Celtic metamorphoses and the technology of enchantment

London

Your gatekeeper is a horned god who stands back to back with a second self.  You enter a field of metamorphoses. You may turn into the curl of a wave, or a waterbird in flight.
    Fish becomes man, dog becomes dragon. You reach for a flagon of unmixed wine and when  your hand closes on the handle it becomes the hound that is chasing a duck that swims into your mouth on a red river. Long-beaked bird-headed men are alive on a Shetland cross. Gold and silver and bronze glint at the throats and on the forearms of queens and heroes.

I am thrilled at the British Museum by by the amazing exhibition "Celts: Art and Identity", despite stumbling in, unshowered, from a redeye flight from the US. The art of the Celts reflects a collective imagination in which everything is in connected, everything in flux, vital energies change form and surge beyond form.
    Some of the patterns are visual riddles. Some were designed, as Alfred Gell proposed, as "a technology of enchantment" [1] designed to capture minds and bind them like ivy. You feel that as the shapes become tendrils, endlessly looping, making knots without end or beginning, no strings you could pull. 

Some images are mysteries to dream on. Is that a bull's head with bulging eyes hidden beside the boss of the "Battersea shield"?     
    What is going on with the "ears" on the so-called Glauberg statue, dug up from a warrior grave in Hesse? Are they stylized horns or antlers, or leaves, or bunny ears, or the Moon worn as a neck rest? Symbols of hypersensory power - especially clairaudience - or the nimbus of Awen (inspiration) whose symbol he wears at his throat? Are these primal shamanic headphones? What would you hear and sense if you wore them?    
    I remember a dream of thirty years ago in which I was watching over my "family" of ancient deer as they grazed in a fertile, unspoiled valley. I felt the strength and weight of my antlers, larger than a moose's horns, and rose with the sense of power and connection.
    I look again at the statue. What is going on with that leaf-like shield over the abdomen? I think of how spirit men in my native Australia open the tjurni - located at the abdomen - to release the dream soul to go traveling. Sometimes they use a hand motion in doing this. Is that what the Celtic figure is doing with his left hand, under the shield - releasing a spirit self to go traveling, as dream shamans have always done?

The boar is everywhere, running before you and around you. Be careful. You pause to hear the hot howl of war from the throat of a boar-headed carnyx, with great leaf-like ears, recalling the statue.
    Swords and shields, iron and oak, ash and bronze. Shields that are plain at the front but have  hidden powers at the back, in the coiling serpents at the grip. Shields with glaring eyes at the front, with hidden faces of raging bulls or angry birds.   
    You find your end at last, craning over the great silver cauldron from the bog, braving the fierce stare of all those gods you cannot name. You find yourself swimming in bull's blood down to the scene of mystery at the base, where a naked woman warrior exults, sword in hand, over the immense body of a dying bull. His magnificent potency is evident, but it is about to be transferred, with the rush of his blood, to those who have willed this ritual.

How far did the Gundestrup cauldron travel to its sodden burial in Jutland? Some maintain that the scale and complexity of the silverwork reveals the hand of Thracian (or Dacian) smiths far to the south-east, in modern-day Romania.[2] There are elements - elephants and the half-yogi posture of the famous antlered god - that suggest contact with peoples even farther east.  

In my end is my beginning.

References

1. Alfred Gell, "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics" in  J. Coote and A. Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 40-66.

2. A.K. Bergquist and T.F. Taylor, "The Origin of the Gundestrup Cauldron" in Antiquity 61 (1987)10-24

When the Devourer stands guard over the W.C.

London

In our dreams, a visit to the rest room may be about more than the ordinary bodily functions. In the British Museum, during my recent visit to a splendid exhibition devoted to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, I found that some inspired designer had chosen a fearsome mythic gatekeeper for the descent to the loos.

There, at the head of the long, turning flights of steps next to the exhibition space, was a hybrid monster that seemed to combine features of the crocodile, the hippopotamus and the lion.

This entity appears again and again in ancient Egyptian paintings of the scene of afterlife judgment in which the heart is weighed against the feather of Truth. If the heart is found to be burdened by guilt and darkness, it is tossed to the monster, whose name - Ammit - is translated as Devourer. The unhappy soul is now denied passage to the desirable afterlife of the Field of Reeds, and must wander restless and homeless.

In our bathroom dreams, we often learn about what we need to dump, not only from our bowels but from our lives. When the Devourer of the Heart stands guardian over the way to the W.C., the mind may be drawn to focus on what needs to be released in order to pass the test of the Weighing of the Heart.

Hoping for Ma'at

London

A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall."

