If Harpo Marx Is God, then Wayne Kostenbaum Is Our Prophet.

 

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx - Wayne Kostenbaum (2012)

 

            How amazing to come across a book dedicated to my single most favorite and adored film star, Harpo Marx, the silent genius in a family full of loquacious and anarchic extravagance, the single greatest mime in the history of soundless entertainment, the funniest of the funny, the man who, without a single word, held his own against the single-greatest wordsmith wit of the past four thousand years, his younger brother Groucho.  Harpo Marx is a being unstuck in time, belonging to the universe in perpetuity for all eternity.  Harpo does not care a whit for any of society's rules or expectations, much like the author of this work, Wayne Kostenbaum, who likewise does not care for the conventions of narrative structure or of film criticism, instead focusing monomaniacally on a deep and hyper-detailed exegesis of the experience he has watching Harpo Marx on the screen.  It makes for delirious and hilarious reading.

            Covering thirteen of the Marx Brothers films, Wayne Kostenbaum ignores the narratives of each movie, instead exploring the individual seconds of screentime given to Harpo Marx's character in each film.  Kostenbaum's language is as ornate, meaningful, and esoteric as Harpo Marx's comedy is simple, meaningless, and aimed at the popular audience.  Much of Harpo Marx's mannerisms come from the interaction he experienced with the live vaudeville audience in the early days of the Marx Brothers, something he translated directly to the silver screen at a time when talking films were so new that people had no idea what to expect, (for example, a full orchestra had to be brought to the soundstage because studio executives did not feel the audience would believe that music came out of nowhere.  The intelligence of the general public is always underestimated.  It was felt that they NEEDED to see the musicians).  In my readings about the early films, I saw that the production had to sometimes be done at nighttime because the soundstage they used was not soundproofed  The traffic outside was picked up by the early microphones in use at the time.  I also read that every sheet of paper in the film was soaking wet, something that does not show on camera, but that keeps the crinkly noise of the paper from disrupting the audio recording. 

            These details do not concern the author, for he is solely and maniacally obsessed with the presence, actions, and reactions of Harpo Marx.  Experiencing the voiceless wonder, he empties his mind of any and every inference, association and remembrance brought about by Harpo and his actions.  Thoughts bleed into memory, memory bleeds into history, history bleeds into supposition, and all the while, Wayne Kostenbaum seeks to understand what is going on in Harpo's mind as he interacts with the world and people around him.  Through this, the reader learns as much about Mr. Kostenbaum as we do about Harpo. For example,

            "When I first fell in love with Harpo, it wasn't his contentment that struck me; I was moved by his hyperkinesis.  Other actors handled plot doldrums, while, in the corner, Harpo, unregarding, unspeaking, busied himself with rapid oscillations of head, eye, and hand, self-pleasuring vibrations that sometimes struck sparks in other players, though, mostly, Harpo's butterfly gyrations woke no one else to his centrality.  I, as viewer, was responsible for granting him primacy...I developed a need to convince strangers that Harpo's hyperkinetic emptiness had metaphysical dimensions."

            I love a book that uses language so well, so specifically, that I must turn to a dictionary to glean the meaning of certain words used by the author.  I must have discovered over a dozen words I needed to look up.  Kostenbaum is as much a master of the English language as Harpo Marx is a master of mime, and his words elevate Harpo's seemingly simple act into pure intellectual mindfuckery of the highest order.  A simple gesture or facial expression by Harpo leads Kostenbaum down a rabbit hole of memory, associations, and even preternatural forecasts of the impending Jewish doom coming in the lats 1930's.  The Marx Brothers contain all of existence within them.

            As a Marx Brothers fan, I have seen their first 5 films many times and laughed throughout.  Reading Kostenbaum's free-association as he obsesses over every single motion, facial tic, or slapstick joke feels a lot like my own mind and my internal dialogue as I watch the Marx Brothers.  Their first film, The Cocoanuts, came out in 1929, and in the intervening century their influence never faded.  The Marx Brothers are as much a part of American folklore as Paul Bunyan, George Washington, or Charlie Chaplin.  As a child of the early 70's, much of the TV and film I saw contained jokes and visual gags referencing Groucho, Chico, and Harpo (and even Zeppo).  These four Jewish brothers ingrained their anarchy into our collective unconscious, helping create what the world sees as "American."  Likewise, the anarchic, explorative thoughts of Wayne Kostenbaum have ingrained themselves into my psyche, helping me better understand Harpo, and increasing my appreciation for the vast amount of thought and diligent care it must have taken to create such a persona.

            Thank Mario that Kostenbaum possesses an interesting polymathic mind.  In anyone else's hands, this attempt at exegesis would fall flat, exhausting itself before completion.  The author's love for Harpo exudes from the page and into my mind.  The Marx Brothers are eternal.  Harpo is their apogee, and Wayne Kostenbaum is the gleeful apostle spreading Harpo's good deeds through his unabashed Marxian proselytizing.  We are all very fortunate to share this world with both Harpo Max and Wayne Kostenbaum. 

