Julian Jaynes Has Blown My Mind Apart, and Put It All Back Together Again

 

The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes (1976)

 

            For weeks now I have been lost in the pages of this amazing book, one which came to my attention through the bibliographies in several of my previous reads.  One of my favorite literary experiences is when I finally find a seminal book oft quoted or referenced in other books. Such a book is The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  Author Julian Jaynes has accomplished something outstandingly original and beautiful, providing what is perhaps the best explanation of what we modern humans call “Consciousness,” how it came to be, and how we can track that development.

            Books like this contain so much within their pages.  It is difficult enough to absorb all the information and ideas shared by the author, but discussing it intelligently is another matter entirely. In the over 11 years I have kept this book-review blog I have enjoyed countless books, but very few have coalesced knowledge and wisdom in my brain like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind has.  It is a masterpiece of insight and research.

            Jaynes divides his work into three “books,” the first one dealing with consciousness itself, what it is, and where it comes from.  This alone is enough material for a great book.  The first great insight that the author shares involves consciousness itself.  We modern humans assume that our brains work in the same manner as all early humans.  We have an internal “I,” designating an interior head-space that exists outside of time and place, and which us modern humans see as our true selves, our internal monologue.  Jaynes central proposition is that this internal “I, this sense of individual consciousness, only arose in humanity after the invention of written language.  Before this time, humans lived in what Jaynes terms a “bicameral mind.”

            To explain what “bicameral mind” refers to, I must go into a bit of neurology and brain structure.  We humans have essentially two separate brains, connected through several channels, (the corpus-callosum is the main one, a bundle of nerves which allow signals to be sent from one brain hemisphere to the other), allowing them to communicate with each other, and to control different aspects of life.  For example, our left hemisphere contains Brocka’s and Wernicke’s areas.  These are two parts of our brain that handle language, with Brocka’s area controlling speech production, allowing our physical mouth and tongue to create meaningful words, and Wernicke’s area handling the other end of speech, that being language comprehension, the mental understanding of the auditory signals received by our ears through spoken language.  In patients who suffer from traumatic brain injuries, strokes, or other such conditions, these areas are sometimes affected, which was the initial impetus for understanding the various sections of our brain. 

            Julian Jaynes posits that, before the advent of the written word, humanity lived in a very different state of mind, the bicameral mind, a consciousness completely unaware of itself, quite the opposite of our current view of consciousness which we feel exists independently of our physical being.  For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in groups led by a “king.”  These kings dictated how the people of a said group would live. The truly great and long-lived kings would be remembered long after their death, their words still echoing in their follower’s heads.  This was not seen as an aberration.  Humans found it perfectly logical that a dead king would continue talking in their heads, as if still alive. The greater the king, the longer the voice would live on in his followers.  As evidence of this, Julian Jaynes discusses how for over ten thousand years, human burials followed the same pattern.  The deceased was not seen as dead, in the way we modern humans see things.  As long as their voice could be heard the king was alive. Because of this, the dead were buried with food, clothing, tools, and all sorts of items that would be useful to the dead person’s continuing “life.”  The high culture of the Egyptians was the pinnacle of this thinking, with Pharaohs buried alongside dozens of sacrificed slaves, wives, animals, etc.  Their isolation in northeast Africa allowed them to maintain their bicameral culture the longest, even after the advent of written language.

            Julian Jaynes posits that the first gods were the dead kings whose voices and commands could still be heard in the people’s heads.  This makes a lot of sense as ancestor worship is the oldest spiritual practice still found among us humans.  Many of the oldest tribal cultures in the world today still observe a lengthy period between when a person’s body stops breathing and when they feel the person is truly dead and ready to be buried/cremated/etc.

            This same bicameral structure is evident in Mesoamerica, where dozens of city states sprung up, flourished, and died over millennia.  These cities are all remarkably similar, containing a large central pyramid of structure housing the king, and in later times, the statue of the local god.  Everything about their lives was dictated by the king/god-king/god, and sometimes the entire city-state would revert back to the jungle after the death of a prominent king.

            Sometime around 2,500 years ago, everything changed.  In Mesopotamia, a writing system was created which altered our entire world and, according to Julian Jaynes, altered our brain’s structure.  This was cuneiform, a method of writing which involves pressing a wooden stylus into wet clay, leaving triangular marks.  Cuneiform is not a language, but a system of writing, and due to this, it was used to write down things in Assyrian, Emetic, Akkadian, and many other languages.  Essentially, once a remote king found that his proclamations could be written down and shared without him needing to personally deliver the information, he then asked his scholars to use cuneiform to write down his proclamations, history, etc.

