Lifting up my eyes
|
|
The Cosmic Man in the Eagle Nebula
|
| A photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope attracted a lot of pubicity a few years ago. It showed three dramatic pillars of interstellar gases. They are what are known as "stellar nurseries", star-forming regions, and were dubbed the "Pillars of Creation". When I first saw the photo, the shape of the left-most pillar reminded me of another image I had seen.
Excavated near Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, approximately 32,000 years old, it's a small figurine of a lion-headed human carved out of mammoth ivory. Exciting, intriguing, it comes from the time when our species was just beginning to express ideas pictorially. What, then, is being expressed here? It's way too early for gods to be represented anthropomorphically, isn't it? Lions were dangerous, immediate forces in their lives. I'd say it's an image of a person who has enlarged him or herself, who's taken on the spirit of the lion. A shaman. The third element contributing to this painting idea comes from page 201 of my old hard cover copy of Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung. On the lower right is an image from an 18th century Indian illuminated manuscript of the Cosmic Lion Goddess. I'd love to know more about her - her name, at least. She holds the sun, and the lion on which she is riding is composed of many people and animals. On the same page is an illustration from Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, a regal figure who is "made up of all the people of the 'commonwealth' - Hobbes's ideal society". The Cosmic Man, says Jung, is "the gigantic, all-embracing figure that personifies and contains the entire universe." Put it all together, stir briefly, and viola - an entity who is all of us, who embodies all that we are, all that we could be, standing among the stars. An alternate title that I still like would be "Megalopsyche" in the Ancient Greek - "Great-Souled". |
