Ars Sacrum – A Visionary Art Primer

Apr 19, 2013 Daniel Mirante in Headline, Sacred Art Theory History and Lineages 4 Comments Tags: icons, sacred art, tradition

By Daniel Mirante

Healing by Autumn Skye Morrison

“Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images.”
- Gospel of Philip

“Where there is no vision the people perish.”
- Proverbs 29:18

Humanity, one strand in the web of life, present something unique to the biosphere. We are inextricably of the flora and fauna of Gaia, and yet we live not only within a world of elements, objects, trees, creatures, sky and earth, but of symbols and meanings. It is the manipulation of the symbolic that is strongly definitive of our species. Whilst our senses open outward to a tangible world of elements, we also live within a psychic world, the nature of which is imaginal, symbolic, metaphorical and mythical, and constitutes the invisible landscape of our human pilgrimage.

From time immemorial, art and stories bring this usually invisible landscape into focus. Myths, symbols, narratives, are the means through which we weave relationships within our lives. And throughout the various epochs, it is the devotees, the craft guilds, the goldsmiths, the secretive temple building societies, the alchemists, who have worked as magical manipulators of symbols, functioning as the prose-poets of the grammar of human symbols and aesthetics, combining, transforming, refining and subliming the syntax of spirit and culture.

When one may look across the worlds holy temples and icons, observing – to give one example – the similarities between the aesthetics of the South American Maya compared to the Chinese Shang Dynasty, it seems there is a fundamental ‘prime’ or ‘seed form’ to art – an innate species-universal blueprint within aesthetics. Such a fundamental ‘prime of styles’ is like a phenotype of humanity – in the same way a bird builds a particular nest, or bees’ generate their complex hives according to fundamental geometries.

fig 1 – comparisons across space and time

Very early petro-glyphs, tribal body art, ceramics and textile motifs across all the worlds peoples demonstrate repeatedly motifs of ‘seed forms’ – dot-work, spirals, sun and moon symbols, rhizomatic network designs. There are surprising similarities of aesthetics between various indigenous groups separated from each other by vast distances.

It has been hypothesised that these cross cultural seed forms repeat across separate cultures because their roots exist in human biology itself – “entoptic patterns”, optical pattern formations that have their origin, anywhere within the optic system; the eye itself and the cortex where signals from the optic nerve are interpreted. J D Lewis-Williams and T A Dowson in their 1988 article “The Signs of All Times” postulate that these images, which derive from effects within the central nervous system, form the basis for images in Palæolithic art.

fig 2 – Tribal art across space and time, replete with entoptic motifs

Entoptic patterns are a particular attribute of certain altered states of consciousness, which is perhaps why, as aesthetic motifs, such patters are conferred significance by many tribal cultures. They most often appear to people before sleep, in meditation, making music, and other forms of trance. Lewis-Williams and Dowson defined three stages to the intensifiction of entoptic patterns:

“First there are the entoptic images alone, then these begin to be elaborated into iconic forms, and the final stage is that of intensification of the iconic forms… In a shamanic society.. some measure of control and manipulation of the entoptics… is encouraged. In the final stage, intensification, the experience moves beyond that of simile (I see something like) to a perception of the experience itself as being real.”

Thus, entoptics proceed from abstract patterns, to iconics – abstracted representational formations, to ‘other realities’ akin to lucid dreaming. Thus such patterns were given significance by early cultures since they often occur as preludes to samadhi or out-of-body experiences.

Even though we associate such aesthetics with ‘tribal art’, these ‘form-constants’ are alive and well in modern humans, as many contemporary ‘psychonauts’ experimenting with shamanistic plants report :

” … geometric patterns, angular not circular in richest colours, such as might adorn textiles or carpets. Then the patterns grew into architectural structures with colonnades and architraves, patios of regal splendor, the stone work all in brilliant colours, gold and onyx and ebony, all most harmoniously and ingeniously contrived, in richest magnificence extending beyond the reach of sight, in vistas measureless to man … They seemed to belong… to the imaginary architecture described by the visionaries of the Bible.” – (Riedlinger 1996 30)

The significance humans confer to these ecstasies, their liberatory and transcendent function, explains why art is often replete with from entoptic patterns and other motifs, metaphors and representations of peak experiences. It is truly a matter of ‘So on Earth as in Heaven’. As Aldous Huxley observed, the relationships between the gems and minerals so treasured by humans may be that they represent to us visions of sacred realms and the virtues of Heavenly realms and beings.

This connection between lustrous and transparent or patterned crystals and rocks explains why totemism employs gold, pyrite, quartz, lapiz and other precious substances, along with pigments and flowers and patterned weaving, to adorn wooden and stone statues of deities. The valued halls and domes of temples encrusted with sparkling pattern-work also make testament to these esoteric realms of human experience.

