by Nigel Spivey
CONNECTING WITH HIGHER POWERS
The American psychologist William James (1842–1910) reduced the varieties of human religious experience to just two essential components. First we are stricken by what James referred to as ‘an uneasiness’; then we attempt to resolve that uneasiness.The uneasiness is caused by the sense that ‘there is something wrong about us’ as we are.The solution according to James, lies in the sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making a connection with higher powers.
Worship may be defined as the attempt to make that connection with higher powers. It is the payment of respect to a force or a being conceived as supernatural. And because the supernatural is above or beyond our normal realm of perception, our attempts to describe it may be faltering or futile. ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,’ declared the twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The nineteenth-century French realist painter Gustave Courbet said that he never painted angels because he had never seen any. Much earlier, a Buddhist text from India argues for the residual indefinability of its sacred objective: ‘For him who has gone to rest [the Buddha], there is nothing left to which he can be compared; words to denote him belong to him no longer.When all things have been rendered to nothing, all manner of words are also cut off.’
Yet images of the Buddha have been made with great descriptive care and conviction, and plenty of artists in the Christian tradition have not shared Courbet’s objection to picturing angels. So what inhibitions arise beyond the down-to-earth reluctance to describe the indescribable, or give form and substance to what is conceived as essentially metaphysical – beyond the physical?
Christians, like Buddhists, have mixed opinions on this issue, and their debate is summarized later (see page). More consistent are the Judaic and Muslim attitudes towards images set up in places of worship.The Koran unequivocally condemns veneration of images as a sham, and praises the patriarch Abraham in particular for personally exerting himself to smash the objects of idolatry. Judaic dogma similarly disparages reliance upon votive and divine imagery as ‘strange worship’, an ‘abomination’. Indeed, the law as delivered to the prophet Moses was comprehensively phrased: ‘Thou shalt not make any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath … Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them … ’ (Exodus 20:4–5) This is a strict ruling, yet it was not rooted in some primal taboo. References in the Old Testament to certain kings of Israel raising altars to the god Baal indicate that antipathy towards divine images had not always prevailed among the Semitic peoples; and the archaeology of cult practice in the Middle East demonstrates that the Phoenicians (of Biblical Canaan, or today’s Lebanon) customarily placed images around and upon the altars of their deities, as did the Nabataeans, the north Arabian nomad traders who created the city of Petra (in modern Jordan). Islam saluted Abraham for taking direct action against such images, while the book of Exodus identified one divine (and petulantly monotheistic) motive for abhorring icons: ‘I, the Lord your God, am a jealous god.’ Either way, cult images were not a matter for indifference. If they were not venerated, then they were feared, or suspected of fostering resentment among higher powers.
We may doubt whether a culture without icons is ever possible. Judaism has its symbols, such as the menorah or seven-branched candlestick from the Temple at Jerusalem. In the Islamic world, too, the arabesques and calligraphic flourishes to be found in any mosque bid for some kind of representational status. Historically, however, it seems clear that the Islamic–Judaic prejudice against images of and for worship was essentially a mode of declaring difference. Idolatry was the hallmark of other faiths; to reject idolatrous practice was therefore a way of being distinct, a mode of self-definition. If that is a crudely workable summary of how hostility towards images came about, we can now attempt to understand the other side.What did practitioners of idolatry think they were doing?
IDOLATRY AND DEVOTION
‘Idolatry’ derives from an ancient Greek word, eidololatria. Eidola were the figures of deities raised in all Greek sanctuaries and latria was the reverence accorded to them. When the Christian evangelist Paul visited Athens in the mid-first century he reported it to be kateidolos, ‘images all around’ (Acts of the Apostles, 17:16).This was the impression that would have struck anyone approaching the precincts of a Greek temple.
On display in the sanctuaries of Athens and of any other ancient Greek city were many images that fell within the category of ‘votive offerings’ – images that were gifts to the gods.Votive offerings could also take many other forms – food, money, clothes and so on – and it is not always clear whether an image is intended to represent the deity or the worshipper. At any rate, it was a busy trade.