- Ahdat Soueif, The Map of Love

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Back to the British Museum last night for a public "conversation" with a pair of contemporary novelists, the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif (The Map of Love) and the Sudanese-British Jamal Mahjoub (Travelling with Djinns). Their books explore travel and identity and liminal spaces, and are said to contain echoes of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, described by the Director of the British Museum, in his introduction, as "the oldest surviving travel literature".

Ahdaf Soueif had some interesting comments about how, after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, the idea of Ma'at (truth, justice, fairness) was revived and "re-articulated" in Egypt. This produced a passionate statement of the need for social justice in an early Middle Kingdom text known as the Eloquent Peasant, which has come down to us intact because it was copied and re-copied over many centuries. Ma'at was personified as a goddess wearing the feather against which the heart of the deceased is weighed in athe Hall of Truth; if the heart, burdened by guilt and darkness, drags down its side of the scale, the soul is consigned to a hybrid monster known as the Devourer.

Out of the wreckage of an ancient Egyptain regime came the luminous description of the Negative Confession, in which the deceased person, in the presence of 42 assessor gods, must swear that he has not committed a long list of crimes or infractions, not only of the order of "I have not killed" but extending to "I have not caused tears" and "I have not obstructed water when it should flow". While it's clear from the surviving texts that plenty of Egyptians approaching the afterlife hoped to get around some of these provisions by loopholes, deals and magical spells, a vision of a last judgment "based on behavior, not belief" (as Ahdaf noted) has a modern and very progressive ring.

Naturally much of the discussion last night focused on the current state of affairs in Egypt and the less-publicized coming partition of Sudan. The novelists, correctly, did not purport to be social prophets. Ahdaf Soueif, who has been journaling her days and nights with the protesters in Tahrir Square, said of the Mubarak regime, "They've been messing with the soul of the country" and held out the hope of a coming order - informed by openness, diversity and the characteritic Egyptian sense of humor - where Ma'at will reign.

Freud among the breathing idols

London

The exhibition on the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the British Museum is the most exciting Egyptian exhibit I've seen. A portal image just inside the doors is worth the price of entry: a statuette of the ka-soul of Senoru, master of horse, clasping his ba-soul, depicted as a human-headed bird, to his heart.

The exhibition was crowded (Egypt is the perennial favorite of museum-goers) but there was good flow control. Kids were able to push their programs into slots and receive an Egyptian spell in return - for example, for changing into a bird, a snake or a crocodile.

Figures from 3,000 or 5,000 years ago, sculpted to hold an aspect of the soul, or a spirit that would "answer" for it (shabti) in the afterlife, or to guard a tomb, seemed strangely alive. I was reminded that the Greeks, who were fascinated by Egyptian statue magic, described such figures as "breathing idols".

It was strange to go from this to the Freud Museum, in the modest brick house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead where he lived for the last year of his life. It is filled with literally thousands of statuettes of gods and other supernaturals, mostly Egyptian, that Freud collected in Vienna. Some fifty are stationed like a battalion of soldiers on his desk. He placed others, like palace guard, between himself and patrients. He claimed to know all of them intimately and would choose different ones to stroke or consult - with his focused gaze - during sessions with patients.

I had known that Freud was a collector of antiquities, but the vastness of this collection is stunning. He compared his practice of psychoanalysis to archeology, in the sense of digging things up from buried levels of consciousness, and it seems that archeology was his favorite area of reading.

Freud, the doubter of the soul and its survival of physical death, who denied that life has any ultimate meaning, surrounded himself with images of ancient gods and spirits. He was surely aware that the Egyptian figures he collected were ritually ensouled, and thus believed to hold a part of the spirit of the dead, or something of the power of a god or psychic guardian.

In the British Museum exhibit was a beautifully carved torso of a dead woman, used as a kind of interworld telephone. A letter addressed to the funerary bust by a survivor began:

How are you?
Is the West [region of the departed] being good to you?
Look, I am one you loved.

May I see you fighting for me in a dream?

Did Freud's "breathing images" come alive in his dreams? My bet is that they did - and also that it is rather unlikely that he left records of those encounters, which would have run so contrary to his rather narrow doctrine of what goes on in dreams.

He did speak of how his art collection illuminated his understanding of symbols and colored his theories about neuroses. No surprise to find a picture of Oedipus with the sphinx on his wall. I see that a fellow-Australian, Janine Burke, has written a study of Freud's collection titled The Gods of Freud published, so far as I can ascertain, only in Australia. Naturally (since bibliophilia is an incurable condition for some of us) I have now ordered it from Oz.