            In this sense, writing was not what we think of today, words which, when read, create a narrative in our minds.  Much like ancient temples, statuary, and religious artifacts initially did, writing allowed ancient humans to hallucinate words and instructions, keeping the king’s voice alive well past his death.  It was an immensely valuable tool for social control in a time before individual consciousness.  For millennia, humanity passed down its accrued knowledge verbally, with specific people in each tribe/group designated to be the memory carriers, reciting long poems and stories from memory in order to share wisdom and instructions with the next generation.  These bards would not specifically memorize a text, for there was no texts back then.  What they did was remember the salient points of a tale, concerning an old god-king perhaps, and then add in connective language as they reiterated the story in question to a new audience. This way allowed the important points to be learned by the audience, while also allowing the storyteller to shape his stories, adding and subtracting parts as they saw fit to. 

            The written word changed all of this.  Julian Jaynes recounts a very dark era in the history of our developing consciousness.  The period of time, around 500-1000 years after the initial breakdown of the bicameral mind, sometime around 500 BC, was a time of dissolution, fear, and mass-violence.  Before the written language, civilizations lived near each other in relative peace, trading goods and food items, but generally just leaving each other alone.  It was understood that other human groups followed their own gods/kings, and that was good enough for them.  Once writing appeared, the “voices” of the gods/kings no longer reverberated through the people’s minds, causing chaos, and uncertainty.  The idea of an individual “I” was unnecessary before this, for everyone knew what their role was, what they were expected to do in life, and why they did it.  The god-king’s proclamations were followed without question, for he spoke directly from the gods.  The bicameral mind did not seek explanations.

            The written word quieted that internal voice that repeated the gods/kings proclamations.  City states became too large for easy control of the population.  It was at this time that specialists came into being, people whose breeding, training, or social status prepared them to be interlocutors between the god and the people.  These were the beginnings of the sacerdotal sects that we all currently deal with.  Even these methods were not enough to hold the homogeny, and the cities slowly fell into ruin and disuse, as people moved back out into the wilds to make their own lives.  Because of this, there was an extreme rise in violence and warfare.  Without the god’s voices keeping everyone safe, neighbors were seen as violent, evil, “other,” etc., and the need to exterminate them arose.  During this turbulent period, it is estimated that in both the western and eastern worlds, nearly 90% of the human population was exterminated.  This was wholesale genocide on a planetary level.  Humans are our own worst enemies.  It is a sad reminder that, even two thousand years later, our collective humanity can be quickly erased or forgotten when we end up seeing our fellow beings as less than human because they do not believe what we chose, or are told to, believe.

            Julian Jaynes traces the development of consciousness in man through our written works, the oldest ones such as the Rigveda from what is now India or the Iliad, from Greece being written at a time when the bicameral mind was still the norm among us humans.  In these tales, the human protagonists do not share their internal monologues.  They had no internal monologues.  Their actions are not self-decided.  Instead, all the actions in the Iliad, for example, are a result of a command or a suggestion by one of the many gods. Achilles does not choose his actions.  They are dictated by the gods.  The same holds for the characters in the Rigveda.  Bicameral man did not self-assess, self-doubt, or self-analyze.  He lived, breathed, and acted in accordance with the instructions provided him by the gods and spirits, voices we modern humans would describe as our internal monologue.

            In the follow-up to the Iliad, the Odyssey, the protagonists do make their own decisions.  They worry and fret and flip-flop without any certainty, something lacking in the heroes of the Iliad.  They still do not have what we would call a consciousness, however.  It is their own constituent parts that make demands.  Parts of the human, such as phrenes, nous, and psyche, were the ones dictating action.  Odysseus’ nous might demand that he feel jealousy, or his phrenes might state that the gods do not agree.  Ancient man did not think of the brain itself as the seat of our minds.  They saw different parts suited to different things.  Sometimes these would still be associated with specific gods, or spirits, but they were internal to man, not external.  Jaynes explains how today, we judge psychosomatic responses in people that would have been very familiar to the people of the Odyssey.  When we are stressed out, our stomachs feel curdled, bile rises in our throat, and we get the “butterflies.”  To ancient man, just developing the faculty of consciousness, this made sense.  When scared, our heart starts beating faster.  Our blood pressure rises.  Our skin gets cold and tight.  Ancient man saw this as evidence that the heart controlled certain emotions, much as the stomach controlled others, and the bowels controlled even others.  There is a wide gap between the mentality evident in the Odyssey and the mentality seen in the Iliad. 

