18
THE ACCRETION OF MEANING
Nativity by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, c. 1490: the birth of Jesus as Saint Bridget of Sweden saw it in her vision
One of the most popular Christmas cards sold by the National Gallery in London is the Nativity, painted around 1490 by the Netherlandish artist Geertgen tot Sint Jans. In the darkness of the stable, Mary is joined by angels to worship the newborn child who illuminates the scene, radiating light. Behind the manger, the ox and the ass look on. In the far distance, an angel is telling the shepherds what has just happened.
It is a scene so familiar to most of us that it is easy to overlook its complexity. Not for the first time in this book, we see the frontier between heaven and earth miraculously dissolved. Here, angels pass easily from one to the other. Most people, if asked, would say that Geertgen is illustrating the Gospel narrative. But he does far more than that. This Nativity combines three very different kinds of stories – historic, prophetic and mystic – into one powerful image.
Saint Luke’s account of Christ’s birth seems to report a historical event which occurred when Caesar Augustus ordered a census. Neither ox nor ass, however, appears in the Gospel. Hundreds of years earlier the Hebrew prophet Isaiah had foretold that those animals would one day recognize the future master of Israel, the Messiah. So they have been led from the Old Testament to the New, and into the stable at Bethlehem to acknowledge the Christ child: an obscure prophetic utterance, turned into beasts that every western child today recognizes – a much loved, but very imperfectly understood, addition to Saint Luke’s story.
The shining, luminous body of the newborn baby, giving out rays of light like the sun, is also not to be found in the Gospel: this detail was provided by Saint Bridget of Sweden, a fourteenth-century mystic who in a vision had found herself present at the Nativity. Her published ‘eye-witness’ account of what she saw there – the stable made dark by the brilliance coming from the child, Mary worshipping her son, angels singing – was hugely popular in Northern Europe around 1500. That is what is shown here, as we are allowed to join Bridget on her mystic journey back in time, seeing what she saw, while also sharing Isaiah’s looking forward to the coming of the Messiah. The brisk Gospel narrative of the first century – ‘she laid him in a manger, because there was no room at the inn’ – is fused with dreams and visions written down at nearly 2,000 years’ distance from each other, which we now overlay with our own memories of childhood and the strains of ‘Silent Night’. Like most religious pictures, this one tells not one story, but several – and allows us to add ours.
This capacity of images seamlessly to combine the seen and imagined worlds has been exploited wherever humans have tried to convey spiritual experience. Across Southern Africa, we find art ranging over many centuries, painted on the rock in thousands of caves and shelters, by the people long misleadingly described by Europeans as ‘Bushmen’. Although there are many different linguistic groups and there is no one name on which all agree, they are now most commonly referred to as San|Bushmen. They are considered to be autochthonous: in other words, they are still living in the same region as they did over 70,000 years ago, when their ancestors (like all our ancestors) evolved into modern humans. Until relatively recently, they were essentially hunter-gatherers (and to some extent still are). Their hunters pursued eland, a kind of antelope. Outsiders have long been fascinated by their languages, characterized by a system of clicks, which to non-San speakers are bewilderingly difficult to mimic, and which combine to make more distinctly different consonants than any other known language.
The Game Pass shelter at Drakensberg, South Africa, one of the most celebrated examples of San|Bushman rock art painting
Their rock art paintings are equally intriguing. Human figures, often tall and wispy, some with animal heads, seem to be progressing across a landscape. Many have in their hands implements of some sort, perhaps tools or weapons. Others are flying or jumping, not always clearly distinguishable from animals doing the same.
For the uninitiated viewer there is wonderment and frustration in almost equal measure. We know that this art was made by people with brains like our own. We know that there must be meaning encoded here, which we ought to be able to understand if only we had the key. Recovering the meaning of an image like this is a little like deciphering a lost language, or trying to work out what is going on in a game of cricket if you do not know the rules: the allure of discovering significance and coherence is tempered by a profound sense of being an ignorant interloper into somebody else’s thought world.
