What The Fire Said: Prophesies of the Hopi

What The Fire Said

What The Fire Said is the portal for my own art and writing. It is necessarily a work in progress, and you are welcome to return anytime to see what has been added here.

In my header you will see both contemporary calibration dials and centuries-old symbols used in the practice of alchemy. My art tends to operate at the interface between such extremes: between our shared distant past and an unknown far future, between the realities of history and the at-times greater realities that lie over the threshold in the world of myth. At these extremes science and magic, myth and history turn into each other, become indistinguishable from each other – as in the far future they well might. ~ Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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What The Fire Said by David Bergen a.k.a. Hawkwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License covering all written and visual material at: http://whatthefiresaid.blogspot.nl/.

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Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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The prophesies of the Hopi nation of the southwest have become more widely known through the release of the film Koyaanisqatsi ('Life out of Balance'). Perhaps the best-known of these prophesies describes how 'cobwebs' will drape the skies and a 'gourd of ashes' will fall from above. This has been connected in our own times to the appearance of our ubiquitous electricity grid pylons, and the form of an atomic explosion, which certainly fits the description of a huge inverted gourd. But the source and the actual dating of the prophesies is complex, and as with the extant writings of Hermes Trismegistus, they might not be as ancient as has been suggested. Whether this is so or not, the prophesies remain a valid and essential message - and a warning - about our stewardship of our planet, and the Hopi need to be listened to.

The best resource I know for a scrupulous and conscientious anthropological study of the prophesies is Rudolf Kaiser's The Voice of the Great Spirit: Prophesies of the Hopi Indians. And of course there is always the mesmerizing Koyaanisqatsi with its score by Philip Glass. The central image of my painting is adapted from a 19th-century photograph by Edward S. Curtis, against a background of masterful Hopi ceramic ware. The silver crescent on the pendant has its own culturally intriguing history: it has been adapted from designs by the Spanish who were the first Europeans in the region, who in their turn adapted the crescent from the Moors. The crescent worn by this Hopi is therefore Islamic in origin!

Cultural paths cross and recross, sometimes with surprising and unexpected results, sometimes with benefits to both - and sometimes disastrously. Were it possible for us to view these events at the time that they actually happen with the same insight and perspective which the distance of history allows us, would we do things differently? Perhaps this is what we crave from prophesies: to reach an understanding of affairs in our own present with the insight of a history which has yet to happen.

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