اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

Chapter Six

HOUSE-BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE

Part 1

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

I Corinthians iii, I 6

We have seen how the typical soul-concept of a particular cultural ideology develops from the soul of the dead, by way of the soul of the living, into the immortal soul. But the soul of the dead, in contrast to the soul of the living, does not yet stand for a part of the human being which detaches itself from the dying body in order to continue its own former existence or to incarnate itself in a new one. The soul of the dead is originally the whole man as he is after death has brought about in him transformations consisting essentially in removal to another locality. And lastly we have the immortal soul, a supernatural collective principle, independent of the individual’s bodily manifestation, which is housed in super-earthly cosmic spheres high above underground death and earthly birth. The earliest conception of the soul of the dead, which presupposes a subterranean continuation of life on earth, leads inevitably to tomb-building. This is at least as old as, if not older than, house-building, for we find attempts at it as early as the palzolithic nomads. For if man continues to live as such in the soul (spirit), he needs a house with the necessary household implements, such as we find from the earliest times in grave-furnishings. In fact, from the standpoint of the living, the corpse which continues its life as a soul is more in need of a house, a safe dwelling-place, than the living man who is free to move about. In this sense the binding of corpses, which we can trace back to the stone age, may be said to be the first form of actual—not merely figurative—fettering of a man toa particular dwelling-place; and because of the grave, which he cannot leave, it becomes a house. This first house, the tomb, then becomes of its own accord a casing for the soul, a human body, in which the soul of the dead is “ housed ” after leaving the earth. But we already know, from the explanations given in the previous chapter, that this house of the dead, in which man lives on as a soul, was originally regarded, not as the place of rebirth, but as a place in which to stay. It therefore represented not so much the mother’s womb as one’s own body. Neither has the idea of rebirth itself its origin in growth within the womb, but, as we have shown, in the idea of the soul-worm, which grows out of the corpse of the dead himself. Thus the soul-concept, even in its most primitive stages, presupposes the idea of human self-creation and represents in this sense man’s earliest creative achievement, whether it be that he lives on after his earthly fashion, or that he continues his existence in another form supplied by the worm that is born of himself. But the tomb-building that arose out of this soul-concept, and the house-building into which it developed, and finally architecture proper in the form of temple-building are also developments of the self-creative principle. So also the house itself, even though it was a copy of the protective mother-sheath, was yet a substitute for this that man himself created. It was not, however, a substitute in the sense of a reconstruction of the unachievable (as I argued in my Trauma of Birth), but definitely in the sense of a self-contained trend towards independence of the maternal tie—a deliberate breaking-away from it, in fact. This self-creative trend, already visible in the building of a tomb, though this has merely to provide a permanent resting-place for the soul of the dead, becomes still clearer at the stage of building the house which is to provide a dwellingplace for the living soul, the human being on earth, and it finally soars above all animal and chthonian ties in the building of the temple for the shelter of the immortal, the divine, soul. This gives us, at any rate for the field of architecture, a three-stage scheme of development, objectivized by the tomb (soul of the dead), the house (soul of the living), the temple (soul of God) ; and it may quite well be that the same scheme has a significance for art-ideology in general, corresponding, we are more than tempted to think, to the three art-ideologies that we have called religious, social, and personal. The parallel, in fact, suggested itself to me quite spontaneously, some time ago, at the mere sight of the complete output of one of the greatest of modern artists. In Rodin’s complete works, to which we shall return later, we see, in the form and content of what is represented, first, man, growing out of the womb of the earth, then his emancipation from the animal (the centaurwoman, already alluded to), and finally, in the expressive portrait busts, the crystallization of the purely spiritual, released not only from the mass of earth, but from the body itself. The artist has symbolized the final result of this very developmentprocess in his “ Penseur” and in the female “Pensée,” just as in “The Hand” he identified his creative organ with that of the universe’s creator.