An important lineage holder of contemporary sacred art, the Viennese artist Ernst Fuchs, speaks of “a secret art whose traces I have discovered with almost all people and cultures, but also in nature itself, there where the primeval world appears.” The nucleus of this secret art is a shared grammar, ‘ein verschollener Stil’, a primordial style rings a fundamental tone, through all the treasures, temples, sanctums and icons that have been wrought from the hands of man.

Throughout such a diversity, such a wide array of varying cultures and cosmologies, we find a ‘hidden prime’, a secret grammar expressing itself through the icons of the divine, through the houses we have built for the divine, the geometries through which we have represented the divine. This is ‘sacred art’ – the phenotypic expression of the species.

fig 3 – further examples of ‘the prime of styles’ within indigenous cultures

The relative mastery over the physical world through the advancements of techne in European and eastern civilization, and the accumulations of myths and wisdom traditions, lead to fascinating expansions to the tribal lexicon of sacred aesthetics. Sacred art developed a strong formal relationship to sacred texts, word and metaphor. In many early Flemish altarpieces, for instance, we find a dizzying array of symbology to represent the divine realms, including fountains, mighty trees, dragons, doves, celestial wheels, halos, mandaloras, grails, astral beings with the wings of birds, and ‘royal’ metaphors of holy warriors, virgins, thrones, power-objects such as grails, crowns, orbs, swords. These are images of regalia of spirit, nobility, active agency, beauty, virtue and purity, higher ideals and initiatory goals of personal development.

St. John Altarpiece – Hans Memling – Oil on Oak – Completed 1479

In the book ‘Architectural Caelestis’, Fuchs traces the sacred grammar through modern history, finding its image in painting, architecture, sculpture. It is clear that the ‘prime of styles’ is a different order of things than a rapidly cycling feed of stylistic trends within the ‘art-world’ as it currently stands, entrenched in myriad factors of novelty, shock-tactics, commodity-value, and intellectual intrigue. Sacred art emerges from a hieratic impulse, not a purely humanistic one, not as a commentary, either, on the culture, lest of all the self defining commercial ‘art-world’ and academic dialectics.

So, has the ‘prime of styles’ reached its terminus ? Is ‘sacred art’ now a relic, like the hollowed out and unattended churches of northern Europe? Is it a provincial artefact of a bygone stage of cultural evolution, curious and irrelevant to our modern, educated, rational psyches? The rational psyche reads Genesis and scoffs, comparing and disputing mythic narratives with scientific theories – as if one replaces the other – because it has lost the means to receive symbols on the metaphorical level. So contemporary thought makes the pretence of a victory over a straw man of its own making.

Such a prevailing attitude ignores that myths not only confound our rational measurement of the world, but are intended to, are intended to buoy the hyletic human mind toward more sublime levels where the concern with the density, predictability and control of matter is temporarily abated, and the potential for experiences of awe and transcendence from the shells of limiting personal identifications is increased. The same holds true for direct visual symbols of the divine, deities, mandalas and sacred narratives occurring outside of secular time.

Maria Divina by Carey Thompson

The neurological and paradigmatic scaffolding for ‘religious thought’, the patterns of thought that are conducive to seeing beyond the limited provincial pastures, is not a ‘lost art’. It is still innate to our human nature, but it requires rekindling in this contemporary climate of desecration (de-sacralisation). Through the play of creativity, if one is so motivated, one may gain access to something like an archaic cultural memory, where spontaneously we can reveal and revive the ancient lexicon of the symbolic. Even if one is not involved in raising ziggurats to the heavens, or hewing forth deities from fiery pools of molten gold, artistic activity serves to catalyst a higher developmental form of consciousness.

As a mission of art, the representation of the sacred seems to be finding resonances amongst many people who feel art has more of an involving role in our personal and species evolution, and that the post-modern dialectic of art, whilst intellectually valid and edifying, may also be myopic in scope. The mystic Jim DeKorne succinctly relates his own experience of transcending a conceptual framework he had been myopically immersed within….

“…. anything and everything that one could see or imagine was only an innate, natural component of a synchronous pattern within an intrinsically perfect, objective whole. French existentialism had just taken its place within this fabric as a pompously amusing irrelevance…” – Jim DeKorne, The Cracking Tower

There appears to be the first glimmers of a change in the spirit of the times, where visionary or sacred art’s momentum now moves beyond the suppressive web of institutionalized rhetoric that, for the past 100 years or so, has exiled sacred art into the hinterlands of naive, fantasy or outsider culture. The sacred grammar has been developing with strength across the west coast of the United States and within certain points elsewhere amongst Europe. But significantly, the cultural climate is now so that the first ‘Academy of Visionary Art’ can raise its banner, within the centre of the cultured, art-loving renaissance city of Vienna. The Vienna Academy has been formed of ten of Professor Fuchs’ former apprentices, basing their curriculum on a time-honoured system of the Guild, with the aim of reviving a higher form of art – an Ars Sacrum that idealizes the human form, while actually transfiguring humanity through visions of oneness.

