Prehistoric Cave Artists Were Women

National Geographic reports that scientists have measured the myriad handprints (including the one shown, from the Pech Merle cave in southern France) that are part of prehistoric cave art and come to the conclusion that they are the hands of women.

Bien sûr...

Leonard Cohen's always right

These lyrics are from "Light as a Breeze":

It don't matter how you worship
As long as you're down on your knees
So I knelt there at the delta
At the alpha and the omega
At the cradle of the river and the seas
And like a blessing come from heaven
For something like a second
I was healed and my heart
Was at ease

Ahh.

Religion as Entertainment

And entertainment as religion...

We all know how seriously entertainers and artists can take ourselves - and how amazingly seriously the public takes celebrities as well (all the while claiming not to...).

As someone who worked for the Catholic Church for 16 years, let me tell you that those guys also take themselves very seriously, and as far as I can tell, so do the Protestants, Muslims, etc. The only religious celebrity who doesn't take himself seriously seems to be the Dalai Lama.

Now we all know why religious leaders take themselves seriously - their raison d'etre being our very souls. Artists of every stripe who take themselves seriously often consider their vocation similarly. When you find yourself weeping to a piano sonata, isn't it because your soul has opened to recognize beauty and love? And isn't the same true when we read a novel that awakens us to feelings and thoughts we hadn't yet known, or a piece of art that reawakens our childlike thrill to beauty?

The connection between religion and entertainment is ancient. Here's one take:

I have this theory (in the prosaic, not scientific, sense of the word) that religion is what people did for entertainment before mass media. The history of theater (the tragedy né tragōidia, or "goat song") rising up from religious ritual suggests the same, and the development of theater into other dramatic forms like satire roughly corresponds with the decline of myth evolution in Greek culture...

We know the printing press, print being the advent of modern mass media, turned out rather badly for the Catholic Church, which found its traditional standing as interpreter of scripture (and, by extension, intermediary with God) demolished by the sudden easy availability of bibles to a hoi polloi quickly becoming educated enough to read them. Literacy was a cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation, but the Protestants pretty quickly discovered what the Catholic Church learned the hard way some 14 centuries earlier in the heyday of Gnosticism: when you let people do their own interpreting, they go off in all sorts of unexpected directions; soon you've got sects denouncing royalty as the usurpation of God's rightful place and condemnation of private property as sin. Mix all this in with literacy, a smidgen of disposable income and the printing press, and voila! The novel is born.

It's no coincidence that The Novel, as birthed in the era of the printing press, was denounced by churches of all stripes as roadmaps to the Devil, because certainly that's what they were, commemorating all manner of human vice and depredation; that's drama, baby! Churches also continued their longstanding feuds with theater and art, frequently condemned as idolatry, while simultaneously employing both, absolving them of their sins where they served religion's purposes.

When Jesus is the hero

The Christian World Magazine has an article on novelists who make Jesus the main character. Author Nancy Tischler says such novelists "find many ways to answer the question, 'Who do you say that I am?'" Tischler seems to take a pretty dim view of the enterprise, however:

This is sacred material and must be approached with fear and trembling. Our discovery of truth may be enhanced by the creative imagination, but the Christian reader must be aware above all of who Christ is and how we know. The writer of biblical fiction can hardly expect us to "suspend our disbelief" and enter into the spirit of the story when that spirit violates our faith. The novelist may help the reader to see the truth "slant" and therefore enliven it, or discover a deeper meaning based on individual experience. But the Christian reader knows that truth is not changing. This truth is beauty—without any need for twisting or embroidering.

She doesn't include my favorite, The Secret Magdalene, by Ki Longfellow, (OK - the Magdalene is the main character in that book) but here's her list:
The Life of Jesus, by Ernst Renan (1863)
The Nazarene, by Sholem Asch (1939)
The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis (1951)
The Gospel According to the Son, by Norman Mailer (1997)
Jesus: A Novel, by Walter Wangerin (2005)
Christ the Lord, a trilogy by Anne Rice (2005)
The Magdalene Gospel, by Mary Ellen Ashcroft
I, Judas, by Taylor Caldwell
The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple, by James Carse
The Thomas Jesus, by Steven Fortney
The Fire Gospel, by Michael Faber
Quarantine, by Jim Crace
The Crown and the Cross, by Frank Slaughter
King Jesus, by Robert Graves
"a trilogy" by Marjorie Holmes
The Greatest Story Ever Told, by Fulton Oursler
The Man Who Died, by D.H. Lawrence

I'm intrigued by the Lawrence book, which has, according to her, "a post-crucifixion scene, in which Jesus reconsiders His mission on Earth and has an affair with a priestess of Isis."

I read one of Marjorie Holmes' books when I was in high school and have fond memories of it; I've read part of the Graves' book, all of Rice's Out of Egypt, and seen The Last Temptation of Christ.

I'd recommend all of them - the Graves' book only if you're seriously able to devote some time to a book.

Anyone else?

Historical Novel Society Conference

The Historical Novel Society Conference ended yesterday - a rather amazing get-together with celebrity historical novelists wandering around acting just like regular people.

I was reminded that Elissa Elliott has two books I want to read - Eve, A Novel of the First Woman, and her memoirs, about finding her own way to a spirit-filled life.