A Phoenician inscription from another sanctuary on Cyprus, at Kition, tells us that around 800 BC a particular pilgrim to the temple of the goddess Astarte arrived there, had his head shaved, and offered his clipped locks in a vase to the goddess, along with a sheep and a lamb, plus another lamb on behalf of his family. In fact, Greek sacrificial custom allowed for those dedicating animals at an altar to join in feasting after the ritual slaughter, leaving a package of offal and bones to higher powers. But it was in the spirit of personal expenditure that one worshipper in sixth-century BC Athens not only (we presume) brought a calf up to the Acropolis sanctuary for sacrifice, but also commissioned a marble statue of himself performing the act (Fig. 94). In itself, the gift of a calf was substantial.The value of the votive offering was multiplied many times over, though, when memorialized in stone – if not for posterity, then certainly to solicit continued goodwill from the deity of the place.
A marble statue of such life-size dimensions as the Athenian ‘Calf Bearer’ would entail about a year’s work for one sculptor. Although in practice the commission was doubtless subdivided among several variously skilled craftsmen, that estimate gives us a clear notion of how the votive ‘investment’ has been raised here, at least with respect to the mass-produced terracottas or little bronzes that were what most pilgrims in the Greek world could afford.To comprehend what prompted an individual to spend in this way, we need to bear in mind that votive practice was, for the Greeks and many others in the ancient world, a sort of two-sided transaction.Votive offerings were made either in thanksgiving for favours received, or else in the expectation of favours to come.Where hope was concerned – say, hope for a safe journey, or a successful pregnancy, or a cure of some personal affliction – then the terms of bargaining were clear enough. One gained as one gave.The more that was offered to the gods, the more the gods reciprocated.
One of the ancient Greek words for a statue is agalma, which can be translated as ‘something that gives pleasure to a deity’.The ‘jealous god’ of Moses took offence at a golden calf that was set up on an altar in the Sinai desert; by contrast, any deity of the Greeks would have been delighted. As one Greek philosopher reasoned, ‘the Greek manner of honouring the gods recruits whatever is most beautiful on earth, whether in terms of raw materials, human shape or artistic precision’. Marble was deemed a finer material than clay, wood or limestone. Bronze may have been considered better than marble; but the greatest esteem was undoubtedly reserved for amber, ebony, ivory and gold.The most celebrated of cult statues in Greece were ‘chryselephantine’, meaning that they incorporated large quantities of gold and ivory.Votive ‘credit’, as it were, was assured from such an image even before it was worked on by artists.
Examples of this logic could be drawn from other cultures. In pre-Columbian America, for instance, the maize god of the Maya was often figured in jade, or with jade embellishments.The precious status of the stone in itself was supposed to assure abundance of crops, with a bead of jade symbolizing the kernel of the maize plant. But perhaps there is no parallel for the extent to which the Greeks complemented the precious status of their divine images with a muscular, sensuous, unashamed anthropomorphism – in human form. In the trenchant Greek
application of this humanizing concept, deities could not only partake of the mortal frame and physical appearance, but were also prone to the usual range of human failings. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, even the highest of Greek higher powers – the Olympians gathered around almighty Zeus – can behave in manners lecherous, fickle, thieving and sly.They are not bound by human form, but readily make their epiphanies on Earth that way, sometimes to the bewilderment of mortal viewers. A sequence of archaic Greek poems, known as the Homeric Hymns, tells how, for example, Aphrodite the goddess of love came down and seduced a shepherd in his hut. It was only in the bliss of post-coital relaxation that Aphrodite chose to reveal her divinity by suddenly magnifying her size and rising through the roof. Or there are the verses to Apollo, god of luminescence and music, who manifests himself to a band of sailors ‘in the form of a man, quick and well built, in the full bloom of youth, his hair flowing over his shoulders’, an appearance that has the sailors momentarily baffled, for they do not know if it is a god before them, or some astonishingly handsome and athletic specimen of humanity (see page).
