'.

 

Samten de Wet, Cape Town, February 2018, based on earlier versions.

---

[1] Opera, p. 20

[2] ibid., p. 237

[3] Durer II, no. 84

[4] Burlington Magazine LXX, 1937, pp. 81 f.

GLIMPSES OF THE GODDESS

 

IMAGE: Judith Shaw

 

The Shrine of the Bird Goddess, in the late 80's. The central piece, The Bird Goddess, is a very large painting – 6′ x 10′. The painting and installation was inspired by the work of Marija Gimbutas, amazing archaeologist who uncovered the ancient artifacts of a harmonious, pre-patriarchal Goddess-worshipping Neolithic Old Europe. [ONLINE HERE]

---

Paul Friedrich, An Avian and Aphrodisian Reading of Homer's Odyssey, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 306-320

 

"THE MEANING, even the sheer presence, of birds in the Odyssey and in similar canonical, paradigmatic texts in other cultures is not obvious to many and has been ignored by all but a few of the legions of specialists. A similar statement could be made about an aphrodisian reading of the text. Yet Homer felt that birds were deeply significant, often as symbols of Aphrodite. To- day we can profitably explore these crucial and nuanced, albeit often subliminal or latent, meanings. Such exploration leads to unique understandings of essential, underlying values in Homeric culture and the cultures of the world generally".

---

Lucy Goodison, Death, Women and The Sun: Symbolism of Regeneration In Early Aegean Religion, Bulletin Supplement (University of London. Institute of Classical Studies), No. 53, (1989), pp. iii, vii-xi, xiii-xix, 1-261.

---

Mythical Representations of 'Mother Earth' in Pictorial Media

Nikos Chausidis

[University of Skopje, Institute for History of Art & Archaeology, Macedonia.]

 

Abstract. This paper summarizes our past researches of the pictorial representations of the Mother Earth myth and the separation of the basic iconographical types. Generally, the paper is not geographically cultural or chronologically limited. This means that we approach the phenomenon in its wider aspect, searching for its universal (transhistorical and transcultural) features. This is justified by the simple fact that the Mother Earth phenomenon itself possesses such a character, being universal for the bigger part of mankind. Yet, beside this principal openness, the focus of our research points toward the archaic cultures, i.e. those that had never, or not in a sufficient degree, entered the spheres of the cultures that are today regarded as civilizations. Here we have in mind the cultures of the Neolithic, the Age of Metals and the later centuries BC. We have divided the corpus of the pictorial representations of Mother Earth into several categories based not so much on the appearance but on the basic semiotic concept that generated them . . .

 

From: Archaeology of Mother Earth Sites and Sanctuaries through the Ages. Rethinking symbols and images, art and artefacts from history and prehistory, Edited by G. Terence Meaden, BAR International Series 2389, 2012

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Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, Spider Grandmother and Other Avatars of the Moon Goddess in New World Sacred Architecture, Journal of the Southwest, Vol. 54, No. 2, New World Sacred Architecture (Summer 2012), pp. 283-293, 295-303, 305-347, 349-397, 399-421, 423-435

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Sabrina Higgins, Divine Mothers: The Influence of Isis on the Virgin Mary in Egyptian Lactans-Iconography, Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 3–4 — 2012

 

Abstract:

This article provides an overview of the scholarship on the relationship between depictions of Isis and Mary that show them breastfeeding or offering their breast (representations of the lactans-type) in Egypt. In particular, it questions the notion of a deliberate cultic continuity between the two holy women based on the similarity of their iconography. The evidence demonstrates that whereas Isis lactans can be documented in the Mediterranean from 700 BCE until the fourth century CE, Maria lactans-imagery only appears uncontested in Egypt from the seventh century CE onwards. This evidence, therefore, does not warrant a generalization that there was a deliberate continuity between the cult of Isis and that of Mary. Although the similarities between the Isis and Maria lactans-imagery are undeniable, they need to be understood within their respective cultural contexts.