Marilyn Bridges Shares a Bird's-Eye View of Sacred Landscapes in Beautiful B+W Photography

 

Markings: Aerial Views of Sacred Landscapes – Marilyn Bridges (1986)

            What a gorgeous photography book!  The “Library Angels” were kind once again, guiding this amazing book into my hands.  Reader of the Book Journey will note my long-standing interest in ancient megaliths, earthworks, and the civilizations that created them.  Marilyn Bridges, an outstanding photographer, took it upon herself to take to the skies over Peru in the 1970’s to better experience the “Nazca Lines” her indigenous guides described.  The sense of awe engendered by what she saw led her to seek more opportunities to fly and photograph the ancient works of humanity.  Facing her fears, Marilyn Bridges learned to fly small airplanes, allowing her to dictate exactly how she would photograph the overwhelmingly complex lines, images, and ruins left behind by our ancestors.

            In the classic documentarian style of photography, Bridges utilizes stark black and white film, all shot from far above, to showcase the ruins and burial sites better seen from the sky.  This is the “view of the gods” as she describes it.  Her impeccable eye for detail, lighting, framing, and composition make each single image a work of art, regardless of the subject matter. 

            This book begins with an informative and poetic preface by one Haven O’More, detailing  Marilyn Bridge’s methods and the magic she creates.  O’More introduces us to the four sections of this book, each with an engrossing introduction.  The first section details Bridges’ photography of the famous Nazca lines and geoglyphs, some of the first images to draw the attention of the world at large to perhaps the most mysterious and massive earthworks and drawings ever created by our human species.  The stark images perfectly capture the inherent emptiness of the Nazca landscape, contrasted by the almost overwhelming amount of lines and drawings and shapes left behind by the creators, a people we call “Nazca” but of whom we know almost nothing, not even the name they chose to call themselves.   They communicate with us and for all time through their artworks.

            The second section of this book explores the remnants of the greatest non-European, non-Asian, non-African civilization in our human history, the Mayan Empire of Central America, which the book states encompasses “…what is now Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, El Salvador, and the southern Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and eastern Chiapas.”  Going back to 2,000 BCE, and existing until around 900 CE, the Maya culture flourished in the middle of some of the harshest tropical forest climates around.  In the 1840’s, a traveler and writer named John Lloyd Stephens explored the area and his two seminal books were integral in bringing the knowledge of the Maya empire to the wider world.  Marilyn Bridges’ photographs capture both excavated buildings and cities and completely overgrown pyramids and temples alike, lending the images an otherworldly quality, as if the jungle was erasing our human history, which it most certainly does cover up!  The Mayan language, the only complete written language ever created in the New World, is still nearly indecipherable.  Because of this, and because the fucking ignorant and psychopathic religious fervor of Spanish Roman Catholic priests “forced” them to burn every Maya text they found, much of Maya culture remains decipherable solely through their earthworks and architecture.  Such a pity.  I firmly believe the world would be a far better place today if every single Bible in existence had been burned up around 400 CE, but I digress.

            The third section details the many prehistoric geoglyphs and burial mounds found throughout North America.  From 500-year old figures carved out of the Mojave desert in California, to the ceremonial centers of the Mississippian people, to the effigy mounds of the Adena people who lived in what is now Ohio between 1000 BCE and 30 BCE, North America is littered with evidence of ancient culture and people, far removed from the lies told by white colonists of a barren, history-less landscape given to them by their white god.  What these ignorant assholes called “Indians” and “savages” were a people with culture, cities, agriculture, temples, burial sites, and an involved society.  Marilyn Bridges’ photographs help us remember this fact.

            The final section describes the truly ancient earthworks, henges, and artificial hills created by the ancient people of what is now England.  The most famous of these is Stonehenge, and rightfully so, but my favorite is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a figure created by removing the sod and topsoil above a chalk hill in Dorset.  A 180 foot tall figure, with a massive 30 foot long erect dong, represents either the Celtic god Helith, or his Roman counterpart Hercules.  Either way, the dude is an obvious ass-kicker with his massive war-club held high overhead.  Not discussed much is the fact that in England exists a human built earth pyramid rivaling the size of the pyramids in Egypt, but created maybe one thousand years before.  INSANE!  Silbury Hill , as it is called, was first constructed around 2500 BCE and remains the largest man-made hill in all of Europe.  Our ancestors were mighty, inventive, intelligent bad-asses of the highest caliber!

            Books like this fill me with awe, with a feeling of overwhelming unity and love for my fellow man, and for all our ancestors trying to make sense of a seemingly random and violent world.  Humans understand pattern better than almost any other creature on Earth.  Because of this, through careful, extended observation, our ancient forebears realized that the seeming permanence of the night sky, along with the solar and lunar cycles, allowed us to experience the passage of time without fear, for we could predict when the rains would come, when an eclipse happened, when the winter solstice came, etc. In all parts of our world, different humans looked at the same skies and came up with the same realizations, creating calendars, observatories, and other tools to measure our world and the passage of time.  To know that this was mostly done by people with no means of writing, no alphabets or glyphs to record information, humbles me greatly.  We stand on the shoulders of every single human that came before us, and every human after us will stand on our shoulders.  This is a responsibility that most of us ignore.  I am deeply thankful our ancestors did not, and that people like Marilyn Bridges, through her insight and emotion, saw the importance of capturing these images and sharing them with the world at large.  I am eternally grateful, as we all should be.

(This amazing book can be purchased used here: https://www.abebooks.com/9780893814236/Marilyn-Bridges-Markings-Sacred-Landscapes-0893814237/plp )