Posted on 04/17/2009 10:03:58 PM PDT by Salvation
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I worry that if HolyO has his way (read: his puppeteer) these
beautiful symbols will be abolished/destroyed, much like the Taliban destroyed those ancient, giant Buddha statues carved in the side of a mountain just before 9/11!!
Or like the temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, or like the Germans descrated and destroyed Catholic Churches during the Nazi Regime, or ??????
How about Mao and China and destroying humans by running over them with tanks?
descrated
desecrated
It was amazing to be reading an interesting, but rather dry book on just why old buildings are so aesthetically pleasing, only to be transported into what seems like a vision. Hale waxed especially poetic upon what he, and apparently the old designers of sacred Christian spaces referred to as the Vesica Piscis, repeated as he termed "like an incantation," throughout the entire structure, above and below ground.
Hale, as I recall, didn't seem entirely Christian in his outlook, veering into slightly pagan territory at times, but it was an extremely interesting book to read. If you ever encounter it, and especially if you're a fan of architecture, pick it up and give it a try. You're just plodding along with him, nice old guy but sort of fusty, inventorying this or that nice old building with explanations about the Golden Section and their preference for pattern, and then ... boom, off you go into some sort of dream world. Happens several times throughout the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, as you can likely tell.
Sounds like an interesting book, but not one that I might easily digest.
The Vesica Piscis part of it sounds very intriguing, however. A place of holiness.
There is a shape in architecture that symbolizes life, that represents the materialization of spirit. That shape is a place where symbol and geometry, body and spirit come together. In this way the shape is what architecture is. The shape is to be found everywhere in plants and animals. It is the shape of a flame, or a seed, or a fish. In sacred architecture it is known as the vesica piscis, vessel - literally bladder - of the fish, and it is also called the mandorla (Italian for almond). The vesica piscis is made when two circles overlap.
It may seem questionable whether we should pattern our buildings after fish or nuts or flames. But the Gothics did just that. At Chartres, Christ sits in a vesica piscis above the West Portal. And the Gothic pointed arch is half of a vesica piscis. In every Gothic church, the shape is repeated like an incantation, wherever one looks, and it may persist invisibly in the building's cross section, where it becomes an enclosing geometry of regulating arcs. The geometry of a Gothic building is an efflorescence of overlapping circles. We almost never see the complete circles, but only the places at which they join. The area where the circles overlap is the most important part of the pattern; it represents the place of harmony, awakening, grace. The vesic piscis is an emblem of unity achieved from duality. It represents the joining of the temporal and the spiritual - as architecture itself does.
He then proceeds at length about various cathedrals, providing beautiful examples of exactly what he's espousing, and then somehow slips off seamlessly into Wilhelm Reich (a highly controversial figure and quite odd though intelligent) and Reich's "orgonome" theories about energy flow. From there, it's off into wonderland for a while, then eventually back to Earth and the task at hand. Ebb and flow.
My guess wasn’t too far off.
I can see the overlapping circles in the fish symbol above, but that is the only one here.
Have you ever looked at a love knot? It’s like an intricate pretzel, and you definitely can see the overlapping circles. The Marriage Encounter symbol also comes to mind. I’ll post it in the next post.
There’s a lot of meaning contained in the symbols we’ve come to almost take for granted. The richness of the history behind what most know only as the “Christian fish” is something with which we all should become familiar. It’s why those fictional quadruped “Darwin fish” irritate me so. Such smugness, so certain of superior intelligence, but it’s they who are ignorant. Go deface some other ancient symbol, I say. They’re no better than Obama’s “tollybonn” blowing up Buddhas carved into cliff faces in Afghanistan.
Thank you very much.
What about butterflies? Aren’t they the symbol of therisen Christ?
Fascinating! That is sooo right up my alley, I’ll have to check it out (Medieval art history class changed my life). Thanks!
That’s so weird...my mother was just reading that book. She says she had read it about 20 years ago and had forgotten until she began rereading it and realized it was awfully familiar...well I’ll have her hold onto it for me!
An excerpt from the overleaf:
The Pillars Of The Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known ... of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect - a man divided in his soul ... of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame ... and of a struggle between good and evil that wil turn chuch against state and brother against brother.
Glad you liked it. Very interesting to me too. And I’m in no way connected to art.
(I just like the hidden meaning in these symbols.)
I’m sure there will be people who see in it Delphi inscriptions, but you gotta admit, as a Venn diagram, it’s pretty cool.
... not to knock any heritage of Delphi inscriptions, the “Jesus fish,” the earliest known abstracted Christian image, is a Delphi (=fish) inscription.
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