The Monarch - popping out all over
I was in Manhattan the other day and discovered a wonderful small museum, The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. It’s everything a great museum should be. For one thing, one walks in off the baking Manhattan streets and into a cool, serene tea room, where one can catch one’s breath and reduce the heart-rate to something approaching normal. This is a pretty important factor when looking at Buddhist and Hindu art, it seems to me, which is all about serenity and leaving Samsara (the illusions of the world) behind. The tea room itself is a quiet and orderly place, with a gift shop that has delightful pieces, some Tibetan in origin, and seductive books. Then, after one has absorbed the mood, one gets to walk through the museum itself.
Compared to the frantic scramble of tourists like myself, of bag searchers, and sweaty schoolkids that was my experience of the entrance hall to the MET, we were indeed in a different world.
But even better things awaited us. The Rubin has exquisite items, carefully chosen and displayed in spacious surroundings, and this means one can get a firm grasp of the art without being overwhelmed a sheer mass of objects. Himalayan art is, after all, a bit of an esoteric thing for most people, and so a well-chosen exhibit can make one a convert, where an ill-chosen gallery would turn one off forever.
Well, I’m not writing about something negative. The Rubin is a triumph.
And, as I looked, astonished, at the Fourteenth Century visions of the nature of the universe I kept noticing repeated images in which a male deity was locked in a passionate sexual embrace with a female deity - which would seem odd for a religion that is based upon monks, and so on. The deities were shown this way, however, because they were symbolic of the union of compassion and wisdom, of heaven and earth, of male and female - and that this was the creative fusion of both. The Mandala of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi was a particularly fine version of this theme.
By any other standard these figures with the weird names were a symbolic version of the Monarch Pair of our western world. The deities, both rulers, were fusing their opposite attributes to achieve the full Monarch balance that keeps the world productive and creative.
And even more good things were to come. Descending to the lower level there was an exhibit of very fine photographs of present day Tibet. And that’s when I got it. It was as if the upper levels of this museum housed the higher, abstract representations of spiritual aspirations, and the lower level brought us back to the physical country the Chinese trashed and enslaved. It would have been too easy, too solipsistic, too comfortable just to look at the art and forget the pain Tibet was in, now. the curators did not allow that. Magical art and blood in the dust. The fusion, again, of opposites.
After the Rubin I found myself in the MET, battling the crowds. I suppose that’s better than an empty museum. Still, it was very crowded. At a certain point Thierry pointed at the sign for the Etruscan Art section and we went up the stairs to find an empty gallery. There, amid the bronzes of bewildering beauty (how did they do that with metal??) were various tall bronze lamp holders. On the top of each were the figures of Hercules and Athena. Think about that for a second.
Hercules, half god, half cave-man. A bruiser, very male, nearly naked. A Fighter, and impulsive, too.
Athena, so much a goddess she sprang fully formed, complete with armor, from the head of Zeus. Virginal, linked to thought (Zeus’ head, you see) fierce, female…
So what on earth were those two doing side by side? I think they could only be seen as embodiments of the same fusion the tantric deities were demonstrating - the male/female, mind/body, heaven and earth opposites of the Monarch pair.
By placing Hercules and Athena on the top of these lamp standards the ancient Etruscans were surely showing that it is the fusion of these opposites in the Monarch that brings light, illumination, when things might otherwise be dark. After all, they could have put anything there as decorations. Birds, dragons, fruit…. They chose the symbolic images that together represented the Monarch archetype.
Thousands of miles apart and a thousand years or more intervening, but in each case the Monarch archetype was present, at the moment of doing something miraculous. Magical, one might say.