Vishnu-Christ Avatar by Laurence Caruana

The simple act of picture making can be overlooked in its symbolic potency – in its high expression it is an alchemy, playing a role in bringing together the disparate revolutions of consciousness that we experience in this age through rapid technological advancements and cross-cultural intercourse. Visionary artists integrate the different symbols and threads of mythology and religion and elucidate their meanings from across cultures, illuminating and renewing these potent archaic archetypal structures of understanding our existence. Such art serves as a means to begin to integrate the implications and world-views of ancient cultures, to reflect upon our cultural conditioning, and illuminating the subtle beliefs that we have inherited, and play out through us via rituals that so often have become unconscious enactments.

Jose Arguelles, the scribe of one highly important piece of visionary art theory, ‘The Transformative Vision’, writes

“As long as we are in the cosmic remembrance we are partipating in the whole cosmic process… now we are realising at a planetary level we are one planetary tribe, one planetary organism that is capacitating intelligence. We will be making our dreamtime circles, growing our veggies and creating our art that will make us feel more connected to the whole cosmic order and the cosmic pattern. That is where we are evolving to and going back to.”

Detail from Chanting Down Babylon by Daniel Mirante

Sacred art connects and integrates wisdom lines and knowledge traditions across space and time. It performs this through a traditionalism, an honoring of its antecedents, its elders, its generational progression, the creative gnostic flame passed from master to apprentice : sometimes directly, sometimes through distant strands of inter-connectivity. Visionary art harkens to a sense of lineage, an ancient unbroken chain – the religious and esoteric art of past ages, its lineages parse and branch through symbolism, surrealism, fantastic realism, psychedelic art, and the work of outsider artists and art produced in psycho-therapeutic contexts.

In this attempt to revive the learning of the past, to become empowered with the wisdom of the ages in order to illuminate the depth of symbolic resonance and the precision of the craft, visionary art as a movement is at odds with a contemporary art scene that confuses dangerously the expressive or clever with a lazy lack of technical craft and disregard for the simple, species-universal motivation of the True, Good and Beautiful. The sense of participation in lineage is rare and more precious in an era obsessed with the mislead concept of ‘novelty’.

Joma Sipe

Will the ‘art establishment’ recognise this transformation of art culture, in these guilds of temple builders, scribes of icons and illuminated manuscripts, and innovators of sacred theatre and new forms of prayer-formance, forging the development of new ritual contexts, and exploring new expressions within traditional forms of painting, super-powered by the resonances of the unique and powerful times we live within?

What could be the consequences of a sacred mission of art becoming more evident within the contemporary art world? Is the notion of ‘art of the sacred’, that pertains to icon making, altarpieces, shrine-building, and visions of hitherto unknown cultural possibilities compatible with the vagaries of the commercially driven art world? How will such an increasing body of work be viewed by a secular and materialist mainstream media, with its scientifically orientated arbiters of truth? How long must an evolutionary pressure gain energy underneath the surface before it bursts forth? And to what degree will a very sincere message be appropriated to commercial interests? The psychedelic revolution, to some degree, put ever more powerful tools in the hands of advertising and mainstream media. Will visionary art fare the same?

What visionary and sacred art typifies is a clarion call toward perceptual diversity. This is why visionary art has so far developed very little ‘self-commentary’ or analysis that allows it to partake of the post-post-post-modern academic art culture. Its unwillingness and lack of motivation to ‘join in the debate’ is partly symptomatic of exclusion, but also based on its development from a completely different set of axioms.

Visionary art is rapidly generating a subculture based upon the integration of indigenous shamanistic techniques of ecstasy and eastern insight and mindfulness practices, and moreover, this art culture is socially inclusive, presences a creative and active ‘culture-making’ practice for each individual, and opens up potentials for a rich cross-cultural communication and the development of valid, valuable perspectives on ourselves and our relationship with Earth and the cosmos. Hewing the new forms forth, contemporary sacred art includes within its iconography reference to deep ecology, and further, to planetary awareness, and spiritual oneness. These motifs repeat as heraldry for the first generations of globally interconnected humanity.

Links

Vienna Academy of Visionary Art
Autumn Skye Morrison
Laurence Caruana
Carey Thompson
Daniel Mirante

References

• Ernst Fuchs. Architectural Caelestis.
• Jaynes, J. 1976. The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• DeKorne, J. 2010. The Cracking Tower
• Jung, C.G. 1959. The archetypes and the collective unconscious. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Lewis-Williams, J.D. and T.A. Dowson 1988. The signs of all times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art. Current Anthropology 29:201-245
• Gracie and Zarkov. DMT – HOW AND WHY TO GET OFF. A note from underground Number 3.
• Caruana, L. 2001. A Manifesto of Visionary Art. Recluse Publishing.