            The second section of this book details the progression from the Bicameral Mind to our current consciousness, tracing the history of our gods, temples and rituals associated with bicameral thinking. Jaynes describes how Mesopotamia was the first example of modern consciousness, something which must have been very strange for those few humans who innately accepted their internal “I”.  Even the tales in Genesis describe this transition from bicameral thinking to our current sense of self.  The author traces the story from the ancient Greeks down to the nomadic tribes which were prevalent after the mass genocide period.  It was these tribes which practiced a new monotheism, replacing the pantheon of gods with one deity, and which led to our current Abrahamic religions and their strict morality, most of which is based on refuting the old bicameral gods and our ways of communicating with them.

            The last section of this masterwork seeks out the vestiges of the bicameral mind within our modern world.  Humanity went from each one of us hearing the gods’ voices directly, to the gods only speaking to select priests and oracles, and then to the gods becoming totally silent, letting their desires be known solely through omens, or the revelation of “prophets.”  Julian Jaynes backs up every one of his observations with rigorous science, and explores the role that our bicameral mind still plays in the creation of poetry, art, and music.  Many creators describe how a piece of art, or music, or poem came to them unbidden, as if the universe was speaking to them directly.  This is an example of how our two brains communicate, with one side dominant, and the other not so.  Jaynes explores hypnosis and the mechanisms used to incite it, mechanisms and techniques extremely similar to those used by ancient priests when selecting new oracles.  Basically, the less self-aware you are, the easier it is to be hypnotized.  The same goes for deeply devout religious belief. 

            This book blew me away.  I wish I could cover everything that Julian Jaynes discusses in greater detail, but that would take an entire other book!  It is a humbling thing to understand that our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, lived for over a hundred thousand years in the bicameral state.  It is only in the past 2,500 years that what we call human consciousness came to be.  There is no guarantee that our individual conscious selves will continue into the future.  It may be that a bicameral mind is better suited for long-term survival on Earth, and we will all soon revert back to that state.  There are no rules stating that evolution is a progressive, directional force.  Animals and plants evolve in all directions, both “forwards” and “backwards.”  It is our ego that makes us believe we are the epitome of life, that we are the best living creature created in our Universe.   That very ego may destroy us all.  I look forward to acquiring this book for my own personal library, and jumping back into its amazing pages in the future.  It is books such as this one that made me a book lover, and keep me a book lover.  What a glorious achievement.

(This book can be downloaded from the Internet Archive here: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes )

Dr. Irving Finkel Speaks on Dead Languages and the People Who Study Them

 

The Future of Dead Languages: Dead Languages, Living Stories – A Lecture by Dr. Irving Finkel

 

            In a bit of a detour from the usual path followed by RXTT’s Book Journey, this review will cover a lecture given by the pre-eminent Assyriologist and Curator of the Middle East Department at the British Museum, Dr. Irving Finkel.  On November 3, 2025 Dr. Finkel spoke at the University of Houston’s Dudley Hall, on the subject of dead languages, the difficulty of translation, and the history of this most human endeavor, trying to understand our ancestors through the written texts they left behind.

            Dr. Finkel first came to my attention through the videos posted by the British Museum, specifically a series titled “Ask a Curator.”  As the pre-eminent expert on Assyrian language, cuneiform, and all sorts of topics relating to ancient and dead languages, I found him to be a kindred spirit, someone who seeks to understand big things, and to absorb vast amounts of information in order to do so.  Upon hearing that he would be visiting and lecturing, I geeked out and signed up for the lecture.

            As a child I was fascinated with the story of the Rosetta Stone and its importance in allowing us modern humans to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was achieved because on the Rosetta Stone the very same text is repeated in three different writing systems.  The top is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.  The middle section is written in Demotic script, the “everyday” form of Egyptian writing, and the third section is written in Ancient Greek, the one language we knew how to read and translate.  Because of this, the whole world of the Egyptian written word opened up and it increased our knowledge of the ancient Egyptians exponentially. 