(This wonderful book can be purchased here: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-anatomy-of-harpo-marx/paper )

Buffie Johnson Explores the Mother Goddess and Her Sacred Animals

 

Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals – Buffie Johnson (1981)

            Sometimes I come across a book so full of information, so well researched and written, that I am overjoyed as a reader.  These types of books are my go-to, my bread and butter so to speak, and they inspire me greatly.  Knowing that a human being had the dedication, intelligence, and insight to gather up a vast amount of information, analyze it, and share their conclusions with us readers leaves me awestruck.  This is the type of book crafted by Buffie Johnson, a visual artist heavily involved in the Abstract Imagist movement.  Sometime in the nineteen fifties, a meeting with psychologist Carl Jung propelled this book into existence.  During their time together, Buffie Johnson discussed her desire to research the many archeological discoveries found that related to the worship of a Mother Goddess, millennia before patriarchal religions altered the worship to that of male gods.  This intrigued Dr. Jung, who gave his wholehearted support for the project, knowing that this specific field of art history was severely underserved.  Four decades later, after travelling the world, visiting different museums and archives, and gathering up as much data as she could find, Buffie Johnson published this amazing compendium. 

            The titular Lady of the Beasts described in this work is the Great Goddess, the initial over-arching deity worshipped by all humans until the advent of patriarchal religions.  For over 100,000 years, humanity understood that the creative principle, that force that brings new life out of death, that provides everything needed here on Earth for our sustenance and care, was female.  They understood innately how the female of the species was the progenitor, the one who could create life out of herself, and seemingly, without the aid of any outside influence.  Millenia before we understood the role of the male spermatozoa in procreation, or even realized it mattered, everyone understood that the womb of a woman, and by extension, any female animal, was the greatest magic in our world.  Not only do women create a new life within them, but they also create water seemingly out of nowhere.  In times when water was as rare and valuable a resource as petroleum is now, seeing a woman’s “water” break, releasing the amniotic fluid built up inside, was as much a miracle as seeing the sun rise again after a dark night, or spring arising after months of dead, cold winter.  Humans understood that life came from water, and that death was just part of the eternal cycle.  The very Earth itself, especially caves and grottoes heading underground, became symbolic wombs where our planet creates itself. 

            The one aspect of women that was seen as magical and undeniably related to the cosmos was that of the menstrual cycle.  Women experience a new menstrual cycle on average every 28 days.  This directly matches the phases of the Moon, which take 28 days to go from New Moon to New Moon, or Full to Full. This was not treated as coincidence, but as divine order, allowing humans to appreciate the divinity contained within the females of any species, including us.  Most ancient cultures and civilizations divided their year into twelve months of twenty-eight days each, along with a five-day period of holiday at the end of each year.  This added up to the 365 days we know occur in a year.  The Mesopotamians did this, and so did the Mayans, the ancient Chinese, and people throughout Africa.  It only made sense to think of the world, and the powers that control it, as female.

            When Buffie Johnson started out on the journey to write this book, the world did not consider the Goddess much.  We live in a time where great patriarchal religions define our spiritual world.  From christianity, to islam, judaism, confucianism, current faiths centered on male deities abound and shape everything about the world we share.  These patriarchal religions are relatively new to our history.  For tens of thousands of years, the worship of the Goddess as the giver and taker of life informed our world and helped explain the many difficult to understand processes of nature we now study through science.  What this means in terms of art history and archeology is that, for the past thousand years of scientific exploration into our past, everything was coded with patriarchal ideas, ignoring and outright fabricating meaning for objects and myths that did not fit in with the idea of a big ol’ male god up in the sky judging and controlling us.  Buffie Johnson’s work in exploring the Goddess through the relics and art left behind was extra difficult, for one of the main jobs of the roman catholic church since their official founding around 300 CE was the destruction of any and all references to the Mother Goddess, and the supplanting of her festivals and rituals with hebrew-coded, christian-coded, or islam-coded festivals and rituals.

            For example, every ancient culture worshipped an aspect of the Goddess called the Grain Goddess.  This was the power that allows life to exist inside seeds, a vitality that only comes to pass once the seeds are buried in Mother Earth’s womb, the soil, where life springs anew and plants grow.  Our current Spring festivals such as Easter, May Day, Mardi Gras and Passover are replacements for the ancient Grain Goddess festivals.  After a long, cold, seemingly lifeless summer, the people had to propriate the fruitful coming harvest by honoring, and sacrificing to, the Grain Goddess.  Around the world, as Buffie Johnson researched, the ceremonies remained eerily similar.  A wagon was created with the image of the Grain Goddess mounted upon it.  This wagon, after preparation by the goddess’ priests, was rolled or carried around the fields to be planted.  As part or the ritual, human sacrifices were held, often of a symbolic “King” who would marry the Grain Goddess before the sacrifice.  After humans stopped being the sacrifice, other animals associated with the Goddess would be sacrificed, eventually leading to the yearly sacrifice of a bull.  This ritual was often followed by a night or a few days of drinking, debauchery and general sexual abandon, as people would pair off and have sex in the soon-to-be-planted field, lending their procreational energy to the coming harvest.  It was all part of the procreative force.

