{religion} – Page 20 – { feuilleton }

The art of Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, 1860–1933

Ahasuerus at the End of the World (1888).

Regular readers will know that I have a fondness for the academic or historical painters of the 19th century if their work is sufficiently grotesque, macabre or fantastical. These paintings by Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl push a number of the relevant buttons, especially Ahasuerus at the End of the World which is so immediately startling I can’t imagine why I’ve not seen it before. Hirémy-Hirschl was a Hungarian who pursued his career in Vienna until he fell out of favour with the arrival of the Secession artists.

The Ahasuerus painting is the stand-out piece here, Ahasuerus being the name of the Wandering Jew who was condemned to walk the earth until Jesus returned. What struck me about this was how uncharacteristic it seems for 1888, with everything rendered in a very hard-edged manner; and that’s before you get to the gratuitous dead woman and the skeletal reaper. This is closer to some of the Russian painters of the period than the academic artists in Paris.

The Souls of Acheron (1898).

The Souls of Acheron shows a crowd of the newly dead waiting to be ferried across the river Styx. The Tomb of Achilles seems to be about sea-nymphs mourning the dead hero whose mother was also a nymph; mythology aside, it looks like one of the many 19th-century pictures that use a legend as an excuse to paint more naked flesh. Translucent blue material wrapping a body is a recurrent detail in all three paintings.

The Tomb of Achilles (no date).

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Salon de la Rose + Croix

Carlos Schwabe’s poster from 1892 for the first of Joséphin Péladan’s art and music Salons de la Rose + Croix. The “Sâr” Peladan’s imposition on the artistic life of Paris in the 1890s may have the smack of a vanity project but he caused enough of a stir to give Rosicrucianism an unlikely fashionabilty for a while. The roster of contributing artists is also impressive, almost a who’s who of Symbolist art. There were six salons in all, the last being in 1897. The poster for the fifth salon by Armand Point & Léonard Sarluis shows Perseus holding the decapitated head of Émile Zola. The evangelist of literary realism was one of Symbolism’s arch-enemies but that didn’t prevent Carlos Schwabe from producing illustrations for Le Rêve.

The pages below are from Peladan’s many books, La Queste du Graal: Proses Lyriques de l’Éthopée; La Décadence Latine (1892). The illustrations aren’t the best reproductions, and they aren’t the greatest artworks either, but they give a sense of what Peladan wanted to see embellishing his own brand of artistic mysticism. Gallica has a Salon de la Rose + Croix catalogue (also from 1892) but like many of the documents archived there the quality leaves a lot to be desired.

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Athanasius Kircher’s Pan

More from the Kircher archives at the University of Heidelberg. As before, it’s good to see illustrations familiar from countless reprintings in books in their place of origin. The volume in question is Obeliscus Pamphilius: hoc est, Interpretatio noua & Hucusque Intentata Obelisci Hieroglyphici (1650), one of Kircher’s attempts at deciphering the hieroglyphics on Egyptian obelisks. I’m still not sure how the Great God Pan fits into these speculations even as a diagrammatic figure, unless in this case it’s Pan as a representative of Nature as a whole.

Whatever the explanation, the Pan picture often turns up in occult anthologies although you’re as likely to see the copy from Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) as the original. Hall’s rendering is useful for the translation of the Latin although he also says it may represent the god Jupiter (?) and he censors the not-very-obtrusive penis, a rather fatuous bit of prudery for a book that’s supposedly concerned with universal truths.

A few more plates follow, one of which features a serpent I swiped several years ago for a Cradle of Filth T-shirt design.

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Weekend links 224

Zona: concept art by Alex Andreyev for a planned TV series based on Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky.

• The Black Sessions are a long-running series of concerts by international artists recorded for radio station France Inter. UK group Broadcast were recorded by the station in May, 2000. While copies of the shows can be often be hard to find, files of the Broadcast concert may be downloaded here. A fantastic performance, especially the white-hot psychedelic freakout at the end.

• Further investigations from the radio age: Invention for Radio No. 1: The Dreams (43 mins, 1964): “an attempt to re-create in five movements some sensations of dreaming—running away, falling, landscape, underwater and colour”. Voices recorded by Barry Bermange with Radiophonic manipulation by Delia Derbyshire.

• “…in his first description of Cthulhu he gives you a list of four things that Cthulhu isn’t quite like.” Nick Talbot talks to Alan Moore about HP Lovecraft. Related: one of my depictions of Azathoth appears in this list of “gods who have forsaken you”.

• Tracking the locations of JG Ballard’s Super-Cannes: an investigation by Rick Poynor. Related: houseboats, architecture and eco-disaster; Justin Sullivan photographs California’s extreme drought.

• “As her writing career existed outside the realm of respectable ‘high-lit’ fiction, she cast herself as an outsider icon.” Chris Kraus on I’m Very Into You, a collection of Kathy Acker’s emails.

• Cover design inspiring fiction: Susan Coll on how a photo of a Bauhaus chair on the cover of her new novel, The Stager, made her alter her text at the last minute.

• “People were either taken by it or felt it was the Antichrist.” MetaFilter on Clair Noto’s unmade science-fiction film, The Tourist.

• The Norwood Variations is a new album by Drew Mulholland (Mount Vernon Arts Lab et al).

• Thought Maybe has a collection of the television essays made by Adam Curtis.

• From 1974: How To Make Magic, a children’s handbook of the occult.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 126 by Mira Calix.

• One Minute Blasts Rising To Three And Then Diminishing (2000) by Mount Vernon Arts Lab | Dashwood’s Reverie (2001) by Mount Vernon Arts Lab | Warner’s Reverie (2002) by Mount Vernon Astral Temple

Chinnamasta

The saintly cephalophores may be reconciled to their martyrdoms but none of them decapitated themselves, unlike Chinnamasta, the self-decapitating Tantric goddess. The most common representations show her sitting or standing on a copulating couple while blood from her neck spouts into the mouth of her severed head and the mouths of her attendants, Dakini and Varnini. In other depictions she should probably be classed among the cephalophores when she goes for a walk or a ride on a lion. The fourth picture here is of Chinnamunda, a related, wrathful form of Vajrayogini from Tibetan Buddhism.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cephalophores
• Decapitations