            Dr. Finkel discussed the importance of the Rosetta Stone, and the differences between Egyptian writing systems and the cuneiform writing system used in Mesopotamia.  Whereas in hieroglyphs, individual symbols stood for whole words and ideas, and in modern English the letters stand for individual sounds, in cuneiform the individual marks held many concurrent meanings, making it super difficult to translate.  Cuneiform is a writing system, NOT a language, and it was used to write down many ancient languages, all with the same wedge shapes.  Much like one can use Arabic letters to write words in German, English, French, or Spanish, cuneiform was originally used to write in Sumerian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia, and then other concurrent languages, such as Akkadian, Elamite, Assyrian, and ancient Persian.  Because the same symbols were used for different languages, translation of cuneiform was and remains a most difficult endeavor.

            An important point made by Dr. Finkel stated the importance of wide-ranging knowledge, hard work, and dedication to the art of translation, especially as it applies to long-dead languages.  The intellectual giants who made progress on deciphering cuneiform were intellectually brilliant humans, people who devoted decades of their lives to reading, researching, exploring, and analyzing ancient clay tablets, all with the hope to one day translate them and open up the ancestor’s world to our modern humanity and understanding.  Dr. Finkel stated his belief that, while computer programs can help translate already known languages, they are unable of thinking creatively, which is what is required to translate ancient dead languages.  This is a job for the human brain, not a machine algorithm.

            Dr. Finkel delivered an amazing talk.  It is a testament to him and his powers of oratory.  It is a rare thing to hear one of your intellectual heroes speak on their chosen field of study in the flesh.  I have been very fortunate to hear such idols of mine as Stephen Hawking, Art Spiegelman, Paul Mooney, Buzz Aldrin, and now Dr. Irving Finkel, speak in person.  To see this intellectual vigor in a septuagenarian is an inspiration.  Dr. Finkel stated that he started working at the British Museum in 1979 and is the longest-tenured member of that organization.  He said his secret is not answering emails or phone calls, which, as he joked, means his supervisors think he already left!  Hilarious!  I was unable to personally greet Dr. Finkel but hearing him speak has been one of the intellectual highlights of my life.  Here’s to dead languages and the people who love them!

Pamela Berger Shows How We Devalued the Mother Goddess, Even As We Continued To Ask For Her Help

 

The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protrectress from Goddess to Saint – Pamela Berger (1985)

            Ahhh, the Grain Miracle. What is the Grain Miracle, you may ask?  It is a tale as old as humanity, from a bygone time when agriculture and its yearly seasonal cycles held deeply symbolic and spiritual meanings for us humans.  The story of the Grain Miracle helped us understand the connection between the life of plants and the life within us humans, as well as the correlation between the fecundity of human females and the fecundity of the Earth under our feet.  Even long after the initial impetus for the story was forgotten, or willfully erased, the tale continued its path through the collective consciousness of humanity, altered and shaped to fit the whims of whatever organized religion rose to prominence at the time.

            The original Grain Miracle story arose from our deep past.  Initially a story about the Great Mother Goddess, the divine being that brought forth all life in our world, it was passed on through oral tradition for millennia.  The story goes thusly, The Great Goddess is being pursued, and she arrives at a field, freshly sown by a farmer.  She asks the farmer to help her by telling her pursuers that she had passed by when the grain was freshly planted.  Upon saying this, the grain miraculously grows tall and full of seed, so, when the pursuer soon arrives and is told by the farmer that the Goddess passed by when the field was freshly planted (the truth!), he sees the full growth of grain, and calls off the chase, believing the Goddess to have passed by long before.  What originally served as an allegory for the cyclical nature of growth and death experienced by the initial farming humans was adapted and reformatted to fit in with the current religious ideals, first for the pantheistic religions of ancient Mesopotamia, Europe and Greece, and then for the monotheistic Abrahamic religions.  The main character, the Earth Goddess herself, slowly morphed into a lower deity, then a sainted human, until finally the story was shaped by the catholic church to refer to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

            Humans are shaped by our pattern recognition.  It is one of the skills inherent to our over-developed brains.  We are so good at it that we see patterns where there are none! (For example, visual pareidolia is the scientific name for our ability to see visual patterns, most often faces, in what is otherwise an ambiguous visual field.  This is the “skill” utilized by anyone gazing up at cloud formations, and seeing familiar shapes within.)   This ability to recognize pattern, especially throughout a period of time, is the foundation of much of our cognitive ability.