I embarrassed myself with Anne Easter Smith, saying how much I'd enjoyed her book about Richard II. Doh! Richard III is the love interest in A Rose for the Crown, a wonderful read.

Margaret George was there, author of Mary, Called Magdalene, in which she brings to life the Magdalene - and in the process makes a reader think about fundamental questions of the spirit.

Anne Chamberlin, author of an underrated and magical trilogy called the Joan of Arc Tapestries, which begins with The Merlin of St. Gilles' Well.

These writers and literally dozens of others were generously accessible - despite being outnumbered by aspiring writers like myself. Actually, although the conference was geared towards writers, it would have been a great time for nonwriting readers as well.

Mark Jarman's Kuan Yin

To the Green Man, a book of poetry by Mark Jarman, is, as the Powell's description says, a book of poems that live in "the dangerous currents where poetry and religion meet." Kuan Yin, whose name means "One who hears the cries of the world," is the feminine aspect of the Buddha.

She is Isis, the Virgin Mary, the Magdalene and all the other goddesses who embody compassion.

Kuan Yin

The blanc de chine porcelain many-armed goddess offers us
Something held loosely in each of her many hands.
It may be a key or an axe, a tongue or a flower,
But whatever it is, it is ours for the taking. That’s clear.
She herself, so the story goes, gave up arms and eyes
To save the life of her father who hated her goodness.
And when he was saved he asked the name of the donor
(It was 7th century China, but donor’s the right word)
And learned from his doctors that his daughter had saved his life.
She had given her arms and eyes, and they ground them up
Into a paste which they fed to her ill, estranged father.
(How many fairy tales can you remember, fables and myths,
Involving the irony of eating your own flesh and blood?)
Restored he went to her, but it was too late for forgiveness.
And instead of an armless, eyeless stalk of pity,
He found the new goddess, a dazzling wheel in the air,
Her radiant spokes the thousand arms of compassion
And her eyes multiplied, too, like the eyes of heaven.
As she faced him for the last time, she was like a mandala
Where he glimpsed the inch of his life, her gift to him,
Just as she left him, just as she disappeared.
And now, here in a glass museum box,
Aesthetically lit to show she’s a work of art,
She lives in her glazed gestures beyond her sacrifice,
Beyond hatred, suffering, and goodness, beyond her story,
Although it’s the story that makes us understand.

Was that also the theme of Pan's Labyrinth? The blood of an innocent?

Iain Pears and Neoplatonism

I finished The Dream of Scipio last night. It's a spectacular book; Pears brings in philosophy and scholarship. He convincingly portrays the zeitgeist of the fifth, fourteenth, and twentieth centuries, in particular how they see virtue, the human soul, humanity's relationship with god, and Christianity's relationship with Judaism.

All three protagonists, in particular the fifth and twentieth century figures, are confronted with utilitarianism's "greatest happiness" principle - that is, you can figure out the right thing to do because the greatest good will come of it - or the least harm.

And so the fifth-century bishop turns his back on the defunct Roman Empire and parlays with the Burgundian barbarian king, who will do less damage than the Goth barbarians at the gate. And so the twentieth-century scholar works for the Vichy government as a censor, allowing himself to be convinced that he will cause less damage than someone less sensitive.

And always there are the Jews, to be used as scapegoats for whatever is wrong with Europe, like sacrifices to be fed to the gods of ignorance and hatred.

And always there is love.

A few gems from the book:

• A thirteenth-century painter's apprentice is amazed when he sees that the figure of Christ at the Last Supper echoes a man they both know. "Our little secret," the painter tells him. "But observe it well. Something of God is all around us, perhaps. All we need is eyes to see and a hand to capture."


• A fifth-century philosopher's despair: "... she could not but be aware that each newcomer to her door, however curious, knew less than the one he replaced. The ability to argue diminished; the grasp of basic concepts weakened; and the knowledge that comes from study grew perpetually less. Christianity, which spread over men's minds like a blanket, put faith above reason; increasingly those brought up under its influence scorned knowledge and thought. Even those with a spark given to them by the gods wanted to be told, rather than wanted to think. Getting them to accept that the goal was thought itself, not any conclusion at the end of thought, was hard indeed. They came to her for answers, and all they got instead were questions."


• About the few Cathars left in the the thirteenth century: "They claimed to be gods themselves, they denied the resurrection of the body, they claimed the world was evil and man a prison rather than something created in God's own image. That God Himself, the god of the Bible, was but a meddling demon and had nothing to do lwith the true deity from which we all come. There was, of course, no mention of Our Lord, and they plainly believed in reincarnation..."


• The fifth-century bishop thinking about Sophia, the philosopher: "Was he... fighting against the gods in trying to fend off disaster?
  "No, says Sophia... The question is a false one, for the concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine.... Faith means nothing, for we are too corrupted to apprehend the truth...
  "Rephrase the question then: Can Manlius Hippomanes, trudging northward with his small entourage, reverse the decline and restore tranquility to the land? Possibly not, nor does it matter. The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nevertheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; success or failure is secondary."


• A couple pages later: "The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must try forever to reach enlightenment."