Der Kampf um die Cheopspyramide, in which he makes the special point that the side-length of the pyramid bears a certain relation to the earth's orbital period, and the height bears a certain relation to its distance from the sun. The massive granite chests in the great pyramid are also asserted to possess their special significance. For the arithmetical aspect, see Dr. Fritz Noetling'’s Die kosmische Zahlen der Cheopspyramide, der mathematische Schlussel zu den Einheitsgesetgen im Aufbau des Weltalls (Stuttgart, third edition, 1921)

Without wishing to anticipate my further investigations into the modern artist-personality, I may say here that I believe every great artist has to go through this process of development, at least potentially, within himself, even if all the stages of it do not always materialize artistically. It may be that just those sketches and lower-rated creative products of a great artist throw a keener light on the struggle of the two souls in his breast than the completed masterpieces which have entered into immortality and are explicable only as the products of the higher self’s triumph over the lower. In thus applying the self-elevating process in the human being, as disclosed by the story of architectural development, to the development of art as a whole, not only have we passed over that development altogether (an omission to be rectified in the coming chapters), but we have also left out the actual development of the art of building. To this we will now give our attention. As a first step, let us look back at a certain burial rite, which, historically, is probably found only in connexion with tombbuilding, but belongs spiritually and culturally to another stratum. We refer to the custom already noted of “animal burial”: that is, the laying of the corpse inside an animal’s body. We can still see evidence of this in the animal-shaped coffins in Bali and the beast-avenues of the Ming graves in China (see Fuhrmann: Grabbau, Plates 4, 9). At the corpseburnings in Bali, the “animal” enters the kingdom beyond together with the man in his interior. “ The animal is born again with the animal components of the man, and the human soul goes back into other members of the nation. Theoretically one may assume that the human corpse was, at some time or other, laid in the body of an actual slain animal, and that both were then burnt together. This is a link with the old myths in which the sun hero was swallowed by an animal from the underworld, but returned after he had in some way set himself free” (op. cit., p. 73). In any case, this conception of a separation of the human soul from the animal body, whether mythic or actually effected by ritual burning, corresponds to a later animistic conception (soul of the living), which postulates the pre-animistic identity of the human and the animal body as we see it in the Fanany myth. We need only recall the African chief who was burnt in a snake-skin, but whose soul reappeared in the worm. Burial iz an animal must therefore have been preceded by burial shrough an animal. This may have taken the natural form of being devoured or have been in the nature of a rite such as was practised by Persians and other Oriental peoples, who left the disposal of their corpses to sacred dogs or vultures, the motive being to release the soul as quickly as possible from its bodily prison and everything fleshly. Our own word “cofn (Sarg),” to which tomb-building proper has finally shrunk, derives its name from the Greek sarkophagos, which literally means “ flesh-eater ” (Kleinpaul, op. cit., p. 70). As a further proof of the dualism inherent in all burial customs, it may be pointed out that the animals in which man took the precaution to bury his dead were no flesh-eaters, but exclusively herbivorous: for example, the bull used for the burial of the African chieftain, or the elephant which predominates in Asiatic burials in animals. (The monster figures of the Bali tombs also are cattle-like.) This may, indeed, have been a determining reason for the substitution of the snake (of which even in Africa there are many non-dangerous species) for the flesh-eating worm. Be that as it may, the animal tomb certainly reappears as cosmic temple-architecture in the Egyptian sphinx-tombs of the Pyramid age, the very object of which was to preserve the corpse to the utmost. A similar meaning probably attaches to the symbolic cremation-rites in Bali, where the animal appears to be replaced by a high tower, often seven storeys high, corresponding to the seven spheres of the planets, the idea being, no doubt, to bring the soul nearer to heaven." On the other hand, there exists from the first the opposite tendency, which found expression in the conception of the soul of the dead, to conserve as much as possible of the living person — whose existence is to continue as soul. This developed into the tomb-building that is known to us at its highest stage in the Egyptian sphinx-pyramids, where the animal character is combined with the cosmic.’ Finally, in the ecclesiastical crypt or chapel we recognize the scene of the rebirth of the immortal soul, relieved from all things carnal. It is no longer the continued life or the rebirth of the individual person that is sought, but the rebirth of the super-individual soul from its temporary bodily prison into cosmic eternity

1I may recall here that the microcosmic foundation of the seven-storeyed towers is to be found in the seven vertebr# of the neck which support the head — i.e., the seat of the soul. The Persians, again, expose their dead to the animals, who devour them in a high building — the so-called Towers of Silence — while more primitive races used trees for the same purpose. 2 T have made no mention here of the cosmic numbers which are alleged to underlie the construction of the Cheops pyramid. These were first pointed out by Max Eyth in his novel: