Manifestations of the Sacred: Art, Ritual, and the Search for Holiness
© 2000 Philip Edward Harding
This essay grew out of a graduate seminar of the same title taught by Anna Kartsonis and Rene Bravmann at the University of Washington. The first draft was my final paper which I then reworked and expanded over the next few years. While I think I have now made the subject my own I owe a great deal to those two, particularly Anna, who invited me to attend the seminar when I was struggling and full of doubts about my decision to go back to school after 15 years as an artist thinking more in images than words.
Human beings live in two worlds - an inner and an outer world. The outer, or physical world, can be objectively measured and weighed, but the inner world is made up of vast realms of mind, emotion, and spiritual experiences, of dreams, fantasies, and myths, of archetypal forms, ideas, and timeless truths. These worlds are not independent of one another. In his essay There Is No Outer Without Inner Space1, R. Panikkar offers music as an example. Music requires physical space through which sound can move, but without inner space - a mind to experience it - music is only physiological noise. Panikkar presents a view of space as advaitic. That is, that we should not think of inner and outer space as separate, or one space as a mere metaphor for understanding the other, but rather as two poles of one space much as a magnet exists as two poles. But not all inner space holds the same meaning, the same truth. There are personal visions, and private dreams, but there are also collective myths, and spiritual truths, which transcends the individual. Bringing spiritual or sacred truth from inner space into outer experience is the traditional role of an artist in society2. Artists, architects, poets, and priests are transparent instruments of the sacred but the sacred is not dependent on any of them and may well manifest on its own.
In the book, Cosmos and History3, Mircea Eliade frames this idea in terms of myth and ritual - that for traditional people life only becomes real by living within their myths. When one ritually re-enacts a myth, profane time is suspended and the participant enters the myth. One's life becomes timeless and shares in the meanings and values of epic dramas. Eliade speaks mainly in terms of rituals, but there are a variety of means by which the sacred, or the mythic, is given a tangible reality in the lives of traditional people. They may, through pilgrimage, enter a mythic landscape and travel to places of visions, miracles or sacred history. The sacred might also be made real through materials sanctified from contact with holy people or places or from the remains or relics of holy people themselves. And the sacred can be invoked through art, architecture, and ritual that creates (or recreates) a holy prototype. That is, an icon comes into being as the outer physical form of a spiritual or archetypal divinity, and a temple or cathedral becomes a sacred space by taking its design from an inner, spiritual cosmos. It is the inner reality with which a sacred space or icon conforms that separates it from profane space and the mundane images of ordinary life.
In their book, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture4, Victor and Edith Turner describe pilgrimage with the language of anthropology. Pilgrimage is compared to a tribal rite of passage marked by three distinct phases. First, one breaks with the social structure. Then there is a period of liminality where one is outside the social structure and during which communitas may form with other pilgrims. Finally there is a re-integration with the social structure. Put another way, the pilgrim leaves behind the familiar mundane world, enters a sacred landscape, and then returns a changed person. The pilgrim may be described as "in the world but not of the world." He is traveling in the world of myths and gods. A pilgrim and a tourist may travel through the same outer landscape, and visit the same sights, but the inner landscapes through which they travel are vastly different. A bus load of secular tourists might share a certain sense of community but not a spiritual sense of communitas. When, for example, a Mexican pilgrim sets off to visit the Virgin of Guadeloupe it is to a place of visions and miracles - a place where the Virgin appeared to a humble peasant, produced a miraculous image of herself, and performed miracles of healing, and where the pilgrim's own prayers may be answered and life changed. The pilgrim is seeing with different eyes - eyes shared in communitas with fellow pilgrims.
The experience of liminality and communitas can also take on various degrees of intensity. A devotee making a daily or weekly visit to a temple, shrine or church encounters regular, small, brief moments of the sacred - moments of liminality during which one is outside of profane time and in communitas with other believers. At other times a journey might be a once in a lifetime event and stand as a major life defining moment for the pilgrim.