In this San|Bushman rock painting in the Free State Province of South Africa, eland and shamans move across the surface of the rock on a journey into the world of the spirits.
David Lewis-Williams, of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, knows a great deal about these sorts of frustrations with San art, and also about the fruits of long effort trying to enter its imagery and thought:
There are many forms of rock art around the world for which we have no corresponding verbal record telling us about the beliefs and practices of the people who created them. With San art, we do have such records. For many years it was a matter of gaze and guess: if you gaze long enough, your guess will take you close to what it’s all about. But I’m afraid that’s not how it works. We need more than that. And here, luckily, we have it. Back in the 1870s, at around the time that the last rock paintings were being made, a German linguist called Wilhelm Bleek came to South Africa, conversed extensively with the San – in a San language which is no longer spoken – and developed a phonetic script for writing down everything they said. His sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, compiled the results: a vast collection of biographies, and many accounts of rituals and myths.
The result of this timely nineteenth-century fieldwork is that we are able to match what we know of the San world of thought and practice with what we see in their rock art, in much the same way as we can with European art. As David Lewis-Williams points out, if you look at a Renaissance painting and see a man having water poured over his head, with a dove depicted above, we know that this is not just a record of a man who was having a shower one day when a bird flew by. We understand that in this tradition the dove represents the Holy Spirit, that water is used for ritual purification, and that this scene must therefore be the baptism of Christ. The same applies to the rich symbolism of San rock art:
There are crucial details in this image [this page], which once you understand them immediately transform it from something mundane into an account of a journey into the spirit world. A fly whisk, drawn as a straight line with a thicker piece hanging down – an antelope tail – indicates a shaman, a medicine man. The San people who made these paintings used fly whisks only in their medicine dance – they didn’t use them in daily life, to bat away flies. And our records tell us that when people went into an altered state of consciousness, to visit the spirit world, they suffered a nasal haemorrhage. They then smeared the blood on people, in the belief that the power of the blood and the smell of the blood – because smell and power are much the same thing – would keep the evil spirits away. So there are many reasons to regard this image as representing the experience of a shaman going into the spirit world while being watched by others.
The posture of one of these figures on the left confirms this hypothesis. His arms are sticking out behind his shoulders, a posture painted all over Southern Africa, which puzzled us for a long time. And then, many years ago, I was in the Kalahari talking to the medicine people – who had never seen copies of rock paintings. During a lull in the conversation, one of the men stood up and put his arms into just such a backward position. He told us that some people dance like this when they’re asking god to put more potency into their bodies, so that they can go to the spirit world and cure people. After all those decades of puzzling, there was the answer. ‘Why didn’t you tell us before?’ I said. ‘You never asked,’ was the reply.
Detail of San|Bushman rock painting (this page) showing figures with their arms stretched out behind them
Bit by bit, we begin to see that there are different levels of meaning here. What had looked like a simple hunting scene becomes a record of a spiritual journey into another realm of experience as well. The hybrid human–animal images are shamans in some kind of trance, absorbing the power of animals to help them gain access to the spirit world. On their return, they may well have created art like this as a way of explaining to people where they had been and what they had seen and done. David Lewis Williams goes even further: he suggests that when the shamans enter an altered state of consciousness, a wall painting like this would allow the rest of the group, who are not in a trance, to share in the shamans’ heightened spiritual experience – in some measure, to accompany them on their journey to a different world:
in rather the same way that the whole congregation in a cathedral might experience a sense of being uplifted, transported, when music by Tallis is being sung by the choir. I think that the paintings helped spread the experience of the spirit world so that ordinary people could share vicariously in what the shamans experienced.
If this is so, then the rock paintings of the San are not so different in function from the National Gallery Nativity, which allows ordinary spectators to share Saint Bridget’s vision on her mystical visit to the stable in Bethlehem.
