Nefertiti

 

Her name means ’The Beautiful One Approaches’. She was the wife and the queen of the heretic king Akhenaten, reigning in the new capital which had been stamped out of the virgin desert a symbolic halfway between the cities of Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south. The king named his new city Akhetaten – ‘Aten on the Horizon’, although it has become more familiar to us from the name of the nearby contemporary town of Amarna.

Nefertiti presented her husband with three daughters. But then as now it was a man’s world, and it was a lesser consort who gave the king the necessary male heir: an ineffectual ruler who died before his twentieth year. The son might have remained an obscure name on the fringes of history but for an extraordinary twist of fate – the discovery of his intact tomb in 1922. The son’s name was Tutankhaten. His change of name tells its own story. With his father’s death, the boy was an easily-manipulated puppet of the priests ready to claim back power, and his name was changed to Tutankhamen.

The glories of the royal court at Amarna collapsed back into the desert sands, its very stones rifled to rebuild the temples of the old gods. Nefertiti, now a widow with a disintegrating power base, must manoeuvre to survive. But did she? History has left no record of the queen’s fate, and we are left to wonder. 

Nefertiti’s legendary beauty is wholly due to the surviving portrait bust of her in the Berlin Museum: a bust which has become so iconic that it takes an effort to think one’s way past it. But I wanted deliberately to pull the focus of attention away from the familiar tall crown back to the queen herself: a very human woman contemplating the best way to move forward in a hazardous and politically adverse world almost three and a half millennia removed from our own. And it seemed only fitting to include the queen’s personal cartouche – a cartouche that was deliberately defaced from the stones of Amarna by the reinstated priests.

You can read and see more about Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the royal court of Amarna at: http://shadowsineden.blogspot.nl/2013/10/the-amarna-heresies.html

The Gospel of Mary

Who was Mary Magdalene? Thanks to a misguided assumption about a passage in Luke's gospel by Pope Gregory I in the 6th-century, the erroneous tradition that Mary was a redeemed whore has persisted for fourteen long centuries. But the text of the Gospel of Mary, written three centuries earlier, reveals a very different Mary. The image of Mary in the gospel which bears her name is of a woman of great dignity, leadership, personal courage and deep spiritual insight: a view of the Magdalene as remote from her misguided portrayal down the centuries as is possible.

We have three surviving fragmentary copies of the text known as the Gospel of Mary, all of them from Egypt. One discovered near the town of Akhmim is from the 5th-century and written in Coptic, and the other two from the 3rd-century and written in Greek were discovered in an ancient refuse dump at Oxyrhynchus – a valuable archaeological site which also has yielded some of the poetry of Sappho.

The Gospel of Mary is the only known gospel to be attributed to a woman. Unlike the verses of Sappho, we cannot know who wrote it, any more than we can ascertain who really wrote the four canonical gospels. What we can say is that its unknown author wrote from a viewpoint that is so sympathetic to a woman’s perspective, so insightful, that it could indeed have been written by a woman, which would have been entirely feasible in an early Christian Gnostic community.

Being closer to the source, this text offers us perhaps a more authentic Mary: a Mary who is indeed a wise and profound teacher, and who is even the closest to Jesus and most deserving of his disciples. This Mary is a very long way indeed from the redeemed whore perpetuated by the Church, and the time for her overdue and deserved reinstatement is now.

You can read more about the Gospel of Mary on my other blog here.

Thecla

The companion of Paul the Apostle, Thecla seems in every way to have been a woman in her own right. Almost all that we know about her comes from a damaged apocryphal manuscript in Coptic known as The Acts of Paul, in which is recounted her seemingly miraculous deliverances from death in the Roman arenas of two cities. On the first occasion in the city of Iconium, while being tied to the stake with the pyre beneath her feet having been already set to the torch, a deluge of rain poured out of a clear sky and extinguished the flames. The following apparently miraculous deliverance found place in the arena of the city of Antioch, when a group of lionesses formed a protective circle around her and fought off the aggressive male lions.

How to unravel these more legendary aspects of her life from the Thecla of history? What these stories about her express – and the apparent esteem in which she was held by her followers – reveal to us a beautiful, charismatic and principled woman who enjoyed the respect and loyalty of her community. Copies in Greek of the damaged text of the Acts indicate that in later years she became a recluse, dedicating herself to a life of prayer and meditation, and living into her 90’s. Perhaps somewhere between the miracles and the meditations is the true Thecla, the Thecla of the spirit: a Thecla who still can touch us with her grace if we open ourselves to her.

You can read more about Thecla and her times in my post: Thecla: A Woman between Rain and Fire.

My painting of Thecla also features in my video: Invocation.

Anthony of the Desert

What drives a man to walk away from his wealthy estate and march off into the unforgiving dunes of the North African desert? I find it difficult to recognize such a bravura gesture as an act of faith in any conventional sense. Were that so, then Anthony would have continued to bow to an acceptably orthodox Church authority. But he walked away from that as well. Others seeking to find grace among the desert’s terrible purity had left their footprints in the sand before him, but their tracks went no farther than the outskirts of Alexandria.

What made Anthony different is that he went farther than any before him. Far to the south of Alexandria Anthony settled into the rough shelter that was to become his hermitage, there to undertake what we would now perhaps more readily recognize as a vision quest.

Anthony’s beliefs were an intensely personal form of Gnosticism – of a seeking for a direct experience of the Divine through privation-induced visions. It was these beliefs which cut him loose from the authority of the Church hierarchy, and which therefore presented the Church with a problem. Over the years the hermit’s fame spread, and his devotional asceticism captured the popular imagination of the time.

What to do about Anthony? For the Church to chastise the wayward hermit in such a climate of popularity was an unfavourable option. The solution was found after Anthony’s death by Athanasius, the influential bishop of Alexandria. The bishop wrote a presumed biography of Anthony, reinventing the hermit, not as the lettered scholar which Anthony truly was, but as a humble and illiterate monk who devotedly upheld the very principles of obedient orthodoxy which the real Anthony in his life abjured. Athanasius even appended a wholly fictitious ending in which the hermit presents the bishop with his cloak as his worthy successor.

For centuries the biography by Athanasius was accepted as literal fact; so much so that the very Gnostic Anthony, as we know, has even received sainthood. It was only after Anthony’s own letters came to light that the bishop’s subterfuge has been realised, and his own agenda has been revealed as a maneuver of the power politics of the Church of that time.

There are many depictions of Anthony from various periods of art history, from the soberly contemplative saint of Albrecht Dürer to the bizarre visions of Hieronymus Bosch. But generally these opt for a portrayal of the grizzle-bearded hermit in advanced years in the setting of his retreat, surrounded by a lurid phantasmagoria of grotesque monstrosities and tempted by equally phantom wanton females. But what compels me more than these is the Anthony who walked away, the young man (he was then in his early thirties) who turned his back on his considerable earthly wealth to pursue his own intensely personal vision of things.


Sources:
Samuel Rubenson: The Letters of Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint. A&C Black, 1995. Just how profoundly Gnostic Anthony actually was is revealed in Professor Rubenson's book, an extract of which can be read here. Anthony was not the only Gnostic to be 'reinvented' by the orthodox Church to drive its own agenda. Both Clement of Alexandria and Paul himself were subjected to the same process.

Gustave Flaubert: The Temptation of Saint Antony. Translated and with an introduction by Kitty Mrosovsky. Penguin Classics, 1983. Flaubert's daring experiment with the literary form, using Anthony's visions as inspiration, and written as a play not intended for actual performance.

More about the conflict of truth between Anthony and Athanasius can be read at: Anthony of the Desert: Life as Fiction.

Portrayals of Anthony and his visions by a variety of artists can be seen at: Temptations.

Omar Khayyám

In 11th-century Persia there lived an astronomer and mathematician by the name of Omar ben Ibrahim al-Khayyami, who, when he was not occupied with astronomical and algebraic calculations, for his pleasure wrote a series of verses which offer universal reflections on life, death and fate.

Seven centuries passed. Half a world away in Victorian England, a rather indifferent writer named Edward Fitzgerald decided to compose a translated version of the ancient Persian verses. Something mysterious happened. Between the alignment of minds that were the Persian astronomer and the Victorian writer emerged an extraordinary poet who resembled neither, and who - at least to English ears - eclipsed both. In the West we know those verses as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and it is Fitzgerald's translation (which is more of an interpretation) which from its first appearance established itself as the definitive English version.

In Fitzgerald's version, Omar Khayyám comes across as a wonderfully pragmatic character, as fond of a carafe of wine as he is of a bit of philosophy, full of good humor in the face of an unrelenting fate. Portraits of Khayyám have tended to treat him as a sort of Middle-Eastern Confucius, white-bearded and sagacious. But I wanted to portray him as he is reflected by Fitzgerald: someone whose spirituality has a definite earthy twinkle in its eye. My background contains all three elements of his character: an astrolabe from the world of astronomy, one of his treatises on algebra ('al-jabra', which is where the term comes from), and, of course, the calligraphed title of the Rubáiyát which secured his immortality.

Hermes Trismegistus

Thoth, the Dynastic Egyptian god of writing and magic, was transformed in the mystery schools of Ancient Greece to become an embodied person: Hermes Trismegistus - Hermes the Thrice-great, the wisest interpreter of the ways of the deity, the supreme practitioner of the [1]secret arts, and the spiritual guide of humankind. His most famous writings are to be found in the Emerald Tables, and his best-known dictum is expressed by the phrase: [2]"As above, so below", conveying the idea that the events in the heavens, even the very movements of the stars in their appointed courses, find their counterpart in the activities of the world below. These ideas are further expressed in sacred geometry and architecture, and even in the plans of cities.  

But the figure of Hermes, hovering always somewhere between myth and history, seemed to follow the fate of a star that shone brightly, but somehow failed to ignite and blaze fully into a practicing religion, and further doubts about the [3]authenticity of the antiquity of his writings during the Renaissance saw his decline in human influence. I for one am only grateful that Hermeticism never became a recognized religion as such, which inevitably would have seen its purity sullied by an overlayering of doctrine, and its cohesion of vision sundered by the divisive factionalism which seems regrettably to thrive in religious belief.

Does it really matter whether Hermes existed or not as a historical person? If there are legitimate reasons for doubt about this, then that merely puts him on the same historical plane as Jesus, Moses, Lao Tsu and others. What matters is what we have of his writings, and those writings, whoever wrote and compiled them, and as does scripture and the Tao Te Ching, contain an authentic spiritual wisdom. My painting is loosely based upon 17th-century Renaissance portrayals of Hermes. There are no other known historical sources to inform us of his possible appearance.


Notes:
[1] From which we derive our term 'hermetic', meaning something which has been sealed closed.

[2] Expressed symbolically by two overlapping triangles pointing both upwards and downwards, which we now most readily recognize as the Star of David.

[3] The 16th-17th-century scholar Isaac Casaubon claimed to have established that the written works of Hermes dated from no earlier than the 4th-century CE. Although his dating methods were themselves later revealed to be flawed, Casaubon's reputation was so influential that the damage to the widely-read Hermetica had already been done. He also overlooked the fact that, even were this so, the texts, as with scripture and other works of classical literature, built upon an already existing ancient oral tradition.

Mary Magdalene

She could well be one of the most wronged women in history. For almost two millennia the Church has described her as a redeemed whore, although there is no foundation whatever in scripture for believing this. Why does the Church perpetuate this image of her? Apparently because it is expedient for it to do so, and is perhaps a further example of the way in which men seemingly cope with the complexities of femininity by perceiving women simplistically either as being an immaculate Virgin or as being available for a price, with little nuance in between the two extremes.

Gnostic scriptures tell a different story: of a woman of dignity, compassion and insight who was the closest, most trusted and most loved of Jesus' disciples, and who, after the events of the crucifixion, had to stand against the tirades of the hot-tempered and jealously misogynistic Peter. Small wonder that the early Church fathers burned all the Gnostic texts that they could get hold of. The erroneous assumption (which scripture itself refutes) that Jesus chose only male disciples is to this day used by the Papacy as a justification for not admitting women to positions of high office within the Church hierarchy, not now, not ever.

A legend of medieval times tells of the Magdalene voyaging from the Holy Land to reach the coast of southern France, where she passed her remaining years in reflective solitude. The legend might have no basis in historical fact, but what the story does underscore is the spiritual truth of exile. Far from home, and having lost that which is most dear to us in the world, we seek the consolation of the spirit.

Kubla Khan

The story is told of how, when the Great Khan made his annual return to his summer residence at Xanadu to avoid the heat of the capital, his courtiers escorted him along the colonnade of the palace to review the improvements made during his absence. The Khan peered out through each carved lattice screen at the formal gardens. Here had been planted sweet jasmine, in another, scented tamarind, and in another, sage and other spices. At the end of the colonnade the group came to the last garden, where had been planted only grasses from the Mongolian Steppes, their Lord's homeland. The grasses stirred, and the western breeze touched the Khan's face. "Ah," said he, "That is the sweetest scent of all."    

Sappho

Plato called her the Tenth Muse, and she was widely regarded as the greatest poet of her age, initiating a wholly original poetic style of personal reflection which we now take for granted, but that in an age of recited epic verse was unique for her time. Clearly Sappho produced a considerable body of work, but time has not been kind to her. Her poems, by turns vividly descriptive, deeply human and fiercely passionate, have suffered both at the hands of prudish minds eager to expunge them from the record and an uncaring indifference which even has seen her recorded verses used as the padding for mummy wrappings - an irony of their very preservation. What has been left to us are scraps rescued from ancient refuse dumps and the lines of hers which have been quoted in the preserved writings of others who recognized her true worth. But even if all that we had of the writings of Shakespeare were a few scattered passages from Hamlet or The Tempest we still would recognize his greatness, and so it is with Sappho.

The Prophet Enoch

The seventh generation from Adam, and the purported eponymous writer of the book which bears his name, it is Enoch who provides us with so many of the details that otherwise are unaccountably missing from the Book of Genesis. The specific nature of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the exploits of the two hundred Watchers who descended from heaven after seeing the comely 'daughters of men', the havoc wreaked by their notorious offspring, the Nephilim, and the real reasons behind the Flood, can all be found in this book, together with an astonishing passage of a vision of Enoch's journey to the celestial realms. In another culture Enoch's remarkable visions would be considered shamanic, akin to the accounts of Black Elk and others. Why Enoch's book never made it into the Biblical canon is a mystery, and scripture is the poorer for it. My portrait imagines Enoch in later years, reflecting on his life of visions as the elderly Black Elk looked back on his own visions from the heights of Harney Peak.

END