Some pilgrimages take on the quality of an archetypal journey to the center of the earth - a kind of mythical center of being. This is particularly true in the case of pilgrimages to Mecca or Jerusalem. For Moslems who face Mecca all their lives as they pray, Mecca becomes the spiritual and physical center of their universe. I have heard it said that if one were to stand in the Cabba in the center of Mecca, it would be like standing in paradise and looking out over the world in all directions. Turner's language of Pilgrimage is well suited to describe the Hajj. As William Roff describes in his essay Pilgrimage and the History of Religions: Theoretical Approaches to the Hajj5, the Hajj is very much a rite of passage. It is an obligatory pilgrimage that every Moslem must make as part of their spiritual life. It begins by setting ones affairs in order as if preparing for death, saying prayers that emphasize the apocalyptic nature of the journey, and leaving home. The journey itself is a collective one, but continues a process of continued separation and increasing sacrality. As Mecca is approached, there is a final purification and fresh clothes are put on which remove distinctions of rank and gender. This marks the final, total separation of temporal bonds as one enters sacred time and sacred space. Here, as one performs the collective rituals of the Hajj (walking in the footsteps of the Prophet), the sense of liminality and communitas are at their height. The pilgrim is thus able to transcend the mundane and the temporal and come away with an enhanced sense of being and of his place in the Moslem world. When he returns home he does so a changed person and may adopt new dress, a new name, and acquire new social status.
Many Christians visiting the Holy Lands in general and Jerusalem in particular are also making a journey to the sacred center of the universe. Jerusalem, in the minds of many pilgrims, becomes symbolically intertwined with the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelations. The city becomes a symbol of paradise, and pilgrimage becomes a spiritual path to heaven. There is also a kind of transcending of ordinary time that takes place in the minds of pilgrims. Glenn Bowman, in his essay, Pilgrim Narrative of Jerusalem and the Holy Land: a study in Ideological Distortion6, refers to pilgrim descriptions as a "mythscape." In the medieval narratives Bowman examines the landscape is not only rendered in terms of Biblical mythology, but Biblical stories are told as if in the present - as if the pilgrim were in their presence. It is as if history did not exist and pilgrims lived for the moment in a sort of eternal present. This timelessness is also reflected in the visual arts. In his essay Loca Sancta and the Arts of Palestine7, author Kurt Weitzmann shows how images often combined elements from a Biblical narrative with specific features of the present day Loca Sancta. For example, a nativity scene might combine an image of the Holy Family with specific elements from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
While the sense of traveling to or within an inner, sacred, or mythic landscape may be universal to pilgrimages, Turner's concept of the liminal and communitas is not. In the case of Hindu pilgrimage in India there can be a deliberate structuring away from communitas. In the essay, The Role of Pilgrimage Priests in Perpetuating Spatial Organization Within Hinduism8, Anita Caplan describes the role of Pilgrimage Priests, or Pandas, in maintaining social divisions among the roughly one million pilgrims to Prayag's annual Magh Mela. Pandas are professionals that maintain channels of communication between sacred centers and client families all over India and maintain those connections for generations. The 1,484 priest families in Prayag, have all of India divided up amongst them. The Pandas help pilgrims with places to stay, food to eat, security, assistance with rituals, and even loans of money if required. When pilgrims visit Prayag, the Pandas see that they stay with others of their own social class and from their own geographic region who speak the same language. The Pandas also keep records going back hundreds of years and can show a pilgrim when their father, grandfather or great-grandfather made the pilgrimage under the guidance of the Panda's family. There is also a sort of reverse pilgrimage from Prayag. Every year the Pandas travel to villages all over India meeting with client families and encouraging them to make the pilgrimage the following year. The most important role of the Pandas however, is not as travel agent, but as priest assisting pilgrims in the correct performance of rituals. Prayag is located at the confluence of three sacred rivers - two visible and one invisible. While many pilgrims come simply to take a ritual bath, many come to immerse the ashes of a family member in the confluence - a practice that must be done according to ritual.
Interestingly, ancient Indian texts, philosophers, and folk tales all affirm that pilgrimage is unnecessary and that place is an illusion. For those whose hearts are aglow with righteousness even their own tub can serve as the Ganges9. For most traditional people however, there is a need to make physical contact with the sacred. This has multiple benefits. The physical contact conveys the reality of the sacred. Like the Apostle Thomas who could not accept stories of Christ's resurrection until he put his own finger into the nail hole in Christ's palm, the act of physically being in a sacred place and touching a sacred thing confirms its reality. Through touch, one can make personal contact with saints and the power of the sacred - its power to heal or forgive. Anne H. Betteridge, in her essay Specialists in Miraculous Action: Some Shrines in Shiraz10, describes how pilgrims often form life long bonds of friendship with particular saints by making visits to the saint's tomb as if visiting a friend. When making vows at the saint's tomb, pilgrims may attach a padlock or tie a string to the tomb's grillwork as a physical expression of binding. For pilgrims visiting Kerbala, a place made holy to Shi'ites by the martyrdom of the Imam Husain, simply having made the pilgrimage can potentially get one into Paradise, and being buried in Kerbala guarantees it. Clay taken from the area around the tomb also has healing properties and is used to make rosaries, small clay tablets, clay rings and armlets11.
This use of clay or other physical materials that have healing or protective powers from contact with a holy person, place or thing, is also found in Palestine. Gary Vikan in his essay, Byzantine Pilgrimage Art12, shows how Byzantine pilgrims would acquire eulogia or "blessing" made from water, oil or earth that had become sanctified from contact with something sacred. For example, oil that had touched wood of the true cross or soil that had been placed in the tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. These eulogia typically bore an image and inscription reflecting its origin and use. Their use might be medicinal, protective amulets, or address a pilgrim's specific concerns such as a safe journey home. For example, pilgrims came to Symeon the Younger, who spent most of his life sitting on a column, for healing. The eulogia or tokens of Symeon, made with dust gathered from the base of his column, show his image, an imprint of the word hygieia or "health," a pilgrim on a ladder with a censer (incense being a vehicle to carry prayers and motivate the saints intercession), and on the back a palm print. Thus the sacred power of image, word, touch and material all combine to create the token's power.
The Byzantines also saw a saint's relics - his body or bones - as possessing a similar type of healing, saving, and protective power as eulogia. At first the veneration of saints began as graveside worship - perhaps not unlike worship at the tombs of Moslem saints in Shiraz. However, a pronounced change took place from Moslem practice. Christians began digging up corpses and bringing them into churches. Every church needed a saint's relics. As Patrick Geary explains in his essay, Sacred Commodities: the Circulation of Medieval Relics13, the preferred medium through which God used saints to act was their bodies. Their corpses were security deposits guaranteeing their continuing interest in the earthly community. Contact with them was a means of participating in their power and generated enormous competition in acquiring relics. Interestingly the power of the saint was not limited to the saint's intact corpse. The saint's powers were multiplied rather than diminished when his bones were divided and shared among various churches. Even a single sliver of bone could possess protective amuletic powers when placed within a phylactery and worn around the neck.
Just as in the case of eulogia, relics can be combined with other elements to increase their power. In her essay, Protection Against All Evil: Function, Use and Operation of Byzantine Historiated Phylacteries14, Anna Kartsonis describes how phylacteries combine multiple layers of sanctity. They were typically small, cross-shaped reliquaries made of cloisonné on gold or silver containing a splinter of wood from the true cross or slivers of bone from a saint. Their decoration would condense the core of theological doctrine into an abbreviated image cycle and might include a Gospel cue line and the names of saints to inter-link word and image. They might also take the form of miniature Gospel books - this at a time when some people wore miniature New Testament booklets as protective amulets. Some incorporated elaborate systems of multiple crosses requiring prior knowledge to decode, and still others would juxtapose images to reflect liturgical practices. Thus historiated phylacteries combined words, images, shapes and relics to create amulets of great power and sanctity.