The largest, all-encompassing pattern on our planet Earth is the yearly cycle of the seasons.  The annual progression from the dead cold of Winter to the warming Spring to the full Sun of Summer to the rains and cooling temperatures of Autumn, and back again to Winter, could not be ignored.  It could also not be ignored that Life seemingly “died” every Winter, only to be “reborn” again in the Spring.  The cycle of the seasons provided the first repeated structures of Life to early humans.  The menstrual cycle of human females provided the second repeated structure.  These two events were not seen as separate by ancient man.  Instead, they were seen as mirrors of one another, as part of the all-encompassing whole of Life.  Ancient man understood that much of the animal world matched the cycles of the plant world, with most of the creatures familiar to us using Spring to impregnate each other, allowing for babies to be born during the plentiful time of the year, and to grow big, strong and fat in time for the hardships of Winter.

With those two cycles in mind, ancient man created allegories, seeking to not only understand the cycles, but to transmit that knowledge to the succeeding generations.  The Grain Miracle arose from the very ancient rituals associated with the planting of seed after the cold Winter.  For over ten thousand years, the arrival of Spring coincided with planting and with the awakening of the natural world.  Ancient humans understood that death precedes life in all things.  They understood that in Winter, the ground “dies” and is then “reborn” once the all-powerful Sun returns in its full glory.  What we call farming was rudimentary in the extreme, and therefore required supernatural help to ensure a good crop and bountiful harvest.  The Great Goddess, symbol of all that is reproductive, was asked to bless the fields before planting. 

According to Pamela Berger’s intensive research, this “blessing” formed into a ritual which humanity carried forward and continued over millennia, all the way up to our modern day.  On the arrival of Spring, (usually sometime in February), before the fields were plowed or furrowed, a figure of the Goddess was put on a cart, and driven around the field to be planted three times, all the while the people supplicated the Goddess with song and dance in order to bless the field, bless the grain to be planted, and bless the natural world to provide good air and rain and sunlight.  Women would bare their breasts as symbols of fecundity, and once completed, the ceremonies ended with revelry, for everyone was satisfied that a great crop of food was to come. In a time before our modern meteorological knowledge, before the use of fertilizers, pest control, etc., planting a field was a seriously risky endeavor.  Birds would eat the planted seed.  Animals such as shrews and deer would eat the young shoots.  Drought, flooding, or unexpected heat or frost would destroy an entire crop, leaving families to starve.  Most families grew their own food, and if unsuccessful, then entire regions could descend into mass-starvation.  The importance of a good harvest was paramount, and the blessing by the Mother Goddess was crucial to the process.

Sometime in the past five thousand years, the matriarchal, Mother Goddess worshipping tribes of what is now Europe were invaded by patriarchal hordes, bringing with them their male, all-powerful, sky deities.  As these male-oriented religions flourished, the Mother Goddess was reduced in scope and power, and transmuted into lesser goddesses, such as Artemis, Asherah, Hera, Cybele, etc.  It was after this societal change that the Grain Miracle stories began, seeking to maintain the respect and adoration of the goddess responsible for their crop’s successes.  The tale initially referred to the goddess, pursued by one of the powerful, invading male gods.  As mentioned above, she came across a farmer sowing his fields, and asked the farmer to tell her pursuers that she had passed by at the time of planting, whereupon the planted seed would miraculously sprout and grow to full height.  This would confuse the pursuers, leaving the goddess to escape.  This became one of the stories sung during the annual procession around the farmer’s fields and served as an allegorical reminder of the past Goddess worship.

The slow demotion of the Goddess continued apace after the christian church codified its dogma and beliefs.  They could not stand to see humans celebrating what they saw as “pagan” rituals and demons.  Their extreme patriarchy and hatred of anything related to female sexuality sought to completely subvert the natural world, the world where females are the source of life, where Mother Earth was seen as a womb, providing life to the planet.  Instead of a Great Mother birthing us all, they somehow managed to get everyone to believe that a male god, and a male Holy Spirit, birthed a male son.  The role of woman was so denigrated that the church, in its never-ending willful stupidity, decided that Jesus’ mom was a chaste virgin, and that she remained a chaste virgin her entire life. (the only ”good” woman is an a-sexual one, according to those deranged perverts they call priests.)  They willfully ignore the specific passages in the New Testament that detail how Mary had to “cleanse” herself after the birth of Jesus, something done by Jewish women to prepare their bodies for the next sexual occasion and possible next pregnancy.  The fear of women from seemingly powerful men is so pathetic and pointless.  It shows just how weak, spineless and corrupt they are.

It is in this mess that the Grain Miracle was transposed from minor pantheistic goddesses to the only female worth worshipping, according to the christian theologians, idiots all.  Instead of a goddess fleeing, the protagonist of the story was changed to one of many early female christian martyrs, eventually settling on Mary. Appending the Grain Miracle to the story of the Flight from Egypt was the only logical choice, and the tale was then dispersed that as they fled Egypt, the holy family asked a farmer to tell King Herod’s men that they had passed by when the seed was just planted, but of course, either Mary, or Jesus caused a miraculous growth, fooling King Herod and his men. 

