The Grotesque in Church Art Part 2

Constantinople had apparently already not only become a channel for the conveyance of oriental paganism in astro-symbolic images, but was also evidently nearer to the lower idolatry of heathenism than the Church of the West. Thus we find the bishops of Gaul, Germany, and Italy in council at Frankfort, rejecting with anathema, and as idolatrous, the doctrines of the Council of Constantinople upon the worship of images.

While all this repression was going on, the Church was making itself acceptable, just as the Mosaic system had done in its day, by a.s.similating the symbols of the forbidden faiths. Itself inst.i.tuted without formularies or ceremonial, both were needed when it became a step-ladder of ambition and the expedient displacer of the corrupt idolatries into which sun-worship had disintegrated. Hence among the means of organization, observance and symbol took the place of original simplicity, and it is small wonder that ideas were adopted which were already in men's minds.

Elements of heathenism which, after the lapse of centuries, still clung to the Church's robes, became an interwoven part of her dearest symbolism. If men did not burn what they had adored, they in effect adored that which they had burned.

In spite, however, of edicts and adoptions, paganism has never been entirely rooted out; what Sismondi calls the "rights of long possession, the sacredness of time-hallowed opinion, and the potency of habit," are not yet entirely overcome in the midst of the most enlightened peoples.

The carvings which point back to forgotten myths have their parallels in curious superst.i.tions and odd customs which are not less venerable.

There were many compromises made on account of the ineradicable attachment of the people to religious customs into which they were born. Christian festivals were erected on the dates of heathen observances. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory sent word to Augustine, then in England, that the idolatrous temples of the English need not be destroyed, though the idols should, and that the cattle sacrificed to the heathen deities should be killed on the anniversary of dedication or on the nativities of the saints whose relics were within the church.

It is said that it was, later, usual to bring a fat buck into St. Paul's, London, with the hunters' horns blowing, in the midst of divine service, for the cathedral was built on or near the site of a former temple of Diana. This custom was made the condition of a feudal tenure. The story of Prosperine, another form of Diana, was the subject of heathen plays, and down to the sixteenth century the character appears in religious mystery plays as the recipient of much abuse.

Ancient mythology points in one chief direction. "Omnes Deos referri ad solem," says Macrobius, "All G.o.ds refer to the sun," and in the light of that saying a thousand complicated fables of antiquity melt into simplicity. The ancient poets called the sun (at one time symbolically of a First Great Cause, at another absolutely) the Leader, the Moderator, the Depository of Light, the Ordainer of human things; each of his virtues was styled a different G.o.d, and given its distinct name. The moon also, and the stars were made the symbols of deities. These symbols put before the people as vehicles for abstract ideas, were quickly adopted as G.o.ds, the symbolism being disregarded, and the end was practically the same as that narrated by the ancient rabbi just quoted. But it may be doubted whether the pantheism of the cla.s.sic nations was ever entirely gross. The great festivals of the G.o.ds were accompanied by the initiation of carefully selected persons into certain mysteries of which no description is extant. Thirlwall hazards the conjecture "that they were the remains of a worship which preceded the rise of the h.e.l.lenic mythology ... grounded on a view of nature less fanciful, more earnest and better fitted to awaken both philosophical thought and religious feeling." Whether a purer system was unfolded to the initiated on these occasions or not, there is little doubt that it had existed and was at the root of the symbol rites.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN IMP ON CUSHIONS, CHRISTCHURCH, HANTS., _early 16th cent._]

Mythic Origin of Church Carvings.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TAU CROSS, WELLINGBOROUGH.]

The discoveries in Egypt in recent years undoubtedly press upon us the fact that there was in Europe an early indigenous civilization, and that the exchange of ideas between East and West was at least equal. For the purpose of this study, however, the theory of independence is not accepted absolutely; it is premised that though there were in numerous parts of the old world early native systems of worship of much similarity, yet that such relics of them as are met in architecture came from the East.

The mythic ideas at the root of Gothic decoration were probably early disseminated through Europe in vague and varying ways, whose chief impress is in folk-lore; but the concrete forms themselves appear to have been introduced later, after being brought, as it were, to a focus, being selected and a.s.similated at some great mental centre. Alexandria was the place where Eastern and Western culture impinged on each other, and resulted in a conglomerate of ideas. These ideas, however, were not essentially different in their nature, though each school, a.s.syrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew, had diverged widely if they came from an unknown common source. But if Alexandria was the furnace in which the material was fused, Byzantium appears to have been the great workshop where the results were utilized, and from whence they were issued to Europe.