The work of the artist Grayson Perry is frequently based on narratives, many about his own imaginative experience, which viewers have to decipher for themselves. Asking him to comment on the San|Bushmen rock paintings, with no prior knowledge of their beliefs and practices, it was striking how much he was able to intuit. At first, unsurprisingly, he thought that these were hunting scenes of some sort. Then he noticed that animal and human figures were becoming mixed, and that the scene including the arms-back posture has the ecstatic quality of a ritual dance. He speculated on its purpose:
I imagine these people were living very harsh lives. The animals were not only their food source, the people would also probably be under threat from wild beasts – as potential prey themselves. I wonder whether these people were almost literally trying to get into the heads of the animals, so that they would understand better how they could either kill them, or not be killed by them. Holding your arms stretched out behind you makes you very vulnerable: you are entering a space with your head and your face. You don’t have your arms to protect you, and that means that you’re giving yourself up to whatever you encounter.
There is a rare keenness and imagination to Grayson Perry’s insights here: the mark, perhaps, of the accomplished artist used to inviting people into his own imagined world. He finds it unsurprising that religious experience should often be closely connected to deep engagement with works of art:
Significance and beauty in art are communally agreed things. People construct their own narratives based on my work – or any work – a real investment of themselves. Religion, to begin with, is bound up with society’s emotional needs, and art is about emotional investment in the thing itself, not about the facts that may or may not surround it. We all bring our own life story and experience to bear on every image that we ever contemplate. So religion and art are both negotiations. Some people want to know exactly how they are meant to feel. They want to be drawn along by a narrative, so that their emotions are manipulated by the story and they feel like they’re doing it right. Other people are happy just to have a spontaneous amorphous reaction – a sensory response. Art, for me, is about making meaning. It’s about trying to offer some fragile foothold in the moment, amidst the chaos of life.
In that chaos, images allow people to make, and to convey, meanings of almost infinitely fluid complexity which words would struggle to carry. The San|Bushmen rock painting seems to take a community of hunter-gatherers on a journey into the world of the spirits. We can witness the reverse phenomenon in a small nineteenth-century Japanese shrine where the spirits come to visit a long-settled agricultural society (p. 279). The curved doors of a small wooden box about a foot high open to reveal, inside, a shimmering world of carved gilded wood. On a decorated pedestal is a group of three foxes, arranged symmetrically. To left and right a fox sits with its tail proudly up, together looking out at us like heraldic beasts. One of them is holding a key in its jaws. The third fox, placed higher and in the middle, carries on its back a large, plump, female figure holding a sword in one hand, a heart in the other. Her garment has strips of bright red, the only colour amidst all the gold.
Set to work on the shrine – an object also totally new to him – Grayson Perry quickly devised a narrative:
It’s about survival and comfort and good things and the continuation of a healthy happy life, yet, with the sword and the heart, death is hovering. It’s always hovering there isn’t it, death? Even within the bounty of the earth and the natural world. Maybe without the anger of that goddess, we might be a bit smug.
It is surely a testament to our abilities as human beings to both shape and appropriate other people’s stories that an artist is able here to take an unfamiliar image and tradition and construct, out of three foxes, a lady and a sword, a coherent narrative about death, life, abundance and violence – or, in his words, to make meaning amidst the chaos of life.
This is, in fact, an image that most people in Japan would be able to read immediately – although they would not all read it the same way. The fox on the left, with the key, tells a Japanese viewer that the figure in the centre must be Inari, the important Shinto deity, or kami. The deity appears in this image in an early role, as protector of agriculture in general and the rice harvest in particular: the key in the fox’s mouth is the key to a rice storehouse, and one of the possible sources for the name ‘Inari’ is the Japanese phrase ine-nari, meaning ‘rice is growing’. Inari is often depicted as coming to earth from heaven riding on a fox. Some claim this was because foxes’ tails can look like sheaves of rice, others that foxes are often seen around rice fields, possibly feeding on birds and animals that might eat the crop. However that may be, around a third of all the Shinto shrines in Japan today – over 30,000 of them – are dedicated to Inari. Those in shrines in the countryside regularly provide nourishment for the local foxes – fried tofu is traditionally their food of choice. So far, so simple: this little sculpture seems to be as easy for a Japanese to read as the Nativity for a European.