Even through the repression of the Goddess, these rituals continued, for they spoke something deep and important to the people that work the fields and raise the food we all eat.  Throughout all the changes and thematic drift of the Grain Miracle stories, the simple truths persisted.  Life is cyclical.  The world is a womb, just like all women possess.  The female is the life provider, and the male is just along for the ride (pun intended).  Weak men fear the Female aspect of life.  It is a force too powerful for them to understand.  They seek to lift themselves up by subsuming women, as if that would somehow negate the awesome life-providing continuity which the blessing of childbirth brings and for which the female body was rightfully worshipped through most of human history.  It is through the effort of people like Pamela Berger that we manage to connect history, myth, folklore, and local tales, thereby allowing us modern humans to grasp the ideals and dreams of our ancestors.  For a fairly short book, this tome manages to explore an idea vast and deep within our collective mindtime.  It is highly recommended.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/204036/goddess-obscured-by-pamela-c-berger/ )

Geneviève Lacambre Shares Her Deep Love and Admiration for Gustave Moreau

 

Gustave Moreau: Magic and Symbols – Geneviève Lacambre (1999)

 

            Often, it is the small books that provide the most information.  Such is the case with this sumptuously illustrated volume exploring the life and art of Gustave Moreau.  One of publisher Harry N. Abrams’ “Discoveries” series, an amazing set of introductory books on Literature, Science, Art, and the Ancient World, this book benefits greatly from its erudite author, Geneviève Lacambre, previously the long-time director of the Musée National Gustave Moreau in Paris.  First-hand knowledge is awesome!  I much prefer reading the adoring words of an artist’s true admirer than the critical skewering which passes for art history these days.

            I spent 2/3 of my time at University studying for my major, Studio Art, specifically oil painting.  I spent 1/3 of my time taking classes for my Art History minor.  In all that time, I was not introduced to the work of Gustave Moreau.  What a shame! Gustave Moreau, through supreme talent, practice, and pure willpower, created a synthesis of old-world myth, christian allegory, and his own innate creativity which served as the vanguard for the Symbolist movement of the very early 1900’s.  Much like the best artists, Moreau sought not to pander to the then-current and always-fickle tastes of the populace, or to the increasingly short-sighted ideas of the established Parisian Salons.  He sought to portray universal truths and wisdom, without overtly explaining his compositions. 

            Seen as an inspiration by many younger painters, Moreau never sought direct categorization of his style and work.  Even so, the path he carved through the world of painting led to the formation of the Symbolist movement in art.  These painters, much younger than Moreau, with many of them studying under him as assistants, used his techniques of theme, composition, and color to try and pull the art world away from the two main pillars of the time, Naturalism, and Impressionism.  The Naturalists sought to portray the inherent beauty of nature, life, and the world around us without embellishment, subtext, or mytho-historical context.  The Impressionists sought to portray the gossamer, fleeting, ever-changing nature of light upon the natural world, and specifically the way that light entered the human eye to create image and form.  Neither used the classic masters as inspiration, which Moreau explicitly did.  They also never sought to create narrative works, something Moreau excelled at, imbuing his art with a deep sense of history, myth, religion, fable, and the inherent human truths those forms espouse.

            Gustave Moreau was an obsessive personality.   He made countless sketches before he sought to portray anything in oil.  Moreau was one of the first fine artists to utilize watercolor paints as a finished product, whereas most artists of the time used watercolors for preliminary sketches.  In time, Moreau’s watercolor works sold just as well as his finished oil pieces, owing to his masterful and riotous use of color.  He also chose not to sell, or even exhibit, his favorite paintings, choosing to keep them for himself.  Who else would appreciate them as intensely?  Truly a bad-ass of the highest caliber. 

            Moreau eventually began teaching art at the École des Beaux-Arts, and according to the testimony of his many students, he was an inspiring and engaging instructor.  Some of the greats of 20^th century art studied under Moreau, giants such as Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, and Henri Evenepoel.  Unlike many great artists who also taught, Moreau never demanded his students follow his personal style or ideas.  He sought to have them each develop their own view, their own style, something that could never be taken from them.  This was far different from the other art professors at Beaux-Arts, most of whom were strictly academic painters, seeking to render the natural world and not the inner tumult of human experience.