That which is sacred, which can connect one with inner spiritual power, can reside in a place that can be visited, can be transferred to materials that have contacted a holy place or person, and can reside within the relics of a holy person. But the sacred can also be created, or re-created, through imitation. For example, Robert Ousterhout, in his essay, The Church of Santa Stefane: A "Jerusalem" in Bologna15, describes how numerous Romanesque churches copied the design of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In Bologna, not only does the church of Santo Stefano reproduce the Holy Sepulchre, but other churches and sacred sites of Jerusalem were reproduced throughout Bologna thus creating a topographical copy of the city of Jerusalem. It is as if through sympathetic magic, the sanctity of the city could be invoked by constructing an image. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the Gothic era when the designs of cathedrals were influenced by the New Jerusalem of Revelations.
In the Byzantine era, both the design of cathedrals and the liturgy performed within invokes the divine order. In The Cycle of Images in the Church16, Henry Maguire describes the images within two Greek churches as a kind of cosmic scheme. Their spaces are zoned hierarchically from heaven above to earth below. The main dome representing heaven was filled with a giant image of Christ. The drum of the dome contained Prophets and the squinches of the dome and eastern apse contained images of the incarnation. On the lowest level - most approachable by humans - were images of earthly saints. Similarly in his book, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy17, Thomas Mathews quotes the Mystagogia of Maximus the Confessor and Historia Ecclesiastica by St. Germanus to show that the structure and furnishings of churches, as well as the liturgy conducted within, were highly symbolic. Mathews quotes Maximus as writing, "The whole church by itself is the symbol of the entire cosmos as perceived by sense alone, since it has a sanctuary like the heavens and a beautiful nave like the earth." Similarly, St. Germanus saw the skenophylakion, a room where communion was prepared, as Calvary and the ciborium, or canopy over the alter, as symbolic of both Calvary and the Ark of the Covenant, thus furnishing the cosmic drama within. The main focus of Maximus and St. Germanus was the liturgy itself. Every act, from entering the church, enthroning the Gospel, ascending the synthronon, and dismissing the catechumens, to receiving the Eucharist itself, is seen as invoking a grand cosmic drama.
Similar to the cosmic scheme of Byzantine churches, Hindu temples are also based on a cosmic design. The temple ground plan is formed from a square gird called the vastu-purusa-mandala that simultaneously relates the building to the cosmos astrologically, to the hierarchy of the gods, and to the form of primordial man.18 The sanctuary is seen as a cave, or womb of the earth, and the form towering over the sanctuary is Mount Meru, the mythical mountain at the center of the universe around which the world turns. The devotee who circumambulates the temple, in effect circles the whole world. In his essay Form, Transformation and Meaning in Indian Temple Architecture,19 Adam Hardy provides addition insight into temple form. He shows that, unlike gothic cathedrals which rise up to heaven, temples of India manifest from the top down. From an invisible formless point above the temple the structure grows downward and outward expanding toward full manifestation and ultimate dissolution. Hardy shows how, through compositional devices such as repetition, multiplication, projection, and expansion, Hindu temples are not simply static cosmological models, but dynamic images expressing Indian metaphysical ideas of emanation of the spiritual and its manifestation in the physical world.
The cosmic scheme of a Hindu temple can also be found in the design of Indian pilgrimage cities. In his essay, Sacred Space and Pilgrimage in Hindu Society: the Case of Varanasi,20 author Rana P.B. Singh describes Varanasi, the most sacred of Hindu cities, as a mesocosm linking heaven (the macrocosm) with the individual (the microcosm). The city, with its 2,000 sanctuaries and half a million images, transposes all of Hinduism's sacred geography to itself. Reproduced within Varanasi are the seven sacred cities which bestow salvation, the twelve light-reflecting Shiva lingas of India, the four abodes of the gods, the eight Bhairavas, the nine Durgas, the forty two Shivas, etc. When pilgrims circumambulate the city of Varanasi they receive the benefit of circumambulating the whole cosmos. The transposition works two ways. Like Bologna's reproduction of Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, "Varanasi is present in a thousand places in India, each with its own temple of Kashi Vishvanatha."