According to Greek belief, a deity could be in two places at once.Yet the images of deities were widely considered to encapsulate the animated presence of those they represented; and the interior chamber of a temple where such an image was customarily installed was known as the naos (dwelling place) of the deity concerned. On the occasions when the doors of a temple were opened to view, worshippers were permitted to peep into these hallowed quarters: what they saw inside was a statue perceived to be, itself, endowed with powers of perception. Numerous testimonies in Classical literature tell of statues moving, sighing, sweating and weeping; several stories also recount how certain worshippers became so carried along by the sense of animate presence that they not only addressed words to an image, but made amorous advances too (see page).
Some Greek thinkers protested at all this. ‘People might as well pray to brick walls,’ was the dour comment of one sixth-century BC philosopher, Herakleitos. Another critic, called Xenophanes, asserted that ‘what is good is ever to have respect unto the gods’, but not by endowing the gods with mortal garb, voice and form. Or, at least, Xenophanes wanted people to recognize the partisan nature of their anthropomorphic customs. ‘If horses or oxens or lions had hands,’ he noted, ‘or the power to paint and make the works of art that humans make, then horses would paint or carve their gods in horse-like forms, and oxen theirs in ox-like forms, and so with each, according to kind.’ Similarly, Ethiopians had deities with Ethiopian characteristics, and the Thracians made theirs Thracian-looking: logically, Xenophanes implied, how could such local or ‘ethnicized’ divinities be conceived to wield absolute universal power?
And yet it seems that the Greeks’ own mode of anthropomorphic belief contributed strongly to the Greek collective identity. In his Histories Herodotus noted as peculiar the religious customs of the Persians – peculiar because they erected no statues, altars or temples to their gods, instead giving sacrifices upon mountain summits, and paying homage to the heavens, and the sun, moon, earth, fire, water and winds. (Though he does not know it as such, Herodotus is describing Zoroastrianism, whose priests, known as magi, indeed officiated at rites without images.) And because his audience was so thoroughly imbued with anthropomorphic practice and ideals, Herodotus felt obliged to describe in some detail another alien mode of worship, whereby images of deities drew upon the animal kingdom.This he encountered in Egypt, and we can almost hear the gasps of incredulity among his ancient Greek listeners when they learn that domestic pets such as cats and dogs enjoy sacred status there, and are more precious to the Egyptians than their own houses.
94 (left) A prayer in stone – the ‘Calf Bearer’, Athens, c.570–60 BC.
95 (above) An Egyptian statuette of the hippopotamus goddess Tawaret.
Herodotus openly acknowledged that the system of deities among the Egyptians historically predated and formally influenced the Greek pantheon. So Athena was a dark-skinned goddess for the Egyptians long before the Greeks used ivory to represent her complexion. However, the Egyptian custom of imagining these deities with animal aspects or manifestations created a powerful impression of difference or ‘otherness’. Amun, the chief deity of Egyptian Thebes, might in function and divine hierarchy be twinned with the Greek Zeus, but not in image, so long as Amun appeared as a ram, or ram-headed.The original motives for associating this or that Egyptian deity with certain fauna are not always clear, though some speculations seem warranted – for example, that the god Anubis was given jackal features because he was lord over corpses and cemeteries, and jackals were known to be eagerly interested in both. In any case, explanatory myths were woven around and about all these zoomorphic images; and their cultic or superstitious relevance is rarely difficult to demonstrate.
One example may be enough: a minor deity, but memorably composite.The goddess Tawaret (‘the great one’) was made up mainly with the body of a pregnant hippopotamus, an animal that was, as Herodotus observed, held sacred along certain stretches of the Nile.Tawaret stood upright, however, on two leonine legs, had the spine and tail of a crocodile, and two arms mostly human, save where they turned into the paws of a lion. Her long hair was combed so that it half-covered a pair of sagging breasts; and her muzzle, which owes something to the hippopotamus, was invariably shown open, exposing enormous, peg-like teeth. Her image is consequently both unnerving and maternal (Fig. 95). And that is as it should be, for Tawaret served as an active protectress. She was especially protective of women during childbirth, but also of marriage and sleep; and her image, fashioned into an amulet, was customarily worn by children in order to avoid encounters with snakes and crocodiles.