            These types of rituals survived long past the advent of patriarchal religion, but not without considerable effort by those religions to destroy every idol, demolish every temple, and chop down every sacred wood belonging to the Great Goddess.  The celebration of Easter, where christians relive the death of Jesus, his three days in Hell, and his rising again out of the grave, used to be a ceremony for Ishtar, or Astarte, both aspects of the Great Goddess herself, who also travelled to the underworld to ensure life arose again on Earth.  In Greece this legend was transcribed into the story of Demeter, a grain goddess herself, who due to male god shenanigans, was forced to spend half the year in Hades, returning for Spring and Summer, and bringing back life and abundance to the world.

            Due to the very successful propaganda and extermination campaigns, first by the Yahweh-obsessed hebrews and then by the christians, not much was thought to survive of the Goddess and her worship, but archeology proceeded to remove their patriarchal and judeo-christian biases in the mid 1900’s, proceeding to discover and re-assess many images and temples once dedicated to the Great Goddess.  Bastions of ancient worship such as Catal Huyuk were discovered, and true scholarship on the Great Goddess began.  Buffie Johnson was ahead of the curve and collected information on the available pieces found in museums worldwide, many of them not associated with the Great Goddess until she reconsidered the artifacts and symbols found within.  Starting with the Paleolithic era, Buffie Johnson takes us through a bestiary unlike any other, sharing with us the visual clues to decipher the ancient art, and to better understand what we are looking at when we see images of the Great Goddess.

            It is evident that much of the great early developments of humanity came about solely because of women.  The ability to not only cook food, but to raise it, harvest it, and save it for future uses came directly from women.  Women created the first woven baskets, leading to the weaving of fabric itself.  Women created the loom.  Buffie talks about how women created pottery.  Ancient pottery has been found which shows that the first ceramics were made by pressing clay directly onto the outside of a woven basket and hardening it in the flames.  The women’s skill with plants led to their development of medicine, or at least the use of natural products to soothe pain, stop itch, or even help intestinal issues.  Because of the complexity involved, it is also fairly evident that women created language to disseminate the gathered information to other women.  Most modern tribal cultures share something with our ancient humanity, and that is the fact that some knowledge belongs solely to the women, and only the women will share it with each other.  Men are not allowed to know these things, and it has been so for countless millennia.  Menstruation was life incarnate, and due to this most tribes have a place for women to go separate from the men while they menstruate.  It is one of the oldest and strictest taboos for males to enter into a woman’s space, and to steal women’s knowledge.  Up until around 3,000 years ago, most royal lines were matriarchal, something handed down from your mother’s line.  This is still seen in how being jewish is something tracked through the matrilineal line.  In ancient Egypt, even in the time of male pharaohs, they would routinely marry their sisters, in order to keep the claim to the throne intact.  One of the odd current findings that mirror this matriarchal mentality is that of the source of mitochondria.  Each of our cells contain an organelle called mitochondria.  This organelle is responsible for the energy usage of the cell, converting sugars into electrical impulses, and essentially powering the life surrounding it.  Recently, genetic scientists discovered that every single mitochondrion in our bodies comes from the genetic material of the mother.  The specific DNA found in mitochondria only comes from the half of your genes provided by your mother in her ovum.  Thanks to this, it is now possible to trace back our collective evolution through the mitochondria, following matrilineal lines.  What was found is, sometime around 50,000-60,000 years ago, a female human existed which is the “mother eve” for every single human alive today, meaning every human on Earth shares mitochondrial DNA.  This is insane news and would have made much sense to our ancestors who accepted the totality and the invaluable presence of the Feminine.

