men

 Wigmore Street, London, 2008.

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Erotica and bulls? Erotica and cows? How’s it all connected?

Some time ago I read William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. I like his kind of imaginative scholarship - highly speculative, but grounded in the tangible remains of the deep human past. You don’t have to believe a word of it to find it stimulating. And who knows, he could be right.

One of his major themes is the place of the bull in the development of European culture - the harnessing by humans of that vital reproductive energy of the bull to energize their own reproductive efforts. The cow, too, appears to have an important place in the European story.

The next few posts will draw on some of the literature dealing with this topic.

(Above) Albrecht Dürer - Life of the Virgin

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Some resources to be brought to the discussion:

Bulls and archaeological evidence: William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996

More bulls and archaeological evidence: Cook, Arthur Bernard. Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1914.

 Bullfight: Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye

Milk: huehueteotl on human evolution

Europa:  In Wikipedia 

More Bulls: Sexculturas

Abduction of Europa, European Parliament, Strasbourg

A remarkable thing about the Barberini Faun is the way it presents the perfect body, the complete sensuality, with only the face portraying something disturbing. The dedication to the dissolute life produces something far from the good life or the life well lived - it produces a life bordering on a nightmare, or a life lived under a great weight. So says the Barberini Faun. A similar distortion of expression can be found in the other sculptures of satyrs at the Glyptothek. Age appears to deepen the malaise. The youngest faun has even a suggestion of hope in its expression. But this is lost in the Barberini Faun who is imprisoned irremediably, but not necessarily unwillingly, within his own indulgence. The second sculpture makes no reference to hope - neither present nor absent. It is at an intermediary stage. The dissolute is there, certainly, but the frown, also present in the Barberini Faun, has not yet mastered the somewhat fragile smile.

The second satyr of the three below is particularly interesting as it has on me a strong effect that I have long noticed, but which is often hard to identify. It takes us a very short while to get a first impression from a face, but it is not instant. Looking at this sculpture the very first impression is that of a smile, and yet within a couple of seconds my brain has processed other aspects of the mouth and face generally that lead my overall impression to adjust very rapidly from viewing a happy and beautiful person to viewing someone far removed from happiness and also probably far removed from from beauty, though it is hard to describe exactly the final impression. I can feel that change take place - but the process itself is quite unconscious. It’s kind of like watching a movie, except nothing in the object perceived is changing, all the change is going on as my mind takes a moment or two to read the face. Interestingly, too, the concluding point is incomplete - I am left wondering what my overall impression is - I am uncertain as to its meaning. That makes the face attract my attention, as I’d like to know more about it - it makes me search it. But it is also a very uncertain process because there are contradictions between happiness, beauty, and further strange emotions in the face. As a part of the process, my desire to see beauty is thwarted, but I find it hard to put a coherent alternative in place. The face is not ugly, but…? I am left hanging on to my desire to see beauty, even to the point of trying to project it back into the face, but my efforts are given little support.

I wonder if the sculptor was aware of all (or some) of these things, whether it is just my own reaction, or worse, my own invention? It is not hard to imagine the sculptor has sought to make a face of contradictions, but is this little two second movie with its tantalizingly incomplete conclusion a part of his intention? Any thoughts on these things?

See also Satyr 2 and Satyr 1.

20-10-08 - Having recently been to Europe I am pleased to add the following pictures of the Barberini Faun, taken at the Glyptothek, Munich. (See previous post at Satyr 1)

Ok, some time ago I was walking through the hallowed halls of the institution where I am required more or less to put in an appearance on a semi-daily basis. Pinned on a notice board was this picture:

It’s a lousy reproduction ‘cos I took the pic close up with my phone camera. Anyhow, intrigued as to why these guys holding masks also had erections, I decided to ask a passer-by who I thought might know the origin of the picture. Well, he didn’t, but he did know that it represented the Satyric chorus. I’ve looked on the web, but I can’t find this specific piece.

All the same, there is plenty of material about the Satyric play and chorus.