Similar to Varanasi in India, Newar cities in Nepal are also designed with cosmic symbolism in mind. In his book Mesocosm,21 Robert I. Levy shows how the design of Bhaktapur, a city to the west of Kathmandu, is based on an idealized yantra, or magical diagram with nine protective, Mandalic Goddesses positioned at the center and eight compass points. The actual distribution of the Goddess's shrines form a highly irregular pattern around the city but that departure does not diminish the yantra's power. According to holy texts and religious scholars, a similar mandala is said to envelop the religious geography of the whole Kathmandu Valley. However when inhabitants of the region were interviewed, most lay persons could respond only to questions about their local shrine but made no mention of any over-all pattern.22 Hence, the sacred or inner spiritual geography of lay people may not be the same as that of specialists.
Manifesting the sacred need not be done on so grand a scale as a temple, cathedral, or city to be effective. The power of god(s) or saints can also be made tangible through images. In Byzantium, the most sacred images were those not made by human hands, but produced by a miracle either directly or, in the case of icons of the Virgin painted by Saint Luke, completed by divine intercession. These icons might have the additional power to miraculously reproduce themselves, thus multiplying their power. Even if reproduced by human hand, a copy was considered as powerful as the original for conveying the power of its prototype - the saint depicted within. Icons could substitute for relics as a means through which God and the saints might work miracles - an important consideration in the case of Christ and the Virgin who left no physical remains to be venerated. However, not all icons of a given saint were valued the same - some were powerful miracle workers. These were extremely valuable assets to their owners bringing not just spiritual benefit but considerable economic benefit as well.23 Iconoclasts attacked the veneration of icons as idolatry, but the Byzantines understood icons as the outer form of an inner reality. In venerating an icon, the homage was transferred to the saint.
A similar relationship between image and prototype exists in India. In Hindu devotional practice, images are bathed, dressed, fed, and treated in every way as living, breathing beings. Diana Eck in her book Darsan: Seeing the Divine in India,24 reports that people in India do not say they are going to a temple to worship, rather they are going for "darsan," which means "seeing." The image is the deity having manifested a physical form. The act of viewing an image of a deity is an act of worship, and being seen by an image is a means to receive the blessings of the divine. Hindu gods can manifest themselves in a great many different ways or not at all. However the unmanifest form of a god may be given an aniconic image. The god Shiva is seen as existing in a range of states from the formless and undifferentiated to full anthropomorphic manifestation. The formless or emergent forms of Shiva are represented by either a plain linga or a linga with faces emerging from its sides.25 Like the Hindu temple, the linga not only represents Shiva but illustrates something of the metaphysics of Shiva's nature. As George Michell notes in his book The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms,26 "Sacred images in Hinduism are never mere effigies; their function is to make visible the world of truth." Hence, the role of the artist and architect in Hinduism is not to express any individuality but to work with priests to illustrate an inner truth.
Among most traditional cultures the role of the artist or architect is to give form to an inner archetypal order - to manifest the sacred. Robert Lawlor writes that in Greek, the word "Architecture" means "the way or method of structuring what is archetypal."27 Temple architecture is therefore a way of symbolically representing archetypal concepts of time and space in the physical world. This is a platonic view that sees the physical world as only a shadow of the world of archetypal ideas. This view is also evident in Islamic art. In Islamic metaphysics, there is a scale of manifestation which first begins with the absolute or pure divine essence from which manifest archetypes. From archetypes are derived prime symbols which are able to embody or express them. At the lowest level is the manifest world. In much traditional Islamic art we find an avoidance of figurative or representational art depicting the physical world and instead find a preference for an art of color, number and geometric symbolism. This is an effort to draw the viewers mind and spirit away from the physical world and toward the divine - to manifest the inner or sacred world in the physical world. Like Hindu temples creating a model of the cosmos, or the cycle of images in a Byzantine church, the objective is to manifest the sacred, timeless order of the universe in the outer world for people to dwell within.
Notes