            The only way we know about the Great Goddess and the people who worshipped her is through art, and more specifically sculptures, petroglyphs, and ancient ruins, all from a time before the written language was invented.  As the artists who crafted the artwork did so in a pre-literate society, visual symbolism was everything.  Ancient works that we have a hard time understanding would have been instantaneously appreciated by ancient humans who lived with the symbols found within, and who could translate the imagery of the specific animals and plants associated with the Mother Goddess.  In order for us “modern” humans to understand what has been forgotten, Buffie Johnson did all the hard work.  She begins by describing the connection between the Great Goddess and the idea of a bird, the most sacred of ancient animals.  Part of the divinity seen in birds is their ability to fly up into what was always considered the heavens, the abode of the Goddess.  Besides that, the imagery of the bird’s egg, with its promise of a whole new life, was developed into the idea of the World Egg, laid by the Great Goddess when she created all existence from her primordial watery chaos.  This idea led to the development of what are now termed “Venuses” but which were initially representations of the Great Mother Goddess pregnant with the cosmic world egg.  These idols, some meant for carrying in the hand, and others, like the giant sculptures in Malta, created to be impressive focal points for a temple of worshippers, helped ancient man understand the giant concepts of eternal life, or birth and death and the immutability of both, and of the idea that creation comes from the Feminine.

            Following the association of the Goddess with birds, the association with water began.  As stated before, women create water to carry their babies until delivery.  Humanity always divided the world into three parts.  The sky above, the earth at our feet, and the waters found deep beneath the earth.  The fish found in these waters belonged to the Great Goddess just as much as the birds in the air did.  Fish symbolism is everywhere in the ancient statues and artwork and has continued into our current modern times.  Jesus is described as a “fisher of men,” and his Greek acrostic, “Ichthys” meaning fish, supposedly stands in for Jesus. Each letter of ΙΧΘΥΣ (the Greek word) stands for a word in the core Christian confession: I (Iota): Iēsous (Jesus) Ch (Chi): Christos (Christ) Th (Theta): Theou (of God) Y (Upsilon): Huios (Son) and S (Sigma): Sōtēr (Savior).  This is why people put the fish symbol on their cars, standing in for Jesus.  It is not from the Bible, but instead an appropriation by early church fathers to supplant the idea of the Great Goddess and her fish symbolism.  Pathetic.  The real sad part is that the fish was an ancient symbol of the androgyny, or hermaphroditism, of deities.  The pointy end of the fish stood for the phallus and the split tail of the fish stood for the shape of the vulva.  Perhaps Jesus was a hermaphrodite?  Who knows?

            One of the most ancient animal symbols of the Great Goddess, apart from birds and fish, is the lion.  In lions the female is the leader, and the females do all the hunting and baby-rearing.  In honor of this, and of the strong feminine power evident, the lion became one of the goddess animals.  Paleolithic art showing the Great Goddess flanked by two lions is found all over Europe, a continent where the lion became extinct thousands of years ago.  Once the lion became extinct, the dog took over the role as protector and guardian of the Great Goddess.  Dogs have always been connected to the Moon, due to their nocturnal howling, and it only makes sense for them to be associated with the Great Goddess.  Gods were seen as intermediaries between life and death, with many ancient people’s believing that dogs helped guide dead souls to the afterlife realm of the Goddess.  The role of Anubis in ancient Egyptian religion was a similar one, a hold-over from earlier matriarchal Great Goddess worship.

            I could spend hours talking about everything covered in this amazing masterpiece of art and archeological history.  Buffie Johnson created a book that has helped open my eyes.  I am now armed with knowledge and ready to look at ancient artwork with a new eye.  The symbols and allegories are in my head and I am so grateful.  I feel almost drunk with knowledge, one of my all-time favorite sensations.  Buffie Johnson researched and wrote this book while living the life of an eminent artist, creating and showing work in galleries and museums worldwide.  She is a great inspiration to me and to anyone drawn to complex ideas and difficult work.  It took her forty years to complete this book, and it will live on in my mind as long as I live.  I hope more people choose to seek this great book out, if only to understand that ancient man had as deep and as complex an internal life as anything we can imagine, and that our apparently wholesale and modern disavowal of anything feminine is a deep hindrance to our collective humanity and the growth we are capable of as a planet full of people.

(This seminal work can be purchased here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Lady-of-the-Beasts/Buffie-Johnson/9780892815234 )

Caspar Henderson Dives Deep Into the World of Sound

 

A Book Of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous – Caspar Henderson (2023)

 

            Around eight years ago, I read and reviewed a very cool book titled “The Book of Barely Imagined Beings”, by Caspar Henderson.  Mr. Henderson explored the world of animals via the conceit of a bestiary where each chapter coincided with a letter of the alphabet, and an animal whose name begins with said letter.  It is an amazing book and one that opens the mind to the infinite variety found in the natural world around us.  Having dipped my toes into the mind of Caspar Henderson, I was very happy to find A Book of Noises while browsing the library shelves.  This wonderful book explores the vast landscape of sound, divided into chapters with titles such as Cosmophony: Sounds of Space, Geophony: Sounds of Earth, Biophony: Sounds of Life, ending with the chapter Anthropophony: Sounds of Humanity.  This is right up my alley!

