Karttikeya Kumara, temple drape. Tamil Nadu, 18th cent AD
Art is image making
and all image-making is rooted in the creation of things that
stand for other things. Works of art are not mirrors but they share with mirrors that
elusive magic of transformation and substitution that is hard to put into words.
This
magic of transformation is particularly difficult to comprehend when we view native
tribal art. We have begun to see that the qualities which the Post-Impressionists
read into African sculpture were after all qualities which sprang from a European cast
of mind. The real difficulty, I believe, lies in the fact that African art, as much as art in
medieval Europe, is the client of religious belief and practice. African sculpture is
talismanic art. That is to say it is concerned with the concept of "force", which
may
be paralleled by the Christian notion of grace. Such a notion means that we can no
longer discuss the native art in purely aesthetic terms, as a matter of exciting
relationships between abstract forms. Instead, we must begin to think in terms of a
whole culture, of a tribe which is driven by instinct and tradition to express its
relationship to nature in a certain way, for a certain kind of ritual purpose.
The making of icons
and symbolic images as talismans is a form of magic. Many
people believe that an image of a person or thing shares some of the qualities of the
original. Many prehistoric, and even modern-day primitive tribes' paintings depict
birds, animals and abundant fertile fields as magical charms, believing that the birds
and animals will be easily hunted and that the fields will yield rich harvests. The idea
behind making images of planets and constellations was to summon the essence of
the original and to attract their favourable influence. This idea was known all over the
world. A 15th century Florentine philosopher and doctor called Marsilio Ficino (1498
A.D.) in his medical book called Libri di Vita (Book of Life) recommended the use of
images of planets to attract their attention and to persuade them to be more
favourable. In India, images, paintings, geometrical yantras, mythological stories
about astral divinities were evolved with the same magical purpose in mind. The
images were, and still are, made of special metals, given specific forms and objects
to hold, all in the hope of pleasing the awesome powers of nature and the celestial
bodies they represent. So it should be remembered that, however beautiful some of
the examples of astrological art may be, their purpose is mainly magico-religious.
They are not works of art created for their own sake, in the modern sense. They are
magical charms and diagrams.
Utimately the purpose
of religious sym-jolism, and therefore of sacred imagery, s to
explore and explain humanity's relationship with its gods. It is often comparatively
easy to assess what ancient societies held sacred, and why. Surviving artefacts,
paintings, sculptures and religious buildings provide insight into the beliefs and fears
of most culture groups. The lives of earlier generations may have been shorter and
more difficult, but they were also simpler: people were concerned about the very
basics of existence and worshipped the forces that governed their survival.
Many sacred symbols
are derived from nature; others are created to remind people
of critical events, ceremonies or people in their religion's history. Some are simply
representations of gods and can be worshipped as such. They appear in many
different forms—as statues, carvings, paintings (on anything from rock to canvas),
engravings, even buildings. All represent an optimistic belief that mankind is not
alone, a humble, almost childlike faith that unknown forces beyond our control are
watching over us.
As civilizations became
more complex, so, too, did their gods. The first evidence of
human ritual or ceremonial belief in an afterlife is evident from Neanderthal graves.
Fifty thousand years ago, a people who scratched out an existence at the mercy of
the elements buried their dead with flowers and artefacts. This suggests that they
were concerned about what happened after death, and perhaps believed in some
sort of supernatural power who would be appeased by their offerings.
The great standing
stones of western Europe, epitomized by Stonehenge, show that
the Bronze Age people of Europe worshipped the sun; several millennia later, the
Greeks had acquired a pantheon of gods whom they consulted about their future and
who protected them in both life and death. This philosophical leap changed the
nature of religious imagery dramatically. Perhaps less concerned than their
ancestors with the forces of nature, and more impressed by rational human
achievements, the Greeks endowed their gods with human forms. Most of their
deities had perfect bodies and beautiful, unblemished faces. In short, they were
divinized humans, not amorphous spirits of an unpredictable Nature.
Carl Jung's anthropological
studies convinced him that for generations, from earliest
recorded history until the present day, the same archetypal symbols have occurred
in the myths and legends of almost every civilization. If Jung was correct, and every
society has drawn from the same universal well of images and archetypal symbols,
why are the images of different cultures dissimilar, and why have they changed so
much over time? The answer appears to lie in the endlessly fertile human
imagination. Every culture must, to some extent, adapt a faith to suit society's needs
and enable adherents to understand the basis of belief. Similarities do occur,
however, as in the earliest sacred images, drawn from nature. All primitive religions
developed among illiterate people wholly dependent upon hunting, gathering and
later, agriculture for survival. Early human beings were awed and baffled by the
forces of nataure, andit is not surpirising that the rain, wind, sun and moon were
deified. Depictions of these gods were firmly rooted in the viible world: powerful
animals lent themselved to sacred images, and they were hybridised into human
forms to emphasise the holistic aspect of human existence.
Given the strictures
of the Bible's second commandment- 'You shall not make
yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that
is in earth beneath, or that is in water under the earth"—it seems surprising that
theJudeo-Christian tradition has produced any artwork at all. However, this prohibition
was, according to Christians, addressed to the creation of iconic objects that could
become the focus of worship, (so-called false gods like the Canaanite Baal or the
Golden Calf).Thus, Christian artists have freely depicted Biblical scenes, while
Jewish tradition interprets the second commandment more widely.
Islam, too, restricted
its artists in representing the Prophet Muhammad, and, in some
sects, prohibited all images of the human form. Muslim figurative art is evocative and
ornamental, not representational.
Sacred images have
also been important to secular societies, acting as powerful
binding forces that have united people in times of trouble. Opportunist rulers have
adopted and misused them to further their own ends. In the late eleventh century, for
example, the powerful Norman knight Bohemond de Taranto had acquired all the
land he could in southern Italy and was seeking a new theatre of operation. The
preaching of the First Crusade in 1096 must have seemed like a gift from God: at
once, he equipped his army with white tabards bearing a red cross and transformed
his marauders into God's soldiers, whose brutal actions were now sanctioned by the
Almighty. "Taking the Cross" became medieval shorthand for joining a crusade, and
Bohemond's troops led the way by capturing the great city of Antioch, which would
become the strongest of the Crusader states.
A far more complex
question is what we hold sacred today, on the brink of the twenty-
first century and a new millennium. In religious terms, the sacred symbols of the
great faiths have barely changed, yet we live in an increasingly secular age, and,
certainly in the West, fewer and fewer people find solace in conventional religion. We
are bombarded with more information in a day than our ancestors dealt with in a
year—from newspapers, radios, televisions, computers and the other paraphernalia
of modern life. We have more control over our everyday lives than our ancestors did,
but are still at the mercy of the elements and the whims of the gods or fate. Despite
the amazing medical advances made in this century, the phrase "In the midst of life
we are in death" remains as true today as it did when the New Testament was
written. Trains crash, storms destroy livelihoods, global warming alters weather
systems, random acts of violence occur everywhere, and individuals have no power
to stop them. For all these reasons, sacred images retain their power, whether as
talismans, spiritual roots or the common focus of belief that orders the universe in
ways beyond our limited comprehension.