            If there is a lesson to be learned from Moreau it is that an artist must seek their own internal, thematic guidance.  For writers, the dictum is “write what you know,” which is a fair one, as readers can immediately tell when an author is speaking about a topic they have no personal experience with.  I believe this should also apply to visual artists.  While many artists seek to defend their explorations, they often end up forcing a theme, or leaving their work feeling slapdash and incomplete.  Moreau loved the classical myths, and drew inspiration from them, re-purposing their symbols and allegories, combining them with christian themes and allegories, all the while portraying his subjects in a lavish way, almost overwhelming the viewer with attention to detail.  It is the exact opposite of minimalism, and his style influenced the Symbolists who followed.

            The amazing result of Gustave Moreau’s failure to sell much of his work, mostly by choice, is that upon his death, he left his entire collection, home, and studio to the country of France.  Several years after his passing, the paperwork went through, and the Musée National Gustave Moreau opened in Paris, where it remains to this day, a time capsule of, and a testament to, one of the most imaginative painters of his generation.  I hope to someday visit it, and see in person these large, impressive works of art.  Until then, books such as these will be my companion.

Kassia St. Clair Explores the History, Sources, and Meanings of Color

 

The Secret Lives of Color – Kassia St. Clair (2017)

            One of the greatest joys of my life is my ability to see color.  I delight in experiencing the vast quantity of shades and hues available to me on a daily basis.  I live fascinated by color.  Colors can affect me in ways nothing else can.  With this in mind, I found it most fortuitous to run into this great book by the columnist Kassia St. Clair.  It compiles and expands upon her weekly color column, providing intriguing details concerning the discovery/creation of individual colors, as well as describing the rise and fall of a given color’s popularity. 

            Kassia St. Clair divides her book into sections for each “color,” starting with Whites, Yellows and Oranges, then Reds, Blues, Greens, etc., all the way to the various shades of “Black” used by artists.  Within each section, she selects specific examples to focus on.  For instance, in the section on “Red,” St. Clair examines colors and color sources such as Scarlet, Cochineal, Vermillion, and Hematite, and how each color came into and out of fashion.  Humans are fickle beings, and we make up rules for everything, including color.  During the European Medieval period, when nearly every social and cultural decision was dictated by the rigidity and stupidity of Roman Catholicism, colors such as Red were reserved for a very select few, such as royalty or Bishops.  If you happened to be born into the so-called Lower Classes, your clothing color choices were minimal, and ordered by law.  Poor people were forced to wear only drab, boring colors, such as brown, tan and grey.  This is as much a function of societal control as any other law.  To keep the masses down and subjugated, one must trick them into thinking that they are worthless, and what better way to do so that by requiring them to dress in the colors of refuse. Every single color comes with such drama, and the author well explores these human stupidities.

            Another great aspect of color is the many sources humans have discovered or invented to create pigment.  Ancient man used the basic colors available to them.  These include the wide range of earth tones, reddish ones coming from hematite deposits, brown ones from specific soils, and black from the soot and charcoal created by campfires.  Such colors are found in abundance in Chauvet Cave, and other paleolithic art sites.  As humans evolved, and proceeded to make basic chemical discoveries (such as vinegar reacting with metal to form oxides), new methods of color creation appeared.  One of the most widely-used colors was Lead White, created when sheets of lead are oxidized in a vinegar bath.  The resulting white powder that forms on the outside of the Lead strips is super white, opaque, color-fast, and worked with most binders without unwanted chemical reactions.  This caused Lead White to become ubiquitous in paints, both for artists and for homes, and for makeup and cosmetic applications.  Many rich and powerful ladies gave themselves lead poisoning because of the fashion of the day, calling for the wealthy aristocrats to exhibit extremely pale complexions, a sign of high-class, as the lowly people are tanned and brown from outdoor menial labor.  Color is, and has always been, used to subjugate and divide us humans. The irony of the rich killing themselves via their own standards of beauty while demeaning those who cannot “afford” to the same is one of the many examples of the great Cosmic Joke we all reside in.

            The sources of color are as varied as the hues themselves.  Certain reds come from the crushed bodies of tiny beetles.  Some purples come from the tiny ink sacs of a specific Mediterranean snail.  Old artist paints used brown pigments sourced from thousand-year-old mummies, and yellows extracted from the urine of malnourished cows force-fed mango leaves.  Other colors arise from plants and their constituent parts, often through painstaking and difficult chemical processes.  It is a testament to the wit and wisdom of humanity that our ancient ancestors discovered these colors and how to create them.  Even to this day, the discovery of a new color can bring the discoverer untold riches, much as it did in the past for those men who discovered cadmium pigments in their personal chemical laboratories.  In fact, the color Mauve was discovered by accident by a researcher trying to synthesize quinine, a treatment for malaria.  To think that ancient man did essentially the same with lead and copper, creating pigments through chemistry, is awe-inspiring and humbling.