            Caspar Henderson comes to the topic of sound and noise from the very best angle, that of wonder and awe.  The idea came to him after a visit to a nature preserve on the Norfolk coast where he witnessed tens of thousands of knots, a short stocky bird that migrates from the Arctic each year, flying overhead.  Within the cacophony Caspar could distinguish individual wing flaps.  He coined the term “Auraculous” to describe such experiences, the word meaning a marvel for the ear.  This is the true theme of this book.  Mr. Henderson explores the vast world of sound we live in and create and does so with a sense of poetry and beauty fitting to the magical world that sound provides to us.  As he puts it, “writing this book has been an attempt to listen more deeply and hold on to a sense of aliveness, in which each moment is a validation of what came before and a preparation for what comes after.”  We live out our lives ignoring most of the aural sensory input around us, much to our detriment. 

            My favorite chapter, Biophony: The Sounds of Life, explores the aural world of our plant and animal brethren.  I enjoyed reading about the various sounds plants make, many of which our modern ears just ignore.  One of the old Buddhist koans, meant to encourage introspection, famously reads, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”  I have always found this inane.  Of course it makes a sound.  Sound exists whether anything “hears’ it.  Sound is merely the vibration of the gas, liquid, and solid matter of the world.  Sound existed on Earth far longer than life has been around and will continue to do so long after humans reach extinction.  Only the inflated egocentrism of humans (which I think is the REAL lesson behind the koan) allows us to imagine ourselves as the primal source of experience in the world.  What a disservice this is to our fellow living beings.

            Caspar Henderson uses the last chapter of this book for an exploration of the many sounds created by humanity, from onomatopoeia and musical instruments to noise pollution, and even to a rumination on silence itself.  In this chapter Mr. Henderson extrapolates the future of man-made sound, including the ability to utilize sound for healing as well as for weaponry.  As with anything in the world, whether it is used for good or evil is dependent on the human making the decision.  Sound can heal and it can harm, therefore it is up to us to determine how best to use it to improve not only humanity but the beautiful and varied world around us.  The path towards good or towards evil is one we embark on in our hearts and minds, way before any action comes.  Books such as these help us maintain our proper distance from our own ego and allow us to replace ignorance and supposition with facts and logic.  Caspar Henderson does us all a great service through his writing.  I have now read two of his works and will look forward eagerly to the next one!  To Mr. Henderson, and everyone reading this who loves to search for the Auraculous, I sign off with the rejoinder made famous on the now-defunct Sonic Youth Gossip Forum, which exhorts the recipient to live a “Sonic Life!”

 (This great book can be purchased here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo200525016.html )

P.V. Glob shares the life and times of Iron Age Bog-People, and it is awesome.

The Bog People – P.V. Glob / Translated by Rupert Bruce-Midford (1969)

            Thank goodness for peat and peat bogs!  And thank goodness for great translators, as they permit us all to share in the learned literature of all the world’s nations.  This intriguing book by Dr. Peter Vilhelm Glob, translated by Rupert Bruce Midford, himself an eminent scholar of antiquities in the British Museum, explores the fascinating and macabre discoveries made by farmers digging peat used to heat homes and cook food through the long Nordic winters.  As the Director General of Museums and Antiquities in his home of Denmark, Dr. Glob is a perfect guide through the history of the bogs, the people found buried within the bogs, and the many cultural items discovered alongside the bodies.

            This relatively short work (200 pages) takes its impetus from letters received by Dr. Glob written by English schoolgirls intrigued with the tales of the bog-people they read in local newspapers of the time. They reached out to him inquiring about the Tollund Man, a find which had ignited great interest in the world’s media following his 1950 discovery by farmers digging peat.  The idea of a 2,000-year-old human preserved so well that we could see his fingerprints, hair, and skin so clearly seemed an impossibility, but it was very real.  Dr. Glob goes into great detail describing the find itself, the excavation and preservation processes, and the analysis of the Tollund Man’s remains, all in the form of a “long letter” to the schoolgirls whose interest sparked the correspondence.

            Peat bogs are chemical factories, created when thousands of years of vegetal growth sinks into a swamp to be buried under low-oxygen and high-iron content groundwater.  The weight of subsequent plant matter deposits presses down on the material, and the highly acidic water kills and prevents bacteria from decomposing the organic matter.  It also stains skin a dark ebony.  As Dr. Glob relates, farmers digging peat for fuel came across such buried bodies countless times in the previous 400 years, many of which were documented by local priests and officials.  Townspeople saw these bodies as evil, partly because of their dark appearance and partly because they were found 4-8 feet underground, the abode of satan himself.  Because of this, many of the older finds were not studied scientifically, but instead given a proper Christian burial in a local churchyard. 

            Sometime in the 18^th century, people started to analyze these finds, and they realized that most of them were over 2,000 years old, an amazing fact. Bodies from the time of Christ just did not survive.  Even the ancient Egyptian mummies did not keep in such a great state of preservation.  Studies showed that these bog finds, men, women, children, and animals, belonged to early Iron Age societies.  Further study informed scientists as to the nature of these burials.