The fox and the key: in this Japanese house shrine, the fox of Inari holding the key to the rice store flanks the figure of Dakini in a complex merging of spiritual narratives.
Then it gets more complicated. Beyond rice, Inari has a range of further associations, including tea, saké, human fertility, industry, wealth and success in commerce. The deity has a wide, apparently constantly expanding portfolio, and a presence in everything from ancient tales to contemporary manga and anime: on the roof of the Tokyo headquarters of the huge Shiseido cosmetics company is a famous shrine to Inari, who can protect corporate profits as well as rice harvests. More confusingly, Inari is not always necessarily female, and can occasionally take the form of an old man carrying rice on his back. Because of Inari’s immense popularity, there are many additional meanings – complementary or competing – bound up in an image like this one, which different viewers would invest with different significance.
Some would see the foxes here as messengers, others as deities in their own right. And some might see, conjoined in the central figure, a second quite different deity. As Buddhism spread from the Asian mainland to Japan, from the sixth century onwards, the deities brought by the incoming religion were slowly – and deliberately – equated with deities in the indigenous Shinto tradition. It was a remarkable feat of assimilation, comparable in some ways to the fusion of Greek and Roman gods. New patterns of belief were superimposed on the old, supplementing but not supplanting them. As part of this process one Buddhist deity, Dakini, originally Indian, who is both protective and destructive, who sometimes cherishes human hearts and sometimes eats them, came to be identified, indeed to co-exist, with the Shinto Inari. It is that amalgamated deity that we see so imposingly here: the central figure is carrying a heart and a sword, the emblem of Dakini, who is now surprisingly appearing in – in fact reshaping – Inari’s story. One might compare Dakini’s presence in Inari’s world with the intrusion of Santa Claus, originally Saint Nicholas, a bishop from southern Turkey, and reindeer from the North Pole into the biblical narrative of Christmas (Chapter 15). Something of the same sort goes on in the floating, ever-widening range of Inari’s meanings.
This shrine, which is at once Inari and Dakini, shows the extraordinary power of an image to combine narratives that are on the surface irreconcilable. It also demonstrates the capacity of Japan’s religious culture to absorb new elements, most notably in its sustained adoption of incoming Buddhist beliefs and practices. Only when it was confronted with a religion which refused all such negotiation – Christianity – did the Japanese spirit harden, as we shall see in Chapter 28. In the Japanese tradition, there is space for several truths, which may be incompatible yet are co-existent. The Inari shrine exemplifies what happens when stories of belief are allowed to grow in complexity and the images of those stories change to meet the new understandings. As the philosopher John Gray writes, ‘Religions seem substantial and enduring only because they are always invisibly changing.’
The current coat of arms of South Africa, introduced in 2000, bears an image of a standing man, taken from a San rock painting, accompanied by a motto (roughly ‘Diverse people unite’) in a San|Bushmen language that was recorded by Bleek in the 1870s, and which is now extinct. An image and a language equally distant from all modern South Africans allow them to travel together to a world of harmonious unity – a political, secular transposition of a San shamanic journey.
The coat of arms of modern South Africa. Figures derived from San|Bushman rock art, with the motto ‘Diverse people unite’ written in Khosan, a now extinct San|Bushman language
Both rock painting and shrine demonstrate the ability of images to take those who look on them into areas of meaning well beyond the bounds of language and obvious rationality. In this potent but unstable mix nobody can ever be certain what meaning will be taken away. It is then no surprise that, over the millennia, religions have both exploited and rejected, with equal vigour, images as a means of guiding the people. That is the subject of the next two chapters.