Sculptured ornament is not alone in the fact of its being a direct legacy from remotely ancient forms, though, on comparing that with any of the other arts. .h.i.therto recognized as of Eastern origin, it will be found that none bears such distinct marks of its parentage, or shews such continuity of form. Thus examination of European glazed pottery, which comes perhaps the nearest to our subject, shews that the ornamenting devices occasionally betray an acquaintance with the old symbolic patterns, but there is less recognition of meaning, scarcely any intention to perpetuate idea, and no continuity of design. It was not in the nature of the potter's purpose that there should be any of these, the difference being that for the mason's and the sculptor's art there was a very close a.s.sociation with the gild system. The first Christian sculptors would be masons brought up in pagan gilds, and the gild instincts and traditions had undoubtedly as strong an effect upon their work, on the whole, as any religious beliefs they might possess.

The symbolism of the animals of the church in the late points of view of the Bestiaries and of the expository writers of the Middle Ages, is not here to be made the subject of special attention. That is a department well treated in other works, particularly in the volume, "Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture," by Mr. E. P. Evans, which yet remains to be equalled. It is to be noted, however, that the early Christians, seeing the animals and their compounds so integral a portion of pagan imagery, endeavoured to twist every meaning to one sufficiently Christian: but what is chiefly worthy of note is the unconscious resistance of the sculptors to the treatment. Although a mult.i.tude of figures can be traced as used symbolically in accordance with the Christian dicta, there are at least as many which shew stronger affinity to pagan myth. There is evidence that this was early recognized by the propogandists. The Council of Nice in 787, in enjoining upon the faithful the due regard of images, ordered that the works of art were not to be drawn from the imagination of the painters, but to be only such as were approved by the rules and traditions of the Catholic Church. So also ordained the Council of Milan in 1565.

The Artists, however, did not invent the images so much as use old material, and, the injunctions of the Council notwithstanding, the ancient symbols apparently held their ground. The protests of St. Nilus, in the fifth century, against animal figures in the sanctuary, were echoed by the repudiations of St. Bernard in the twelfth and Gautier de Coinsi in the thirteenth, a final condemnation being made at the Council of Milan in 1565, all equally in vain. Though the force of the myth symbols has pa.s.sed away, they have left another legacy than the grotesques of church art. The art works of the Greeks arose from the same materials, the glorious statues and epics being the highest embodiment of the symbolic, so loftily overtopping all other forms by the force of supreme physical beauty as to almost justify and certainly purify the religion of which they were the outcome; so, later, the same ideas clothed with the moral beauty of supreme unselfishness enabled Christianity to take hold of the nations.

By the diatribes of Bernard we can see what materials were extant in the twelfth century for a study of worship-symbols and of the grotesque, though he ignores any possible meaning they may have. He says, "Sometimes you may see many bodies under one head; at other times, many heads to one body; here is seen the tail of a serpent attached to the body of a quadruped; there the head of a quadruped on the body of a fish. In another place appears an animal, the fore half of which represents a horse, and the hinder portion a goat. Elsewhere you have a horned animal with the hinder parts of a horse; indeed there appears everywhere so multifarious and so wonderful a variety of diverse forms that one is more apt to con over the sculptures than to study the scriptures, to occupy the whole day in wondering at these than in meditating upon G.o.d's law."

It has now to be observed how far the symbolic fancies of ancient beliefs have left their impress on the grotesque art of our churches.

A common representation of the great sun-myth was that of two eagles, or dragons, watching one at each side of an altar. These were the powers of darkness, one at each limit of the day, waiting to destroy the light. This poetic idea has come down to us in many forms. Greek art was unconsciously frequent in its use of the form, and mediaeval sculptors, being often quite ignorant of the significance of the design, use it in a variety of ways, in many of which the likeness to the original is entirely lost, the composition ending in but a semi-natural representation of birds pecking at fruit. In the above block from Lincoln Minster, the altar is well preserved. In the next block, which is from a carving connected with the preceding one, the idea is more distantly hinted at.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ALTAR OF LIGHT AND THE BIRDS OF DARKNESS, LINCOLN.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SYMBOLS OF DARKNESS, LINCOLN.]

At Exeter, an ingenious grotesque composition of two duck-footed harpies, one on either side of a _fleur-de-lis_, is evidently from the same source.

Examples of this could be multiplied very readily.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ALTAR OF LIGHT AND THE BIRDS OF DARKNESS, EXETER.]

The Cat and the Fiddle are subjects of carvings at Beverley and at Wells.

Man has an almost universal pa.s.sion for the oral transmission of the fruits of his mental activity. In the particular instances of many lingual compositions this pa.s.sion has become an inveterate race habit, and the rhymes or reasons have been transmitted verbally to posterity long after their original meaning has been lost or obscured. It is no new thing that a nursery rhyme has been found to be the relic of an archaic poem long misunderstood or perverted. The lines as to "the cat and the fiddle" are an excellent instance of the apt.i.tude to continue the use of metrical composition the sense of which has departed. The full verse is, as it stands, a curious jumble of disconnected sentences.

"Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon, The little dog laughed to see such sport, While the dish run away with the spoon."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WEEKS DANCING TO THE MUSIC OF THE MONTH, BEVERLEY MINSTER.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HEY, DIDDLE, DIDDLE, THE CAT AND THE FIDDLE, WELLS.]

I am not aware that any attempt has yet been made to explain this extraordinary verse. Examination seemingly shews that it was originally a satire in derision of the worship of Diana. The moon-G.o.ddess had a three-fold existence. On the earth she was Diana. Among the Egyptians we find her as Isis, and her chief symbol was the cat. Apuleius calls her the mother of the G.o.ds. In the worship of Isis was used a musical instrument, the sistrum, which had four metal bars loosely inserted in a frame so as to be shaken; on the apex of this frame, which was shaped not unlike a horse-shoe, was carved the figure of a cat, as emblematic of the moon. The four bars are said by Plutarch to represent the elements, but it is more likely they were certain notes of the diapason. The worship of Isis pa.s.sed to Italy, though the Greeks had previously connected the cat with the moon. The fiddle, as an instrument played with a bow, was not known to cla.s.sic times, but the word for fiddle--_fides_--was applied to a lyre. It is equivalent to a Greek word for gut-string. In the light of what follows, I suggest that "the Cat and the Fiddle" is a mocking allusion to the worship of Diana upon earth.

In the heavens the moon-G.o.ddess had the name of Luna, and her chief symbol was the crescent, which is sometimes met figured as a pair of cow's horns.

Images of Isis were crowned with crescent horns; she was believed to be personified in the cow, as Osiris was in the bull, and her symbol, a crescent moon, is met in sculpture over the back of the animal. This apparently suggested the second line.

The third personality of the G.o.ddess was Hecate, which was the name by which she was known in the infernal regions,--which means of course, in nature, when she was below the horizon. Now another name by which she was known was Prosperine (Roman), and Persephone (Greek), and her carrying down into Hades by Pluto (Roman), or Dis (Greek), was the fable wrought out of the simple phenomenon of moon-set. I suggest that the last line of the verse is a grotesque rendering of the statement that--

"Dis ran away with Persephone."

Dis is equivalent to Serapis the Bull, otherwise Ammon, aesculapius, Nilus, etc., that is, the Sun. Why the little dog laughed to see such sport is not easy to explain. It may be an allusion to one of the heads of Hecate, that of a dog, to indicate the watchfulness of the moon. There is another Hecate (a bad, as the above-mentioned was considered a beneficient deity), but which was originally no doubt the same, whose attributes were two black dogs, _i.e._, the darkness preceding and following the moonlight in short lunar appearances. Or it may be an allusion to the fact that the dog was a.s.sociated with Dis, being considered the impersonation of Sirius the Dog-star. In various representations of the rape of Prosperine, Dis is accompanied by a dog, _e.g._, the grinning hound in t.i.tian's picture.

Prosperine's symbol of a crescent moon was adopted as one of those of the Virgin Mary, and Candlemas Day, 2nd February, takes the place of the Roman festival, the candles used to ill.u.s.trate the text, "a light to lighten the Gentiles," being the representatives of the torches carried in the processions which affected to search for the lost Prosperine.

Hindoo mythology has also a three-fold Isis, or moon-G.o.ddess; namely, Bhu on earth, Swar in heaven, Patala, below the earth.

The moon-deity has not come down to us as in every case a female personation. This is, however, explained by an early fable [in the Puranas] of the Hindoos, in which it is narrated that Chandra, or Lunus, lost his s.e.x in the forest of Gauri, and became Chandri, or Luna. The origin of this has yet to be discovered; it may be nothing more than the account of an etymological change, produced by a transcript of dialect.

Whether the Beverley artist knew that the cat was a moon-symbol may be doubted. The fiddle has four strings, as the sistrum had four bars. As well as the elements and the four seasons of the year, the four may mean the four weeks. It will be observed that as the Hours are said to dance by the side of the chariot of the sun, so here four weeks dance to the music of the moon-sphere; the word moon means the measurer, and the cat is playing a dance measure!

The cat is not a very frequent subject. At Sherborne she is shewn hanged by mice, one of the retributive pieces which point to a confidence in the existence of something called justice, not always self-evident in the olden-time. Rats and mice are the emblem of St. Gertrude. The dog had a higher place in ancient estimation than his mention in literature would warrant; the fact that among the Romans he was the emblem of the Lares, the household G.o.ds, is a weighty testimonial to that effect, while the Egyptians had a city named after and devoted to the dog.