            Our agrarian ancestors worshipped the very idea of fertility, in the guise of a goddess responsible for the return of life to the Earth following the “death” of life during wintertime.  Many of the people found in these bogs were spring sacrifices to the goddess of fertility, and when the goddess was supplanted by a male fertility god, the sacrifices continued to him.  In the old myths, the figure of the goddess was cared for by her priests, and once a year, a special wagon was outfitted with the carved image of the goddess (usually in wood) and taken around the farmer’s fields in a grand procession involving dancing, song, and prayer.  Much as in other ancient agrarian cultures, the “king” was chosen specifically for this spring sacrifice.  Many of the bog men have ligatures around their neck, and many others have their throats cut.  In this century, scientists were able to analyze the stomach contents of the bog-people, finding that most of them, the ones showing ritual strangulation or ritual throat-cutting and bleeding, were served simple meals of gruel, which, when analyzed, showed a remarkable variety of local grains and seeds, numbering in the high dozens.  It makes sense to include seeds from all the edible grain and grasses if what you want is to make an offering to the fertility goddess thereby propriating a great harvest and lush abundance in the coming year.

            One of the details I found most intriguing is the way that the peat bog’s chemical nature preserved textiles.  Amazing examples of woven fabrics and leathers show just how advanced and creative the humans we call “ancient” and “primitive” were.  Human ingenuity brought us out of the wild, and only the truly ignorant or vain assume that intelligence is a hallmark of modern man, and not of humanity in general.  Examples of trade and commerce between ancient people always fascinate me, and one of the greatest bog finds is the Gundestrup Cauldron, a masterpiece of silversmithing which was broken into pieces and placed as an offering within the peat bog.  The beautiful images of the goddess, and of the ritual lives of the people, sculpted into the silver cauldron transport us back into antiquity.  As Dr. Glob details it, the amount of silver used to create this massive cauldron likely represented much of the actual wealth and riches of the local people and their leaders, as most of the silver they had arrived from far-off lands, and would never have been broken into pieces and buried as an offering if the times were not critically dire.  Ancient man did everything with purpose, even if today those purposes are forgotten, or seen as inconsequential.  It is a great example of how everything we value today will be either forgotten, ignored, or supplanted by new things and new ideas, just as modern man dismisses the ideals, beliefs, and religions of ancient man.

            The last section of the book describes the many carved wooden gods found in the bogs.  These carvings, usually abstracted and taking advantage of the natural shapes and forms of the wood used, were found in all ancient human cultures that worshipped the great goddess of fertility.  It was these carved gods which were cared for and protected by the god’s priests, and which, in a wholesale act of evil, were ordered destroyed or burned by the early roman catholic church (always ready to exterminate humans, ideas, and religions they saw as counter to their fascistic fake-ass christianity.)  The patriarchal roman catholic church feared the power of women and of the Great Goddess, and they still do, seeking to subjugate half the population into subservience towards the male half.  So dumb.  The attempted erasure of our collective human past and human mythology is among the worst, along with the wholesale slaughter of “heathen” humans that religions love to engage in frequently. There is nothing capable of more evil than a religious zealot. History shows it again and again. And again.

            Two thousand years is not a long time.  Modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, have been around for just over 60,000 years.  The Homo family, our human ancestors such as Homo Habilis, Neanderthal man, and such, have been around for around a quarter of a million years.  This is but a drop in the bucket compared to the dinosaurs, who flourished on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, or green plants which have populated our planet for over two billion years, a ridiculous amount of time.  I bring this up because the humans that started what we call civilization did so very recently, cosmically speaking.  We are more similar in our day-to-day lives to the ancient Scandinavians working the old peat bogs that we care to admit.  Our collective humanity has learned more, and forgotten more, than we can ever imagine, and it is great books such as this one that help us keep the awareness of deep time in mind.  Reading about the bog-people and their culture keeps us grounded, aware that the concerns of humanity have always been the same.  The need for family, food, shelter, and spiritual connection is found in all human cultures.  I hope more people read this great book and open their minds to the infinite variety of human existence.

(This great book can be purchased here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-bog-people )

Martin Kemp's expertise shines a light onto the true life of one of my heroes, Leonardo da Vinci

 Leonardo – Martin Kemp (2004)

  

            If there is a single human being that exemplifies my definition of an artist it is Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, the greatest of the “Big 3” of Renaissance art.  The other two being Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, otherwise known as Raphael and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. The omnipresence of Leonardo in our collective human consciousness is unrivalled by any other artist.  From his amazing engineering genius, his deep inquisitiveness about the natural world around us, and his unceasing desire to expand the wisdom of humanity, he drew forth art so timeless as to feel inevitable. His two most famous works, the Last Supper fresco and the small oil painting on poplar universally loved as the Mona Lisa, are the two most recognizable pieces of art the world over, with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco and his massive statue of David coming in a very close second.  I studied Art and Art History and considered myself well-versed on Leonardo, his life, and his achievements, but nothing could have prepared me for the journey taken with this wonderful book by Martin Kemp.