            Colors affect us innately.  They are used for wordless communication to this day.  Bright Reds and Yellows warn us, cautioning in their intensity.  Greens represent Nature in all its wonder.  Many cultures see Black as a symbol for mourning, while others see White as the color of grief.  Our lives are suffused with colors, with new ones appearing every day.  If there is a lesson to be drawn from Kassia St. Clair’s work it is that the emotional/intellectual weight of colors is purely created by our human experience.   There is no universal definition of any color or its meaning.  As with all things outside of our consciousness, humans force meaning where it does not exist.  The lies we tell ourselves often end up oppressing our fellow man.  Learning about the human connection to color and pigment helps us fight the delusions, and should be required reading for any artist.  It may be that we all need to understand that Life, and everything in Life, is but a process, a step forward among a marathon of concurrent and disparate steps.  The old Zen koan concerning whether a tree falling in a wood makes a sound if no one is there to hear it has always rung false.  Sound exists independent of any receptor.  It is solely the variant vibration within air, water, or earth.  Hence, sound exists whether our ears receive it.  I believe the old koan was a way to force a student to understand how miniscule and largely unimportant the human is to the workings of Mother Nature.  Colors were not invented for the enjoyment of us humans.  Colors existed for billions of years before Mother Earth spat out hominids, and will exist for trillions of years after we have forced our own extinction.  Long live color!

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Lives-Color-Kassia-Clair/dp/0143131141 )

Don S. Lemons Describes the Importance of Drawing in the Discovery of New Scientific Concepts

 

Drawing Physics: 2,600 Years of Discovery from Thales to Higgs – Don S. Lemons (2017)

 

            Small books are joyful books!  While I adore an imposingly thick reference work, dense and packed with information, I find great joy in the relatively small, concise, and engrossing books such as Drawing Physics, by Don S. Lemons.  The trick to these books is that they must be hyper-specific, or else the thread is lost and the writer loses focus.  Don S. Lemons cleverly designed this book to move forward, not only chronologically, but in the levels of scientific complexity.  The overarching idea explores the invaluable use of drawn imagery by scientists to either describe a previously unknown property of our universe, or to create a visual symbol of the scientific experiment or idea being described.  It is very clever, and builds upon itself, helping guide the reader through topics and ideas in the world of physics as they were developed and theorized, from antiquity to the modern day.

            If any book could claim to embody the old dictum, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” it is this one.  The simple drawings lead to very complex ideas.  Lemons succinctly describes each individual scientist’s life, and their educational and cultural backgrounds, providing a foundation for the amazing discoveries discussed in each chapter.  It is still eye-opening to understand how much our human ancestors managed to deduce and intuit, using just the observed details of the world around them.  We humans are a magnificent thinking creature.  Our ability to think is only rivaled by our ability to share our thoughts and conclusions.

            Whereas previously, humans only shared their knowledge orally, forcing students to memorize whole epic poems and philosophical treatises on nature, the advent of writing allowed humanity to pass on knowledge across time and distance.  The combination of drawn images and the written word?  It is likely the single greatest synthesis in human existence.  Much like the “thought experiments” used by scientists to imagine situations which are difficult to describe in words alone, the drawings in this book allow the reader to create a mental image, helping one understand the deeper meaning behind the formulas and theories described within.  Sometimes an image can provide an example of an inalienable truth of our universe, even though there are not yet words to describe the actual internal workings. 

            That is the beauty in art.  It provides communication between minds in an instant manner.  Even a simple doodle can express ideas so vast and complex that people could not understand them without the imagery.  Art also communicates across language barriers.  A beautiful painting or sculpture can be appreciated without language.  A diagram of a triangle, its angles, and the relationship between them, conveys knowledge across the centuries, much like Pythagoras and the theorem named after him.  Don S. Lemons has put together an amazing little book, valuable to anyone interested in the progress of scientific thought, and in the creative ways which scientists portray their discoveries.  I felt inspired and uplifted, in awe of the creativity and intellect of my fellow human beings.  Highly recommended.

(This book can be purchased here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535199/drawing-physics/ )