THE BUDDHA’S IMAGE
The travels of Herodotus did not take him as far as the Indian subcontinent. Had he strayed there, he would surely have come across the reputation, if not the person, of a wandering teacher and holy man once known as Siddhartha Gautama, generally agreed to have lived between the mid-sixth and fifth centuries BC. Siddhartha was born a prince of the Sakya (or Shakya) clan, whose home was where the borders of India and Nepal now meet.When he took to preaching around the cities of the Ganges River basin, he became known as Sakyamuni, or ‘Sage of the Sakyas’. Ultimately there was another change of name when he was hailed as Buddha, ‘the Enlightened One’. Siddhartha was, therefore, the historical founder of Buddhism, a faith that, in various forms, was diffused across much of Asia by the tenth century.
We have already noted that the state of Buddhahood – an awakening, as it may also be defined – is reckoned in some early Buddhist texts to be an inexpressible attainment. Several centuries elapsed, it seems, before a figurative language was contrived to articulate not only the appearance of the Buddha in his perfected eternity, but also the key events of Siddhartha’s life and mission. In the northerly region known as Gandhara (roughly approximating to modern Pakistan), some traces of Classical influence upon this Buddhist iconography have been supposed – in the folds of drapery worn by the robed Buddha and his monastic followers, or in the bodybuilder physiques sported by associated figures, carved characteristically in a grey stone called schist. Such supposition of stylistic influence is not absurd, for this was the area of India once reached (in 326 BC) by Alexander the Great and his nominally Greek army (see page). But the development of Buddhist imagery was more immediately shaped by the Mauryans – central Indian rulers who annulled all of Alexander’s incursions – in particular the emperor Ashoka, who reigned through the mid-third century BC. Ashoka established a host of sacred sites at which relics of the Buddha were said to be preserved.These were solid mounds faced with brick, and marked off by carved stone gateways and perimeters; estimates of their number across Mauryan territory total some 84,000.The generic term for them is stupas: each stupa held within it a casket containing some token of the Buddha’s earthly existence (a lock of hair, a tooth, ashes, or suchlike).Whatever the relic, it was never on display to pilgrims, being buried d
eep below the monument. It seems to have been in order to assist the focus of pilgrimage that sculptural narratives were eventually elaborated at certain stupas.
96 (top) An aerial view of the stupa at Borobudur, Java, c.800.
97 (above) The Parinirvana Buddha at Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, 11th–12th century.
At Sanchi, in the centre of the Indian subcontinent, a Great Stupa created in the first century BC was elaborated with sculptural prompts and cues for followers of the Buddha’s life and teaching. Centuries later, when variants of Buddhist faith had been transplanted throughout Southeast Asia, the stupa erected at Borobudur, on the island of Java, would present pilgrims with a daunting massif of stairways, corridors and terraces to ascend, densely interspersed with narrative illustrations, as it were, of the way towards the peak of enlightenment (Fig. 96). Elsewhere, a less complex iconography developed in which four principal episodes of the Buddha’s story were singled out for special emphasis.These were his birth; his attainment of peace – the enviable personal ease reached by conquest or extinction of all cravings, a state known as ‘nirvana’; his first sermon; and his death, or parinirvana (Fig. 97).
The scene of birth usually shows Siddhartha’s mother, Queen Maya, holding on to the branch of a flowering tree, her legs crossed in the manner of a fertility goddess or tree spirit, and the little prince Siddhartha either emerging from her right hip, or else toddling forward to take his first steps. In some abridged versions, he is seen doing both in the same image (Fig. 98). According to certain Buddhist scriptures, the child walked in the four cardinal directions, declaring, ‘I am born for supreme knowledge, and for the welfare of the world.This is my ultimate birth.’