How odd that one can place on a notice board in a very respectable institution a picture of three guys with erections and no-one even notices. What is it about 2,500 year old pictures that somehow creates in us a blind-spot for this (what would otherwise be) transgression?

For more on the Satyric chorus:

Wikipedia - Satyr Play

Wikipedia - Satyr

Seyffert - Satyric drama

Mlahanas - Surviving Satyr plays

Sparknotes summary of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche, Chs 7 & 8

Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext By Bobby Joe Leggett

Pancime - Barberini Faun

If anyone can let me know the identity of the actual object in the photograph and its location I would appreciate it.

If anyone has any stories about transgressions that aren’t, I’d love to hear them.

The ‘Adonis from Chernitz’ was found in 2003 near Leipzig. The figure was made from clay around 7,200 years ago. Another fragment, thought to be the thigh of a woman, was found at the same site. Archaeologists speculate that the two figures may have been used together to depict the act of copulation. Below I have provided links to a few useful articles. These point to many more prehistoric sites bearing depictions of sex, and discuss the social environments that might have existed to produce such depictions .

Adonis von Zschernitz / Adonis from Chernitz

(Click on pic above for larger version, and you might need to click on that version to magnify it still more.)

Adonis von Zschernitz / Adonis from Chernitz

Adonis and Venus

Articles about Adonis from Chernitz

News articles

Pornography in Clay, Matthias Schulz, Spiegel Online International

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Erotica May Date Back to Stone Age, Jennifer Viegas, ABC Online

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Journals and books

There are no links to articles from journals and books, but the following might help you track something down:

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Germania (mentioned in the Viegas article, but no article available online that I could find)

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ARCHÆO 1, 2004

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Louis D. Nebelsick/Jens Schulze-Forster/Harald Stäuble, ‘Adonis von Zschernitz’, Archaeonaut 4 (here)

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Von Peißen nach Wiederitzsch - Archäologie an einer Erdgas-Trasse

Lake Constance

In his article in Spiegel International, Pornography in Clay, Schulz mentions a find on the shores of Lake Constance:

An archeological dig on the banks of Lake Constance has produced something just as spectacular as the erotic clay figures from Saxony. Researchers discovered a temple whose walls were once adorned with protruding clay breasts. The “cult temple,” uncovered by archeologists from the southern German city of Ludwigshafen, is almost 6,000 years old.

…The mysterious ancient temple on the banks of Lake Constance proves that special erotic rituals already existed at this early juncture, long before Egypt’s pyramids were built. “The cult building stood on pylons directly on the shore,” explains archeologist Helmut Schlichtherle. The interior was painted with white dots. But the site’s truly unique feature is that eight large clay breasts seemed to grow out of the walls, evoking images of a place devoted to the erotic.

There is more evidence that the temple was once a place filled with billowing smoke and ecstasy. Bits of fabric, perhaps parts of priestly robes, were found. Also among the rubble was an imposing ceremonial vessel filled with birch resin, a substance that produces a bewitching scent when heated. Perhaps birch resin was the incense of the Stone Age.

For more information about lake dwellings see Helmut Schlichtherle, Lake Dwellings in South-Western Germany, Living on the Lake in Prehistoric Europe: 150 Years of Lake-dwelling Research, by Francesco Menotti (ed)

Underwater Archaeology

See an interesting page on underwater sites at www.abc.se

See also a review by Arne Emil Christensen in Nautical Archaeology (Journal of the of The Nautical Archaeology Society) of ‘The Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress on Underwater Archaeology’ (IKUWA). The congress was held in 2004. The review mentions a paper that discusses the Lake Constance site:

In the ‘Cult Site’ section, this reviewer was most impressed by the very careful excavation work of a site in Ludwigshafen, Bodensee, Switzerland. Here the clay daub of a burned house showed traces of white paint. The oldest dendro-date from the site is 3861 BC. The reconstructed decorative motifs contain lifesize female figures with the breasts sculpted in relief. The author discusses whether this is a case of cult in a private house or a cult building, suggesting the latter solution.

Satyr - Barberini Faun

(courtesy manofroma)

20-10-08 - See a rather more elaborate display of this sculpture at Satyr 2.