Seven Wonders Reborn

Two of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World will be getting new life. The gods to be so honored: Artemis and Helios.




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Plans are being drawn up to rebuild the Temple of Artemis in Selçuk.

Dr. At?lay ?leri, the founder of the Selçuk Artemis Culture, Arts and Education Foundation, met with Dr. Anton Bammer of the archaeology institute at the University of Vienna, Austria, a decade ago while Dr Bammer was leading a series of excavations in the area. During this period, experts searched for the techniques on how to rebuild Artemis.

It was at this meeting that the two began to realize the reconstruction of the once magnificent Temple of Artemis. With support from Austrian scientists, ?leri had Swiss architects prepare a plan for the reconstruction of the temple.

?leri, who has dreamed of reconstructing the temple for 10 years, said: “When completed, the temple will not be a copy or an imitation of the original Artemis but the Artemis itself. And its sisters of the past will set their eyes on it with pride and emulation.”

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The massive re-envisioning of Helios, known as the Collosus, will, appropriately for a sun god, be made of light.

Like the original, erected in homage to the sun god Helios by the master sculptor Chares of Lindos, the new Colossus will adorn an outer pier in the harbour area of Rhodes, and be visible to passing ships.

And like its ancient namesake, the modern-day wonder will be dedicated to celebrating peace and built, at least in part, out of melted-down weapons from around the world.

But unlike the ancient Colossus, which stood 34 metres high before an earthquake toppled it in 226BC, the groundbreaking work of art is slated to be much taller and bigger. And unlike previous reconstruction efforts, officials say the Cologne-based design team is determined to avoid recreating a replica.

. . .

Instead, in the spirit of the 21st century the new Colossus has been conceived as a highly innovative light sculpture, a work of art that will allow visitors to physically inspect it by day as well as enjoy - through light shows - a variety of stories it will "tell" by night.

No word yet on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the giant statue of Zeus. Developing...

Did Stone Age Man Take Drugs?

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Graham Hancock certainly thinks so. And, he makes a very good case in Supernatural, which I might add, is one of my very favorite books. So, I was very excited this morning to see press reports appearing to confirm evidence of Stone Age drug use.

Scientists have long suspected that humans have an ancient history of drug use but much of the evidence has been indirect, ranging from the bizarre images found in prehistoric cave art to the discovery of hemp seeds in excavations.

Now, however, researchers have found equipment used to prepare hallucinogenic drugs for sniffing, and dated them back to South American tribes.

Quetta Kaye, of University College London, and Scott Fitz-patrick, an archeologist from North Carolina State University, found the ceramic bowls, plus tubes used to inhale drug fumes or powders, on the Caribbean island of Carriacou.

The bowls appear to have originated in South America between 100BC and 400BC and were then carried the 400 miles to the islands. One implication is that drug use may have been widespread for thousands of years before this time.

One problem. The time frame given -- 100BC - 400BC -- is by no stretch of the imagination, the Stone Age. To gain some clarity on the use of this term, I did a lot of googling, this morning. Ultimately, my husband located the original, peer reviewed article in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Nowhere, do the authors use the term "Stone Age," only "prehistoric." I see no evidence that the islanders documented in the article are latter Neolithic. As near as I can determine, someone thought "stoned age" was a clever play on words to describe the use of psychotropes by indigenous people, as documented by Kaye and Fitzpatrick. If anyone has a better explanation, I'd love to hear it.

Indeed, the only reference to Stone Age inhabitants of the Caribbean was here.

The first settlers were an unknown race of Stone Age people who lived in the Caribbean about 4,000 years ago.

Apparently without permanent settlements, they were hunter-gatherers. They left behind no pottery, only stone tools which the Arawaks found useful 1,000 years later when they moved into the islands.

The Arawaks called this unknown race Ciboney, after the Arawak word "ciba" for stone. Modern archaeologists still have no idea where the Ciboney wandered in from or off to, but they were gone from the Caribbean long before the Arawaks arrived.

So, as far as I know, there remains no documentary evidence that psychotropes were used in the actual Stone Age; specifically, the Upper Paleolithic era, which gave rise to the magnificent artifacts described in Supernatural. Even so, I have little doubt that some type of mind-altering methods were employed. They may have ingested any number of psychotropic plants. They almost definitely employed rhythmic drumming and/or dancing. The evidence presented by Hancock of geometric patterns, therianthropy, and nose-bleeds consistent with vigorous, ceremonial dancing, is just too strong. Here, Hancock describes the nut of the idea that inspired his research.

I quickly realized that this was the mystery, and the period, I wanted to investigate. Not that endless, unimaginative cultural desert from 7 million years ago down to just 40,000 years ago when our ancestors hobbled slowly through their long and boring apprenticeship, but the period of brilliant and burning symbolic light that followed soon afterwards when the first of the great cave art of southwest Europe appeared – already perfect and fully formed – between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago.