            I should have been prepared, seeing as how Martin Kemp, the Emeritus Professor of Art History at Oxford University, is the world’s most-renowned scholar and expert on Leonardo Da Vinci, his works, and his life story.  As an art lover, I felt Mr. Kemp’s awe and admiration for the old master on every page.  I share this with him.  Mr. Kemp’s prose is detailed, informative, and full of original ideas.  While there exist many biographies of Leonardo, this concise volume focuses on how we, modern human beings, can truly understand him, and the world he adored, analyzed, and portrayed in his writing and art.  A superlative individual such as Leonardo suffers from the cult of personality that arises around such august personages.  Stories turn into myths and myths turn into legends.  The world accepts the legend as truth, until everyone forgets the true facts.  Martin Kemp has created a magnificent resource for anyone seeking to learn the actual details of Leonardo’s life, patronages, and art-making processes. 

            One of the intriguing details in the story of Leonardo’s life is the tale of his death, and what became of the art he left behind in his studio.  Leonardo, like all great artists and craftsmen of the time, ran a studio of painters and sculptors who helped him prepare materials, prime surfaces, and finish “unimportant” details of paintings so the master could focus on the main subjects portrayed within.  One of these men, a rascally character named Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno who painted under the name “Andrea Salai,” apprenticed under Leonardo and held an unsavory reputation, even though he was one of the main apprentices given the responsibility of running Leonardo’s workshop.  Upon the master’s death, Salai took it upon himself to swipe a good number of completed paintings from the studio, keeping them hidden in his home until his untimely death by bow and arrow.  It was in the accounting of Salai’s belongings that a list of the purloined Leonardo’s was found.  This included the famous Giaconda painting currently hanging in the Louvre.  King Francis I of France purchased the lot soon after, which is why the Mona Lisa is a treasured piece of art in France and not Italy.  If it wasn’t for a shady apprentice, the world may never have heard of the Mona Lisa! 

This book is full of details that flesh out the true life of Leonardo, while also explaining exactly why the grandiose and superlative legends arose about the great man.  Martin Kemp includes dozens of color plates showing beautiful reproductions of the master’s art, along with many black and white drawings exploring the ways in which Leonardo used the act of drawing itself as a form of thinking about, and inquiry into, the natural world around us.  He prized sight above all other senses, and the act of focused looking as the main source of inspiration for any visual artist.  In this he influenced everyone that followed, even if only in rebelling against this idea.  In Leonardo’s assessment, visual art is more valuable than any poem, song, or theatrical art.  These types of art require time to pass for the audience to fully grasp the intent and beauty within.  Visual art, such as sculpture, paintings, and drawings, slams the viewer with everything all at once.  It takes very little time for communication to happen through the eye.  The horror of war illustrated in Picasso’s Guernica, or the viciousness of the old gods as portrayed by Goya in his Saturn Devouring His Son slam into us without any need for exposition.  Truth, beauty, and wisdom are transmitted without the need for sloppy words.  Perhaps it is this quality that touches us centuries later as we admire and explore Leonardo’s art.  I know that he touched my life in unimaginable ways.  I hope many people read Martin Kemp’s book and grow in their love and admiration for the great master.

(This wonderful book can be purchased from Oxford University Press here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/leonardo-9780199583355?cc=us&lang=en& )

It appears that humanity has always ridden the Mindway in search of wisdom, insight, and community

 

The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World – Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, Karen Polinger Foster, Editors (2022)

 

            While I treasure and adore all books, it is books such as this one that thrill me the most because of the amazing amount of information included within.  Having read books on shamanism, ancient humans, and myth creation recently, I was thrilled when this book appeared in my hands while browsing the stacks.  The editors of this work, Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, and Karen Polinger Foster have provided the world with a magnificent resource exploring a seldom-analyzed part of our collective human past, that being the use and exploitation of what the writers term “Altered States of Consciousness,” ASC for short.  For far too long archeologists and anthropologists saw ancient man through our own modern “enlightenment” principles, ignoring all “subjective” experience such as trance, spirit possession, hallucinations, etc., in favor of empirically verifiable data.  This created a vast chasm of ignorance regarding the spiritual and mental lives of our ancestors.  It is the aim of this work to rectify that and to help guide the exploration of our distant human past towards a better understanding of the role ecstatic experiences had in the shaping of our species.  It is an impressive achievement.