Among the pre-existing symbols seized by the Christians, the Egyptian Cross and Druidical Tau must not be overlooked. It is found on the capitals of pillars at Canterbury and other places; the example given in the initial on page 34 is perhaps the latest example in English Gothic.

Its admission as a grotesque is due to its, perhaps merely accidental, use as a mask as noted in the chapter on "Masks and Faces."

The sinuous course of the sun among the constellations is mentioned in literature as far back as Euripides as an explanation of the presence of the dragon in archaic systems of mythology. This may have been the origin of the figure. Yet in addition to that there always seems to have been the recognition of an evil principle, of which by a change of meaning, the dragonic or serpentine star-path of the sun was made the personification or symbol. According to Pausanius the "dragon" of the Greeks was only a large snake.

It might not be impossible to collect several hundreds of names by which the deistic character of the sun has been expressed by various peoples; and the same applies, though in a less degree, to the Darkness, Storm, Cold, and Wet, which are taken as his ant.i.thesis. One of the oldest of these Dragon-names is Typhon, which is met in Egyptian mythology. Typhon is said to be the Chinese _Tai-fun_, the hot wind, and, if this be so, doubtless the adverse principle was taken to be the spirit of the desert which ever seeks to embrace Egypt in its arid arms. The symbol of Typhon was the crocodile, and doubtless the dragon form thus largely rose. Rahu, an evil deity in Hindoo mythology, though generally called a dragon, is sometimes met represented as a crocodile, and his numerous progeny are styled crocodiles. The constellation called by the j.a.panese the crocodile is that known to us as the dragon. Can it be that in the universal dragon we have a chronicle of our race's dim recollection of some survival of the terrible Jura.s.sic reptiles, and hence of their period?

But the myth has ever one ending; the power of the evil one is destroyed for a time by the coming of the sun-G.o.d, though eventually the evil triumphs, that is dearth recurs.

In the Scandinavian myth, Odin the son of Bur, broke for a season the strength of the great serpent Jormungard, who, however, eventually swallowed the hero. Thus was Odin the sun; and his companions, the other Asir, were more or less sun attributes. In the case of Egypt the G.o.d is Horus (the sun-light), the youthful son of Osiris and Isis, who drives back Typhon to the deserts; for that country the rising of the Nile is the happy crisis. Horus is sometimes called Nilus. Whether the above derivation of the word Typhon be correct or not, which may be doubtful,[3]

that of Horus from the root _Hur_ light, connected with the Sanscrit _Ush_ to burn (whence also Aurora, etc.,) is certain. When the great myth became translated to different climates, the evil principle took on different forms of dread. Water, the rainy season in some countries, the darkness and cold of winter in others, were the Dragon which the Hero-G.o.d, the Sun, had to overcome--out of which conflict arose myths innumerable, yet one and the same in essence. Apollo slew the Python, the sunbeams drying up the waters being his arrows; Perseus slew the Dragon, by turning him to stone, which perhaps means that the spring sun dried up the mud of the particular locality where the fable rose. Later, Sigurd slew the Dragon Fafnir. When the Christians found themselves by expediency committed to adopt the form, and to a certain degree the spirit, of heathen beliefs, the Sun _versus_ Darkness, or the Spring _versus_ Winter myth was a difficulty in very many places. At first the idea was kept up of a material victory over the adverse forces of nature, and we find honourable mention of various bishops and saints, who--by means of which there is little detail, but which may be supposed to be that great monastic beneficence, intelligent drainage--conquered the dragons of flood and fen.

It is somewhat odd that the Psalmist attributes to the Deity the victory of breaking the heads of the "dragons in the waters."

Thus St. Romain of Rouen slew there the Dragon Gargouille, which is but the name of a draining-gutter after all, and hence the grotesque waterspouts of our churches are mostly dragons.

St. Martha slew the Dragon Tarasque at Aix-la-chapelle, but that name is derived from _tarir_, to drain. St. Keyne slew the Cornish Dragon, and, to be brief, at least twelve other worthies slew dragons, and doubtless for their respective districts supplied the place of the older myth. Among these, St. George is noteworthy. He is said to have been born at Lydda, in Syria, where his legend awaited the Crusaders, who took him as their patron, bringing him to the west, as the last Christian adoption of a sun-myth idea, to become the patron saint of England. A figure of St.

George was a private badge of English kings till the time of the Stuarts.

On the old English angel the combat is between St. Michael and the Dragon, and though St. George is generally shewn mounted, as was also sometimes Horus, the Egyptian deity, he is sometimes represented on foot, like St.

Michael. The Dragon is generally the same in the two cases, being the Wyvern or two-legged variety.