Part 2-1
Art before History: Charting the shadowy Beginnings of Art
by Samuel Abelow, edited by Johannes Böckmann
In the first part of this series of essays, we saw that the artistic endeavor plays a central role in the conscious development of culture. The Artist, always in interplay with the unconscious, is set on a heroic path, working against the blind spots and biases of civilization. Here, we will go through the early phases of development in closer detail.
Archaic Past
Adam & Eve in the Garden — primordial man, fully immersed in a paradisal nature — had no need for art. The production of images results from the enormous tensions of a feeble, burgeoning, just-emerging consciousness. This emergence of a self-aware ego is marked by masculine imagery and is connected to the formation of male groups and their cultural mores, rites of passage, and sense of autonomy in relation to the forces of nature. For it is earthliness, the garden symbol itself, and the matriarchal power of the woman — as a totality — that man emerges from: the womb. He is creating art in relation to the forces of nature — in relation to her.
Imagine three men, living their lives separated by vast time-scapes, with culture rolling by slowly in-between their individual times of birth: First, a man, with a certain sensitivity takes raw earth pigments and water, presses his hand onto the cave wall to make his individual impression known upon cold and harsh nature, so he would not be forgotten by time’s passage.
Then later, his successor, unknown to them both, takes charcoal onto a stick and draws the animals, with a peculiar acuity. He acts in participation mystique, that this will magically enhance the odds of a successful hunt the following day. His attempt to develop a sustained ability to control nature — magically, imagistically, artistically, heroically — is put on display.
The third heir to this succession, another man, shapes clay to represent a maternal deity, emphasizing the breasts and tummy, rendering her fecundity, life-giving processes. Erich Neumann carefully demonstrates that early man expresses his experience of the feminine — a power that easily intoxicates & overwhelms a newly-forming consciousness — developing the increased will to overcome the languidness of mind & to control nature. [See: Neumann, Origins & History of Consciousness; Chapter: The Uroborus]
Early man’s efforts to create images that bolster his emerging consciousness are counteracted against the potent eroticism and mystery of woman’s naturalness that has a subsuming effect — a downward pull, diminishing the newly forming consciousness back into the unconscious. This constant tension is often too much to bear, as the maternal unconscious envelops him, leaving the development of culture at a stand-still or even de-generation, for vast periods of time.
Piercing the naivete about early history: it’s not all paradise
Nude figurines, vessels that appear like a woman’s body, and stone carvings with sexual references dominate archaic art. In fact, many early nude figures emphasize the breast, belly and rear, while diminishing the head of the woman. The question “why?” is reviewed extensively in Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother. The perspective of Neumann’s work is based on the classical model of Jungian psychology, where the feminine principle represents the unconscious and is connected to eros (body, relatedness), while the masculine principle represents the ego (conscious personality) and is connected to logos (mind, ideas). This archetypal situation holds true for both men & women.
Moral responsibility, which is the domain of ego development, seeks coherent cultural structures. What we know today as a sense of goodwill, charity, communal care and committed relationships is not to be taken for granted. These pillars of developed society have always been in conflict with the easy and immediate pleasures granted by impulses of an animalistic sort. Both desires — the longing for meaning, coherence and structure, and the compulsion towards dissolution, mania & chaos — originate as one and only become conflicted at a certain degree of development.
Moral responsibility towards sexual behavior, which is so deeply rooted in powerful drives, and linked to primitive experiences of ecstasy & the divine, is a crucial area of continuous struggle. The Great Mother, as primordial force of feminine totality, has no definite moral, but is rather marked by the rawness of fecundity, nourishment and ecstasy on the one hand, and terror, dissolution and death on the other. During the development of civilized western society, many forgotten artifacts of this almost impossible dichotomy have been expressed. [See Neumann Origins, Great Mother; also Jung, Vol 9.1, Archetypes for more]
It is especially important to remember that the reason that many archaic societies engaged in child sacrifice is that it is connected to sexuality: Children are, fundamentally, the outcome of sex. Stories of child sacrifice are often projected onto exotic cultures, but less so regarding the archaic ancestors of Europeans — such as the Greco-Romans. How this is connected to the nude body in western art will be shown later, but below are a series of citations to back up this unexpected claim, regarding child sacrifice, and its connection to sexuality:
“The crucial role of emotion and aggression in sacrifice appears in a number of Greek rituals and cultural expressions such as oracles. games. mysteries. Dramas. [...] The handling of animal bones signals feelings and thoughts of intimacy among humans and between humans and animals (Burkert 1986).
Ancient Carthaginians really did sacrifice their children. After decades of scholarship denying that the Carthaginians sacrificed their children, new research has found 'overwhelming evidence that this ancient civilization really did carry out the practice.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children
In ancient Mesopotamia, the ancient Babylonians instituted temples where so-called sacred prostitutes encountered male initiates, as a rite of passage towards becoming a woman. The brith control at the time included abortion.
[See: The Origin of Prostitution in Ancient Mesopotamia, Gerda Lerner Signs. Vol. 11, No. 2 (Winter, 1986), pp. 236-254 (19 pages). Published By: The University of Chicago Press]
Whether child sacrifice is a mythological process acted out in order to quell natural forces that might take away the king, or as a state-sanctioned abortion of a fetus which conceived in a mysterious encounter in a cult prostitution temple, the evidence is clear that the conflict between the mother cults and the hero archetype — that is, the feminine and masculine duality — is an essential aspect of the collective past and present personality structures.
The animal dominance of man, when subsumed under the maternal element is represented in the bull-gods of ancient mid-east. Additionally, the overcoming of this instinctual pull is represented concisely in the Mithras cult, where the hero slays the bull. The latter of this was popular in the (relatively) late civilization of Alexandria. (See below).
As the masculine develops, it brings forth increasingly sophisticated cultural productions — expressed in art, rites, rituals and cultural mores — from this tension. It is this the importance of the tension between the feminine and masculine archetypes — the impulse to find mystery and excitement in the erotic, and the longing to overcome dissolving effects of the instincts on developing moral structures. The previously mentioned, crude activity, is brought into conflict with new forms of aesthetic-moral conceptions, which drive culture forward. This is always pursued in well-funded artistic production and representations.
For now, the reader should note that in antiquities there was a social complex between the promiscuity, child-sacrifice, in relation to the great mother archetype, as a totality that induced tensions with various forming cultures and their cults. The hero, as an early masculine identity and myth, is the typology that resists the dissolving effects of the maternal unconscious. The development of moral structures and social codes is strengthened by a concentration on the hero archetype, representing the masculine in the struggle against the maternal unconscious. This successful hero’s struggle would later set society on a path of denying the body and the nude. This denial in turn would be fought against in modernity. We will see that the nude body in art, from classical to a modern, is an attempt to reconcile a lost feminine, left in the unconscious, with a developed masculine structure.
18th-century depiction of the Moloch idol (Der Götze Moloch mit 7 Räumen oder Capellen. "The idol Moloch with seven chambers or chapels"), from Johann Lund's Die Alten Jüdischen Heiligthümer (1711, 1738).
Mithras killing the bull (c. 150 CE; Louvre-Lens)
Documentary about the Phoenician practices of child sacrifice in temples of Astarte-Baal
The Bloodcurdling Sacrifices Of Phoenicians | Blood On The Altar | Timeline
In the next section:
Throughout history, in various cultures and their cults, mythologies and visual representations express the tensions of an emerging masculine consciousness from the undifferentiated and vast maternal unconscious. We will look into the development of the masculine in Torah Judaism and more.
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