            Formatted much like a textbook, each section presents a case for the omnipresence and importance of ecstatic experience in understanding the cultures of our ancient past.  The first section of three chapters, titled “Setting the Stage,” explores the history of ASC dismissal by biased researchers and explorers of our past, providing a firm foundation upon which to expand the explorations each writer takes in turn, and showing how universal these ecstatic experiences were.  These chapters also expand on what used to be the definition of “ecstasy” to include all types of societal, spiritual, and shamanic altered states of consciousness.  The third chapter of the first section aims to provide empirical models to define ritual practices and ecstatic experiences, from ancient man to today’s modern world.  It helps place these studies, and ASC’s themselves, within the greater study of humanity and its development, something which mainstream archeology and anthropology has dismissed for centuries.

            The second section seeks to elucidate the evidence we have for the various types of psychoactive compounds, plants, and substances used by our ancestors to achieve ASC states.  Evidence from archeological digs, mass-spectrometry, and other modern tools is given to show the wide variety of ingestible, smokable, or otherwise applied natural materials used in ecstatic rituals.  The full gamut of intoxicants is analyzed, from botanical specimens and residue found within sealed jars, to the early use of fermentation to create drinkable alcohol, to the various mind-altering plants used by the Babylonians, Hittites and early Egyptians, all recorded in their language and art.  To emphasize the communal use of these substances, the final chapter of section 2 discusses a type of ceramic container found throughout ancient sites.  The Ring-Kernoi is a device consisting of a ceramic tube, shaped into a donut, with four to five adorned containers attached to the ring.  Looking at these artifacts through the lens of ASC experience, the author describes their use in ritual communion.  Each adorned section contained wither a different psychoactive compound, whether opium, cannabis, mandrake, etc., meant to be smoked in sequence and passed around, or they contained different liquid substances which, when mixed up in the Ring-Kernoi, created an intoxicating brew capable of easing the passage into ecstasy.  For our ancestors, the divine, experienced through ecstatic states, was a communal activity, a very important way to define their culture and self-identity as individual groups. 

            The third section of this awesome book goes into detail exploring the numinous world of ecstatic experiences, as described by ancient humans in their own words.  Starting with a dive into the most ancient archeological sites we have found, such as Çatalhöyük, and the discovery of a communal imbibing of alcohol, whether plain or adulterated with other psychotropic substances, which took place in massive megalithic spaces, many of them underground or only accessible through narrow openings.  These are the first evidence for the types of communal, spiritual experiences out of which the human need for religious communion arose.  Delving into ancient rituals for the goddess Ishtar, the writings concerning the dead from Egypt, and the ASC’s described by the ancient residents of Crete and the Minoan civilization that followed, helps us grasp the constant flow of ideas and wisdom that propelled our humanity forward.  From these ancient civilizations we then move onto ritual experience in ancient Greece, and the various cults and oracles which took advantage of ASC’s to promote their ideology.  Ecstatic experiences were a critical part of many cults, including those of the healer Asclepius, and the gods Apollo and Dionysius. As with all roads, the section ends with an analysis of the ecstatic funeral processions recorded from ancient Rome.  These chapters help bridge the gap between our assumed knowledge of the ancients towards a more factual and historical basis, drawing from the many written records we have of Greece, Rome and their neighbors at the time.

            The final section of this great work focuses on the evidence we have from our collective past pointing to, or describing, the experiences of the “Ecstatic” mind.  This section builds on all the previous ones and shares great insights into such topics as spirit possession and prophetic ecstasy as described in Mesopotamian texts, the psychedelic art from the Aegean, and the progression from personal or communal ecstatic experience to that of rigorous, sacerdotally-dictated ASC’s utilized by the very powerful in all societies to control the masses (think of a modern Catholic service, with its rituals, chants, music, incense, and repetition, intended to draw the congregation together into a shared experience).  The insights found in these final chapters help us understand the evolution and propagation of personal ecstatic experiences into the collective religions we see all around us in our “modern” world.

            This book is a masterpiece of research and science.  I hope to see it used as a foundational text, allowing younger researchers to continue down the same path of exploration, and guiding the elders in these fields towards new ideas and possibilities for scholarship.  When we as a culture disdain “unsavory” aspects of our past, dismissing wholesale anything to do with mysticism, or our long-standing use of chemicals, fauna, trance, song, or rhythms to achieve altered states of consciousness, we negate aspects of ourselves that help us understand each other.  It creates divisiveness where these old rituals and experiences sought to create inclusivity.  It is such a shame that our modern world sees everything we do as the pinnacle of human achievement, all the while forgetting that for most of our human existence we have all had the capability of communing with the divine, of understanding ourselves and our place in the world around us, and of accepting that reality is far greater than the basic facts we all choose to agree upon.  This book is a great step in the right direction, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in humanity’s psychological and spiritual development.

(This great resource can be purchased here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Ecstatic-Experience-in-the-Ancient-World/Stein-KieltCostello-PolingerFoster/p/book/9781032108483 )