A most remarkable theory exists to explain the special characteristics of these amazing and haunting early works of art, and to explain why identical characteristics are also found in prehistoric art from many other parts of the world and in art produced by the shamans of surviving tribal cultures today. The theory was originally elaborated by Professor David Lewis-Williams, and is now supported by a majority of archaeologists and anthropologists. In brief, it proposes that the reason for the similarities linking all these different systems of art, produced by different, unrelated cultures at different and widely-separated periods of history, is that in every case the shaman-artists responsible for them had previously experienced altered states of consciousness in which they had seen vivid hallucinations, and in every case their endeavour in making the art was to memorialise on the walls of rock shelters and caves the ephemeral images that they had seen in their visions. According to this theory the different bodies of art have so many similarities because we all share the same neurology, and thus share many of the same experiences and visions in altered states of consciousness.

There are lots of ways of inducing the necessary altered state. The bushmen of South Africa get there through night-long rhythmic dancing and drumming, the Tukano Indians of the Amazon do it through consuming the hallucinogenic beverage Ayahuasca. In prehistoric Europe I present evidence that the requisite altered states may have been reached through the consumption of Psilocybe semilanceata – the popular little brown “magic mushroom” that is still used throughout the world to induce hallucinations today. In Central America the Maya and their prececessors used other psilocybe species (P.Mexicana and P. Cubensis) to induce the same effects.

The images speak for themselves.



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Everything Tries To Be Round

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round... Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle. The nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

-- Black Elk, Oglala Sioux Holy Man

Which is the long way 'round my saying that I love this art. I won't be posting the images here, because I think they're proprietary, but Edward Winkleman has reproduced a number of images by Julie Evans. If the spheres within sheres print I included in my last post looks like something that was snatched out of my head, this is like a kind of jazz riff on what goes on inside my head. From the press release:

Evans works slowly and painstakingly, rendering delicate garlands and intricate mandalas, and filling large expanses of color with tiny, countless, vertical strokes. She creates ambiguous spaces within spaces that are at once both micro and macro in realm, keeping the viewer up close to these intimate works, but with the sense of their broader reach into place and time.

She has worked in India and Nepal, including travel and research supported by a Fulbright Scholarship studying with a master of Indian miniature painting. Critic Mario Naves wrote of Evans' work that she "creates vistas infinitely more expansive than the physical parameters of the paintings support. Clearly the conventions of Indian miniature paintings have become second nature to her."

These pieces definitely evoke mandalas and what I find really interesting is the use of sacred geometry. I'd have to break out my tiny, little, screen-sized calipers -- in other words, something I do not have -- to determine if the proportions are exact, but there looks to be a lot of use of phi ratios and golden mean spirals. There are also beautiful lotus images throughout.

I've been thinking a lot about lotus's lately and recently added a handful of the nicer images I could find to the art gallery. The lotus image is one that has been so overused in spiritual circles that it's been largely reduced to a cliche. The symbolism is so profound that I think this is unfortunate.

When we moved into our new house last year, one of the items left behind by the previous owners was a bowl of black, decorative rocks, with a cheap, fabric lotus plunked on top. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I really don't think they were Buddhists, so the imagery is probably completely accidental. This, in part, is what makes it so profound. Amazing the way we all just pluck these things out of the Akashic record, without the vaguest notion that we have done so. The image, of course, evokes the Buddha's "Lotus Sutra." Loosely translated: From the darkest mud comes the most beautiful lotus. So I have kept it. Tacky, Michael's, fabric lotus and all.

But my fascination with the lotus is more rooted in Egyptian mythology and owes to something I plucked out of the Akashic record many years ago in meditation. I scribbled the images down because I did not understand them at all. It was a disjointed collection of death/rebirth images. In the middle of the page was this strange looking flower with a face emerging from the center. It was only years later that I stumbled on the Egyptian lotus mythology that explained the image. Here's the short version from A Dictionary of Ancient Egypt:

The lotus signified Re' 's power and birth and was celebrated in the Loutus Offering, a hymn sung in the temple on festival days, especially at the cultic center in Edfu. The hymn referred to the god Re' as the "Great Lotus," which emerged from the primeval pool at the moment of creation.

Perhaps someday I'll write the long version, which is complex and beautiful with tendrils moving through numerous myths. But for now I just endorse you to look at Julie Evans's art.

Also of interest on Edward Winkleman's blog, a discussion of the abortive attempt to exhibit the chocolate Jesus. I just don't understand the outrage. Is it the Easter season conflation of Jesus with a giant chocolate bunny? Or is it the presence of the penis? Because I'm pretty sure Jesus had a penis. I know the Biblical accounts don't go into too much detail on that, but even so. With all his rantings on sacrilege and bigotry, I wonder what Bill Donohue's views are on, say, the tomahawk chop. So far I think he's been mum.